Nine Recommendation Tools We Wish We Had
...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far
There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. Below, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers.
This list is written from our perspective, as technology bloggers, but we suspect that many of the links and ideas below will prove useful in other contexts, as well.
Two tools that do exist that we like a lot are the FriendFeed Best of Day feature and the MyBlogLog recommended posts widget for WordPress.
First Finders
There may or may not be any such thing as a tipping point or a mysterious group of otherwise random market influencials online, but we're pretty sure that are people who consistently find cool things before other people. We'd like to know who they are so we can look over their shoulder.
This is something that social bookmarking tool Furl.net at least used to do really well - they'd recommend users whose archives are similar to yours and you can choose which ones to subscribe to.
Nowadays we're not sure if there's any service that really does what we're looking for, so we're muscling through some data crunching by hand. This is the one work-around on this list that we can't tell you about for competitive reasons - but we will say that if you want to find out what's cool in web tech, early, you should pay attention to user experience designer Angus Fraser. We've never met Angus but the numbers we're running say he's our kind of guy. (Hi Angus!)
We'll introduce you to more of the people that our experimental system is telling us to watch when we credit them for stories and cool websites they helped us find before our competitors have.
What You, Our Readers, Might Like
We'd like to have have, as one of our sources of story leads, an automated system that could suggest links that our community of readers would likely enjoy given their similarity to other things that we know you like already.
We know what some of you are interested in, anecdotally, through systems like MyBlogLog's BlogJuice (right) but we'd love to get systematic access to that kind of data. We probably could if we decide to dedicate the resources to it.
Touchstone Sharers
Everyone wants to know who the big influencers are in social networks. Unscrupulous types want to buy them off but we'd just like to make sure we're in the orbits of the relevant ones. They find good things and they are good to be found by.
For example, you may know that super networker Robert Scooble is coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs over FriendFeed. (As are we, it's great.) But you may not know that there are apparently more influential people there than Scoble, too. In one 8 hour period recently we counted the number of other people who "liked" the same items that Scoble liked on FriendFeed and found 254 people clustered around his promoted items. During that same period items liked by Mona N. were liked by 357 people! That's why some people in the know call Mona the Queen of FriendFeed.
We'd like a tool that introduced us to those types of people in various social networks we participate in.
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These are the online recommendation tools that I've found particularly useful for teachers and students:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/07/24/the-best-places-to-get-blog-website-book-movie-music-recommendations/
That's a cool list, Larry, and for teachers too! Thanks for sharing it.
There are a number of search engines that find similar stuff that you might like to look at:
http://whoislike.it/
http://www.similicio.us/
http://web.insuggest.com/
http://www.tastekid.com/
The last is more music/books oriented, but the first three are all fairly good, though my preference is Whoislike.
We've got some stuff up our sleeves that will address a couple of these holes, though primarily in conjunction with partner sites. Feel free to ping me if you'd like to hear more.
For related companies, where a Wikipedia page exists for a company and companies similar to them, our demo site often does a decent job:
http://pedia.directededge.com/article/Twitter
http://pedia.directededge.com/article/Apple_Inc.
When it comes to bars and restaurants...
http://liketribe.com
...has indexed some popular restaurant guides like Citysearch and Yahoo! local for a few major cities. It uses the index to provide personalized recommendations using a collaborative filtering type approach. You can get started by rating just a few places, but the more you rate, the more accurate the recommendations get for your tastes.
Its location based, and boils your search down to only 3 suggestions. Best part is you can easily do it from your phone using text messaging or email.
Thanks for the pointer back to Blog Juice, Marshall; it's way past time I updated it to include FriendFeed and a few other services.
As of a few days ago, Yahoo! Mail will highlight messages from your Yahoo! Profiles contacts. One way to get priority notice about comments to your blog would be to send those messages "from" one of your contacts.
That's something we're trying to tackle at Skribit, although a full-realization of that might include some AI as well, which will naturally take quite a while to develop and fine-tune.
Thanks for mentioning Zemanta. One quick correction: it's ZemAnta.
There has been a lot of developments since the spring post from Sarah. We're recommending all related content (images, tags, links ...), not just related posts:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zemanta_releases_major_upgrade.php
We deliver the right content at the right time to the blogger.
Looking forward to hear your opininon. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Ales Spetic, CEO, Zemanta
aiderss/ postrank can show your 'best posts' in general... but not per topic. If you could create an rss feed per topic on RWW you could pump it through and get a 'best post' per topic
Crowley, you can do topic subscriptions with new postrank.com. Here is an example of a topic 'rss', with 'best' filter on it:
http://www.postrank.com/feed/2e39cadbd73de47e3427efc0e9ba31f5?q=rss&level=best
To subscribe to that feed, click the orange RSS icon, and you can export it to your favorite reader.
How about Megite Discover. Given a link, it can discover more related sites and posts under a concept.
Nice recommendation. See the stuff related to RWW.
@Ilya - thanks for the tip. That is an extremely useful new feature :)
Hey All,
I just found this blog using BlogRovr. I think its the best tool to use for an avid blogger like me.
If you have Firefox, you take a look at its deep plethora of add-ons and plugins that helps make the surfing experience a pleasant one. :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4689
Let me know if you agree with me or not. :)
Regards,
Erwin
http://winning2win.com