

Has anyone created an RSS-based recommendation engine yet? - altano

Like reddit, but input/output of OPML/OPML instead of votes/links.<p>We're obviously all going to be using RSS some day so this is inevitable.  I'm just wondering if someone's done it yet.
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dpapathanasiou
SeekSift (<http://www.seeksift.com/>) is headed in that direction, though it
works a little differently from what you described.

I hadn't thought about the possibility of producing OPML as the output, but
it's certainly something I could add in a future version (it's still in a
fairly early stage of development right now).

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altano
If there's a way of uploading an OPML file on your site, I'm not seeing it.

Most people who are fanatic about RSS aren't going to be able to manually
input the URL to each of their feeds due to the sheer number of feeds they
subscribe to.

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dpapathanasiou
I'm not sure if you're still following this thread, but I just wanted to tell
you (and I didn't see any contact information in your profile, otherwise I'd
have just contacted you directly) that you can now upload an OPML file when
adding feed sources.

Other changes are in the works, too; send me an email or reply to this thread
if you'd like to be kept un-to-date on those as they happen.

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altano
I'll check it out, thanks.

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johnrob
So, you upload your feed list (OPML) and get other feeds (OMPL) that you might
also like?

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altano
Exactly. Even better, your RSS feed reader/aggregator does it for you.

EVEN better yet, your feed reader can assign weights to the feeds based on how
often you actually read the content.

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akkartik
I'm not sure why the format is important.

Building recommendation engines is really hard from an algorithmic
perspective. How you format the inputs and outputs seems negligible in
importance.

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natrius
It's not about the format, it's about what being in someone's OPML file means.
It means that someone finds the information from a specific site to be so
useful that they want to receive every update from the site so they can at
least take a glance at it. Votes on specific links are a far less valuable
indicator of reputation. No one wants to see everything that's submitted to
Scribd; a few things just happen to get voted to the top of social networking
sites because they're funny or interesting. That doesn't say anything
meaningful about Scribd's reputation.

Google has a huge advantage in this area since they collect which items from
an RSS feed people actually read on Google Reader. They know that even though
I subscribe to the del.icio.us/popular and digg RSS feeds, I rarely read any
of the items, whereas I read almost everything from dive into mark or Jeremy
Zawodny's blog.

As far as the output is concerned, it doesn't have to be traditional "output"
at all. It can be an increased PageRank for a site, or a Firefox extension
that shows a reputation meter for every site you visit.

The format isn't important, but the things people subscribe to are very
important.

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staunch
Google does have a recommendation ( _"You might also like"_ ) system for when
you add a feed to your iGoogle page.

