Categories or Channels

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

I've been here before but I want to re-phrase it.

Most of the aggregators out there group RSS headlines by the channel
source. So as I'm reading a new batch of say 50 stories, I'm constantly
changing context as I shift from source to source. The one big exception
to this is Moreover. 

I think that what I want to see is similar to the way a newspaper is
structured; the Business section, UK News, World News, Sport, Editorial
Features, Technology section, Humour. Each one of these becomes a
locally synthesized feed from many sources.

The problem with this picture is the question of who and what (how?)
categorizes a new incoming story and decides which bucket it goes into.
De-centralizing the categories back to the source probably isn't going
to work due to the lack of standardization. Grouping them purely by
source almost works although some sources are too broad (eg Upside Today
has business, technology and even humour). Using keywords needs access
to the full source article to be effective, especially when the headline
is a bad pun.

I'm not sure, but I think Moreover use a combination of automatic and
human effort. I can't believe they have people scanning every item from
1800 sources and deciding which of 700 buckets to drop them in. But at
the same time, they seem to achieve an accuracy higher than I'd expect
from a purely automatic system. 

In the short term, I think being able to define a category and then
associate a set of feeds with that category would go a long way to
getting the job done. Guess I better go and write some code!

-- 
Julian Bond eMail: julian@netmarketseurope.com
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ICQ:33679668 tag:So many words, so little time