[evansolomon]

The "personalized news service" idea is my default example for startups that people keep trying and users keep ignoring. Entrepreneurs constantly want to build this thing and it consistently falls on its face like few other ideas.

Maybe it's because they just haven't been good enough, and as soon as someone cracks the code it will be great. However I think a much more likely answer is that only a very, very small number of people have a news discovery problem.

[davewiner]

The difference between this approach and the ones that startups have been trying (I see a lot of them) is that this idea will work. They've been trying to create something that works for everyone. This approach only works for people who actively forward or retweet links.

[mckoss]

I think you'll find lots of attempts at ths problem. We tried to do this with data from Faves.com, our social bookmarking service. In the end we shut down our public recommendation service because we couldn't keep up with the spammers.

Any recommendation engine is a honeypot for web marketing types. I love the concept, but the scalable execution is very hard. I think the best sites approach this by engaging a motivated community, like HN, Reddit, and the original Digg. You need some zealous moderators to keep the spam at bay.

[martinkallstrom]

Dave, talk to Trunk.ly. If they fed their data into Directededge.com's API you would get exactly what you are looking for. A prototype would probably take them a mere few hours to implement, just to try out the idea.