Spam filters are great but they aren't so good at determining subjectively important or controversial comments on blog posts. For example, we put up a post about Barack Obama's social media strategy right after the election. Our lead editors were all on flights back from the Web 2.0 summit and so we didn't notice that some of the comments on that post were really offensive and needed to be dealt with right away. Some technology to highlight and prioritize delivery of those comments in particular would be really nice to have.
This kind of automated prioritization of emails was something that Yahoo! was talking about a year ago in terms of an Inbox 2.0 concept but we still haven't seen it. The closest substitute we can think of is setting up a list of non-spam but high-priority keyword filters in GMail, then grabbing the RSS feed for that filter and subscribing to it in an app that we watch high priority feeds through.
When we write about companies, applications and concepts here, we try to provide some context by linking to related websites. That's just good blogging, we think, but it's much easier said than done.
This is the kind of technology we've fantasized about ever since seeing Austrian startup SystemOne at the DEMO conference in 2006. For now we rely instead on a collection of Google Custom Search Engines and that works very well.
Speaking of linking, we try to link out to other blogs as much as we can and we'd like to be linking to smaller blogs writing about concepts similar to our posts. Automation of that kind of research tool would be really nice and is something that SystemOne or BlogRovr could help with. Evri looks great from a publisher's perspective too, though it doesn't look as valuable from a research perspective as we'd like.
This author is just now checking out Zementa (see Sarah Perez's review this spring), which recommends related blog posts as you compose, but it's not clear that the recommendations are granular enough to be useful. We'll reserve judgment for now.
The best solution we've found to date is taking a Google Blogsearch feed for related keywords, changing the num=10 part of the URL to num=50 and then running that feed through PostRank. PostRank will take awhile to process it, but in the end you can see which recent posts about your keywords around the web got the most comments, inbound links, etc. That can help surface quality posts from sources you've never seen before.
We'd love to be shown related blog posts from our own archives as we compose new posts. We don't know if there is technology that can help do that better than the system we've already got. We simply bookmark the link to a google search for "site:http://readwriteweb.com," then visit that and add search terms to the query box. It works pretty well but relies on Google's algorithm for relevance. That may or may not be helpful.
This has been tried many times before and there are new people trying it now - but when someone creates a killer ranked, categorized and extensive directory of topic blogs around the web, they'll have the world at their door.
For now we've got a number of systems (six, actually) that work pretty well for us. Our favorite methods involve delicious and ask.com blogsearch.
It's a real good day around here when we get to incorporate some expert opinion in an article we write. We love doing that. We'd love to know which of our existing contacts or people we don't know would be best to contact regarding a story.
There is Help A Reporter Out and we should probably give that a try, but queries only go out a few times a day and we're looking for immediate contacts, preferably by Instant Messenger.
We've used Twitter for this a lot, actually, and in some ways it works better than we can imagine almost anything else working. If you're interested, check out our post How We Use Twitter for Journalism and see our favorite post written this way, APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion of the Pros and Cons. It's pretty amazing that nearly every quote we got for the story was sent to us on Twitter.
We love recommendation technology because used selectively it can make us smarter and more effective. The field is just in its infancy, though, and we expect that many of our dreams will come true soon.
What about you? Do readers here have recommendation fantasies, favorites or tips on getting done what we aim to do with the hacks and workarounds above? Drop those thoughts in comments and we'll all be smarter for it.
Photo credit: "I Love The Idea" Creative Commons by Flickr user apesara
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...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far\n\nThere'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.