Danny Taggart's Blogarama

A more-or-less daily dose of news, politics, techmology, and any random thoughts that pass through my head.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Filtering the blogosphere some more

Thinking about the Jim Miller article some more, I wondered why Bloglines or other RSS aggregators don't implement some kind of efficient filter that recommends specific posts, instead of blogs. I am getting increasingly frustrated at having to manage a blogroll that only gets me maybe one interesting post out of five. Bloglines should have some functionality that allows me to grade specific posts and then intelligently ranks future posts based on my past preferences.

Of course, you could make such a system much more sophisticated. For example, you could cluster people's preferences and generate recommendations based on what people like you find interesting. This approach saves you from having to develop an intelligent ranking system based solely on individual data, which would probably end up frustrating a lot of people anyway. (Imagine you happen to downrank two posts which talk about Iraq and Bloglines assumes you don't want any news about Iraq.) I suspect a number of people out there are working on such things, but I haven't seen it yet.