[paletoy]

Giving you articles that are fun,strongly insightful and 100% right almost every time, on your exact interests is the goal of a great curation.Bonus points for short an to the point writeup when appropriate.

How do you do it ? not sure yet. The best that i can do today to do is constantly weeding out my blogs/twitter subscriptions. But i'm far from that goal.

[TelmoMenezes]

> ... on your exact interests is the goal of a great curation

I am not so sure this is a good idea. It will trap people in bubbles, where they will find only an echo chamber for their existing opinions and never have them challenged. It will insulates them from serendipity and it will prevent them from exploring, acquiring new interests and perspectives and so on.

[chris_va]

People keep worrying about filter bubbles, which is a rational but misguided fear. Having written some of these systems (Google News), it really does not happen the way people imagine it would.

At the end of the day, the factors that define a good curation framework do not actually create a filter bubble. People love serendipitously discovering new content, and the optimizing for the "best article" does not actually optimize for a singular viewpoint. As a result, any curation system that produces a filter bubble will not actually feel as good of a system to the end user, and will not get as much adoption.

[TelmoMenezes]

Chris, in my view the problem with this reasoning is that you are assuming that people are good at noticing that they are inside a filter bubble.

I have a less optimistic perspective: I suspect people want to feel like they are being exposed to diverse information while not having their beliefs or preferences challenged. This makes sense, considering that our cognitive resources are limited and being exposed to information that contradicts our beliefs is a psychologically painful experience.

So I claim that this is a cultural problem that companies have no incentive to solve. I am not claiming that I have a solution, nor do I endorse regulation or (shudder) government intervention on cultural dynamics.

I suspect that we more and more belong to tribes that are divided across intelectual instead of geographical lines. Surely I have more in common with you than most of my neighbours (just going by the fact that we are both participating in the same niche forum). The problem is that nation states are still geographical and have to arrive at some democratic consensus to avoid tyranny. The avenues by which such consensus can be achieved are getting narrower. Maybe we will transcend nations, maybe we will devolve into tyranny. I am hoping for the former, but become worried when I see people believing that the problem doesn't exist.

I try do as I preach, so I am open to having my opinion challenged :)

[walterbell]

What do you think about the approach taken by http://random.co?

http://www.datascienceweekly.org/blog/19-random-predictive-c...

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Everyone's reality consists of unique connections between things. To someone "art" is more strongly connected to "abstract art" than "photorealistic art". For someone else "art" refers most strongly to "oil paintings". Our system tries to capture and understand what kind of unique connections an individual has. Random tries to understand what "art" means to you personally and what kind of related things might be interesting to you.

The app also allows you to connect things freely thus letting you express both your rational and irrational self. There're no universal categories or connections between different things - rather it's about an individual's own "ontology" that's created through usage. The "associative ontology" evolves continuously both through the actions of the individual and other people using the system.

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[declan]

Yep. I’ve heard complaints about “filter bubbles” before, but have always found these to be entirely theoretical — not a critique of an actual implemented system. In reality, as <chris_va> says, a “filter bubble” is different from a “viewpoint bubble.”

An example: If our recommendation engine at http://recent.io/ concludes you’re interested in Barack Obama, it will (surprise!) recommend articles about Barack Obama. It doesn’t filter by political viewpoint. You’ll get articles from both lefty sources and right-leaning sources.

Also, of course, we offer “top news” if you prefer!

[paletoy]

Chris, any tips on how find good curated sources ?

[austenallred]

That's similar to what we're trying to do with http://grasswire.com, but not so much "articles" as "tweets/videos," and crowdsource fact-checking after the fact.

So, maybe not very much like it at all, but I agree with your original analysis that curation will be king. News/journalism feels very much like the Internet did pre-Google. There has to be some aspect of real-time curation/fact-checking built in IMO. But obviously I'm extremely biased.

[declan]

> on your exact interests is the goal of a great curation.

You might be interested in signing up for the beta at http://recent.io (disclaimer: I quit my job at CBS/CNET earlier this year to found this company). We released an alpha version to early testers last month, with the beta to come soon.

We recommend articles based on what we learn your interests to be, and that selection of recommended articles is the best I’ve ever seen.

[walterbell]

Any differences from Zite (now owned by Flipboard)?

[declan]

>Any differences from Zite (now owned by Flipboard)?

Yep, differences in design, approach, and implementation. It offers better recommendations and can do things Zite couldn't.

This is not to discount the groundbreaking work done by the Zite team at the time; the last CEO of Zite is a friend who managed the product well. It's always easier when you've been able to learn what other companies have done well and what they haven't. And we've been able to do things like using Google App Engine for the backend from the beginning, which wouldn't exactly have been possible when Zite was founded 9 years ago (and because of earlier GAE limitations and higher costs may not even have been practical even 2-3 years ago).

As a practical matter, Zite is about to be discontinued with some of its features, in theory, to be eventually incorporated into Flipboard. (The March 5 announcement of the acquisition said they'll be "shutting it down" as early as September 5: http://blog.zite.com/2014/03/05/zite-is-flipping-out/ ) So if you liked Zite, you might want to sign up at http://recent.io