Dygest: Survey All The Hottest News Coverage in One Digest
Dygest.net is a fascinating new service that looks over hundreds of topical sources online, finds out what the hot topics are and publishes excerpts of coverage that help tell the whole story succinctly on one page. It's like Cliffs Notes for meme-tracking and it appears to work quite well.
At first glance Dygest looks like the work of one more computer scientist who's trained a robot to hunt for hot links. There are a lot of those now. This one uses natural language processing algorithms instead of tracking links between sources, though, and the summaries from multiple sources are enjoyable to read. Demo sites have been set up for technology, environmental, film, Chicago-area and San Francisco area news.
The digests aren't perfect but they are surpassingly coherent. The site isn't particularly eye catching at all, but as a proof of concept it's very interesting. You can either get a broad understanding of a story by reading highlighted paragraphs from various sources, or pick one of those sources to dive deep into its particular coverage. The opportunity to sample different writing styles, angles and key points makes Dygest fun to read casually and for in-depth exploration of the news.
The team behind Dygest says they think the service would be well suited for mobile consumption, but white labeling the technology is high on their list of ideas as well. OneSpot comes to mind as an immediate competitor, but there are others.
Dygest has pre-seeded each of its demo sites with a few hundred sources, but the possibilities the analysis engine presents are many.
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It seems very similar to topikality, which is also right on the verge of being on the big time. Topikality claims to learn what sources you prefer over time, though, where dygest.net doesn't (yet).
Very cool services though - as my subscribed feeds grows to unmanageable proportions it's nice to have a single place to go to get news on a specific topic. The open question is whether this, in the long run, puts the squeeze on smaller content providers as they fight for space within a given cluster of news. There's also a specialist/generalist issue - I'd rather read Berkman or EFF on tech/law issues, but subject-matter expertise might not be weighted appropriately.
a thinking man, aren't you j-p! all very good points. i love this field and the questions that come up in it. how about you and i discuss it in greater detail over lunch again sometime soon?
Somewhat similar to buzztap.com, which brings content related to a given sport/team/league together into a single location.
I'd like to view this kind of website, for I can save a lot of time.
A GistWeb on steroids perhaps? I used to use GistWeb to quickly get summary of long-winded articles, but it only works on one page at a time, and it always keeps opening tabs, nice to see some automated software has come in to help and that is not a bookmarklet.
Dygest: Survey All The Hottest News Coverage in One Digest http://bit.ly/BEI3M [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3314915423]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 17, 2009 9:32 AM
I've been using Dygest since your article came out. It's a little verbose for my taste -- it seems to be reissuing all its updates every few hours, so that I see the same article three or four times a day.
Eadwacer,
our RSS feed was indeed a bit "talkative" -- We put a filter in place today, so you should get a lot less articles reissued. Please let us know how that works for you and any other feedback you may have (e-mail address is on our site).
Team Dygest
Since I don't have a need for minute-by-minute updates, what I've done is put your tech page into my "Morning Papers" folder in Opera. That way I am guaranteed to scan it once a day. I did pass on my earlier feedback on the site (differentl username), and I'll let you know there how this works out (just posting this for in-thread closure).
It looks to be a useful service.