RE: [syndication] Aggregating and displaying feeds

["Jeff Barr" <jeff@vertexdev.com>]

Julian says,

> The vast majority of news stories are ephemeral things that only have
> relevance for a month at best. I think expecting this to generate "Top
> Story" information is too much. But I do want to do it at the publisher,
> site, feed and author level.

Absolutely! I want instant aggregation of the top stories for the given
day. I think that this could be done. When something is "hot" that day,
I want to know about it.

However, now that I think about it, I have to wonder -- will this measure
interest in the story/subject, or will it tell us just how well-written
the story's headline happens to be? Probably a combination of both. I
believe that journalists spend time learning to write concise yet 
catchy headlines. As with most things, it is harder than it looks.

Jeff;

-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Bond [mailto:julian@netmarketseurope.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 11:25 AM
To: syndication@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [syndication] Aggregating and displaying feeds


In article <005201c0e479$874e1130$070d0dc0@monster>, Jeff Barr
<jeff@vertexdev.com> writes
>That said, it would be very interesting if several of us were to aggregate
>"click through" data to come up with a list of top stories. If there
>was a server somewhere that would take raw clicks and aggregate them, I
>would definitely be interested in participating.

The vast majority of news stories are ephemeral things that only have
relevance for a month at best. I think expecting this to generate "Top
Story" information is too much. But I do want to do it at the publisher,
site, feed and author level.

The exception is when a press release goes out on the wires and multiple
editors decide it's significant. eg Gartner slams Ariba. I'd like to
just read my favorite commentator but be aware that it was picked up by
15 other sites. Of course this is also hard to do auto-magically as each
site will spin the same story with their own style of headline (or
rather, bad pun). 

Let's not get too far away from real life and into the technical detail
of categorization. We all do this skimming and sampling ourselves as we
choose a daily newspaper, scan the headline, skim most pages, look for
favourite writers, ignore all the sport except biathlon and so on. This
is why I want to use behaviour. By clicking on a headline and viewing
the full story, I'm saying something quite significant. 

-- 
Julian Bond eMail: julian@netmarketseurope.com
HomeURL: http://www.shockwav.demon.co.uk/ 
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M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173  T: +44 (0)20 7420 4363  
ICQ:33679668 tag:So many words, so little time

 

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