I’ve always loved the news — I can remember scanning the newspaper even before I could really read. Now that news is available in such a wide variety, covering opinions from many different angles and qualities of newscasting, the sheer amount of choices out there makes it hard to find all the relevant news out there. What is relevant to me may not be relevant to you — we might agree on topics, but our regions might be far apart. The wonderful news sites out there are still “one size fits all” in many ways, even if they have different sections or categories. I’m a regular at slashdot, NewsVine and digg, and I love their interfaces, but they’re still very one-dimensional. Sure, digg lets you vote up or down a particular article to hit the home page, but if an article hits a homepage, everyone sees it. We’re all thrown into one pool. Slashdot has the moderation system, a system that is a little more adaptive since you can modify moderations using an individually-managed preference (giving more “mod points” to your friends and taking away from your foes), but even slashdot isn’t very collaborative. Newsvine is gaining a lot of speed, but it is still a “Yay” or “Nay” system — not much collaborating going on.

Who wants to be the first news site that truly allows collaborative filtering, such as the API engine provided by CRITEO? Imagine a news site that lets individuals submit articles, comment on them in a blog-like fashion, and rate them using a collaborative filter? I might love a particular news story — you might not. Over time, as thousands or millions of others rate articles submitted, a good filtering engine will give us the stores that WE specifically are interested in reading — with great accuracy! Instead of trying to wade through thousands of articles a day, you can just do your normal scanning of the sites you like and submit links to those articles just like you do at newsvine. You can comment on the article, just like you can at slashdot. You can rate the article, just like you can at digg. But with an API such as CRITEO, that site would weigh the articles differently for each individual — some might love news on puppies, others might want news on the latest lawn mowing technology. Some might love news from major trade corporations, others might like news from small bloggers. It doesn’t matter, because the collaborative filtering engine will handle figuring out what you’d like to read, and what you should pass on.

Who wants to step up?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under Collaborative Filtering, Possible Markets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.