You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

When you search on Trapit, the first batch of stories might be pretty good, depending on your query. The interface prompts you to give five stories the thumbs-up or thumbs-down until it's finished personalizing. This isn't an up-vote or down-vote for popularity; it's just whether the article is what you're looking for or not. This is how the AI engine learns what you like and personalizes results for you. After that's done, the results are fine-tuned to your tastes, and the same trap on someone else's profile might look completely different.

Don't think of Trapit as a search tool. You can save traps to your profile, and as the engine finds new stories it thinks will interest you, it delivers them to your traps and gives you a notification. Trapit makes for a great homepage; every time you open your browser, you'll see new stories listed in your activity feed, which you can read now or save to your reading list for later.

While the trendy discovery engines these days are social, trawling your Facebook and Twitter connections and using those to approximate your interests, Trapit goes the other way. It uses only your query, your votes and its machine intelligence. "There's no concept of crowd-sourcing on here," Griffiths says. Trapit shows you featured traps by other users, which you can add as your own, but as soon as you do, they start personalizing for you specifically.

Trapit reminds me of Thoora, an app with a similar mission, but they work rather differently. Thoora's algorithms use certain signals, including popularity but also using smarter semantic data, to pull in content from millions of sources. Trapit scours fewer sources, but it uses different underlying technology with a grasp of natural language.

I've tried out both, and I don't know which is better. They both work much better than dumb popularity-powered aggregators, that's for sure. I can find endless amounts of relevant reading on either one.

Does a personalized news feed like this help you find good stuff to read? Try it out and tell us what you think. Go to trap.it and sign up for free and share your reactions and favorite traps in the comments.

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

We covered Thoora's features earlier this week. It's a compelling alternative to the social search phenomenon of letting your friends' tastes substitute for real context. Thoora uses machine learning algorithms to help users build topics using keywords, popularity, and over 100 other quality signals. It's especially good at finding articles from small blogs deep within the Web, a shortcoming of typical search tools. Its attractive interface makes for a great user experience for both work and play applications, and the tablet form factor is a natural fit.

The UI is consistent with the Web version, but menus and controls have been moved to the periphery and organized in a familiar two-column tablet layout.

It's a great fit on a Motorola Xoom, and Carrie Shaw, Thoora's head of product, says that the Honeycomb-based app will be tested on the Kindle Fire as soon as possible. If it works as expected, they'll submit it to the Amazon Appstore. Thoora is also developing for iPad and phones, looking to ship those versions before the end of the year.

Grab the app from the Android Market, try it out and tell us what you think! If you create any cool topics, share them in the comments.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

Digging For Content

Thoora was founded in 2008, and it originally launched as a real-time news aggregator, which we covered back in 2009. But this new iteration is about much more than scanning the news. This is a toolkit for users to explore and research topics, and it learns more about them as its users sort out what matters to them. It is a social tool - users can share topics, and the Thoora site features highlights - but the purpose of the tool is to turn up the most relevant content on the topic, no matter how deeply it's buried in the Web.

"We like to say that we're at the intersection of aggregation, curation and search," says Carrie Shaw, head of product at Thoora. As far as users are concerned, that's a good description, but the real value of Thoora comes from the learning algorithms at work behind the scenes. As users create topics, discover content and clean up the results, the Thoora engine gets better at recommendations.

Shaw says the algorithm scours "28 million sources from the traditional media and the blogosphere... looking at over 100 signals to figure out the relevancy of the results and the order in which to present them." These include social signals, such as shares on Twitter, but it also looks for comments on the article itself, as well as other signs of article quality. If an article is swarming with ads or can be identified as the product of a content farm, that article's importance is diminished.

Creating A Topic

Currently, topics on Thoora stand alone, and topics with the same name by different users are not related. But Shaw says there are some advantages to that, because "different topics develop different angles over time," since topics can have different focuses and keywords. Users can browse existing topics through the Explore gallery, but the best way to see Thoora in action is to create a topic from scratch.

As soon as you choose a title, you can already see the engine at work. A suggested list of keywords appears on the right side, and the keywords adjust as you add more. Before creating the topic, you can either select one keyword as the main descriptor, or you can check "All keywords are equal." Finally, decide whether you want other members to be able to view and follow the topic (on by default), and then click "create topic."

After creating a topic, you can even pull in specific Twitter accounts or RSS feeds to put Thoora's engine to work on links that arrive there. It's a cool way to augment the firehose of content that the algorithm filters through. These can be seen in a tab called "Topic DNA," which shows all the user inputs going into the topic, including its followers, ratings, keywords and more.

The topic page displays a list of text articles with a range of sorting options. The article tab lists the title and a short excerpt along with the source, the date of publication, and the Thoora engine's popularity rating for it. Another tab surfaces related images.

Popularity is hardly the most important factor to the algorithm. In fact, it does a good job of identifying content on minor blogs due to other quality signals, whereas Google News would overlook a site without an established reputation.

If the topic you've created turns up weird or irrelevant results, that's an opportunity, not a problem. There's a trash can button to indicate to Thoora that a result isn't relevant, and if you delete it, the topic updates right away. You can also click the heart button to indicate to Thoora any articles you particularly liked. These new data points improve the algorithm for all users over time.

Sharing The Experience

Though Thoora is useful for personal research, it's also a shareable experience. Users can follow one another and see when new topics are posted. Topics and articles can be easily shared, and Thoora's Explore tab features popular topics, featured topics selected by Thoora editors, and a list of "Au-THOORA-ties" who have lots of followers and create good topics.

The Business of Discovery

Thoora is free, and Shaw says it will implement premium level of service in the coming months. The premium service will target content marketers, and Shaw says it will be "a very low cost." The main additional features will be analytics tools and integration with outside analytics software.

Whether you're a blogger or journalist, an academic, or you're just interested in something, a machine learning-powered tool like Thoora could be a powerful alternative to a purely social service.

If you give Thoora a try, share your cool topics with us in the comments.

Links to read the full story launch a fully capable built-in browser, or you can chose to open the story in Safari. The app supports iOS 4 app switching, so you won't lose your place. You can also chose to email or copy the link or save it for later to your Instapaper account.

The Good: I really like the idea of stumbling onto news, and the ability to quickly scan headlines about a given topic without knowing the source eliminates our media loyalties. Searching works pretty well for both broad searches like "technology" or more specific ones like "iPhone app development." Results were relevant and from good sources.

One small feature also makes digging deeper within topics easy and unobtrusive to workflow within the app. If you search for "baseball" and then remember you want to read up on the Red Sox, you can start a new search from the "baseball" search results page. The app then provides a link to return to the previous search, letting you pick up where you left off. It's a small feature but it goes a long way.

The Not So Good: Accidental News Explorer (which, let's be honest, could use a better name) is beautifully minimalistic and feels "newspapery" with its grey color scheme and serifed fonts, but it also leaves much to be desired. I really would like to see the ability to save searches into a list of favorite topics implemented in a future version of this app.

This could take the app to the next level and make it far more powerful by allowing it to curate a list of news at the intersection of my various interests. I would love to be able to select a few topics and set this thing on shuffle. That would truly make it the Pandora of news. StumbleUpon, which just went mobile with iPhone and Android apps, is a better solution for that at the moment.

For version 1.0, this app is pretty solid if you enjoy browsing for news. Most of us, however, are very loyal to the news outlets we most trust, and breaking that habit can be difficult. $1.99 could be a bit of a barrier to some as well, but if you want to mix up your news consumption, I recommend giving Accidental News Explorer a look.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

In an age when gross-out sites like goatse are just a click away, a number of services offer parents the information they need to find quality online entertainment. While past generations were raised on unfiltered television and video games, today's parent take a more active role in the process of media consumption.

AOL's PlaySavvy: PlaySavvy is another site that offers parents a chance to check out age-appropriate kids games. Similar to What They Play, this site lists the ESRB ratings next to games and information is categorized by topic and gaming system. Products for console favorites like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii are often featured on the site. AOL also offers parents daily articles and a section to view the most popular games.

Parents' Choice: Established in 1978, this site is run by the Parents' Choice Foundation - a nonprofit organization that offers awards to the top children's media and toys. Some of the award categories include websites, video games, DVDs, software, television programming and toys. This site definitely skews towards narrative-based educational materials. If your kid has a shorter attention span, you might want to visit PBS Kids instead.

Common Sense Media: Common Sense media is a nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering parents reviews and suggestions on appropriate content. The group produces movie, website, TV, game, book and music ratings as well as a number of educational tools for classroom use. The site can be personalized for kids between the ages of 2-17 years old and it's available in English and Spanish. This site tends to weigh the benefits of mainstream media sites.

PBS KIDS Island: This site offers parents reading resources, videos and games in English and Spanish. While the majority of the content is best queued up by a parent or teacher, the videos are of particularly high quality and completely commercial free.

National Geographic for Kids: This site offers kid-friendly games, videos, stories and activities for nature lovers. The same photography that has made National Geographic a hit with grownups is likely to please kids. Not surprisingly, the video content is equally compelling. Discovery Kids offers a similar experience and is a great site for visual learners.

Totlol: Totlol is a parent-moderated version of YouTube. The site offers video options specifically designed for children and even offers "age optimized interfaces" to ensure that kids of different ages get the most appropriate content. In 2008, ReadWriteWeb covered Totlol's beta launch. As of today the site charges a $3 per month subscription fee or $54 until your child grows up.

Photo Credit:Swaminathan

Does this mean Shazam is about to give Pandora and the like a run for their money?

The free Shazam application is best known for its nifty tune identification trick. Mobile users can hold their iPhones up next to a speaker or other source of music and the application "listens" to what's being played in order to identify the song and artist. It also lets you read track and album reviews, read artist biographies and tag songs to share with friends over Facebook and Twitter.

The new application, Shazam Encore, adds even more functionality including improved speed performance, trend lists that highlight what's popular among other Shazam users, a search function that taps into a database of 8 million+ songs, music recommendations and a "drive-and-tag" feature that lets the app recognize when it's in an in-car dock so it can identify what's playing on the radio while you're driving.

But How are Those Recommendations?

Out of all the new features, however, it's the music recommendations option which is the most interesting. Recommendations are the killer feature which can either make or break a mobile application these days. With services like Last.fm and Pandora already providing mobile users with playlists based on a user's likes or dislikes, Shazam needs to be able to do recommendations well - really well - in order to compete with these already popular applications.

In addition, the up-and-comer streaming music service from Spotify also partnered with The Echo Nest's music intelligence platform earlier this year to help improve on Spotify's playlist and music discovery functions. The end results of that partnership have been touted as being like the iTunes' "Genius" feature, only better. Although not yet available in the U.S., Spotify's mobile application is one of the most highly anticipated applications as it provides a new way to enjoy music - through playlist creations that can be listened to both online and off. It, too, will be heavy competition for any application entering into the music recommendations game, including, of course, Shazam.

So where does that leave Shazam Encore? At the moment, its recommendations offering provides you with a list of other songs you might like based on the one track you have pulled up. While this might help you discover new music, you aren't able to create a playlist based on those songs. Instead, Shazam's focus remains more on the sharing of music via tagging and posting to Twitter and Facebook.

As far as how good Shazam's recommendations are, we would need to do a lot more testing before giving a solid opinion - the app is just too new. In fact, it's so new that it wasn't even showing up in an iTunes Store search at the time of writing. The provided screenshot in the App Store doesn't look all that encouraging, though. (Really, a fan of indie band My Sad Captains wants to listen to Katy Perry singing about "kissing a girl?" I don't think so...)

But whether or not the recommendations are up to speed, it remains to be seen whether iPhone app shoppers will be willing to fork over the $4.99 US (£2.99/ €3.99) to have access to them, especially when there's no playlist option included.

Those interested in trying the new Encore application can find it now in the App Store by clicking here.

AOL's PlaySavvy: PlaySavvy is another site that offers parents a chance to check out age-appropriate kids games. Similar to What They Play, this site lists the ESRB ratings next to games and information is categorized by topic and gaming system. Products for console favorites like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii are often featured on the site. AOL also offers parents daily articles and a section to view the most popular games.

Parents' Choice: Established in 1978, this site is run by the Parents' Choice Foundation - a nonprofit organization that offers awards to the top children's media and toys. Some of the award categories include websites, video games, DVDs, software, television programming and toys. This site definitely skews towards narrative-based educational materials. If your kid has a shorter attention span, you might want to visit PBS Kids instead.

Common Sense Media: Common Sense media is a nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering parents reviews and suggestions on appropriate content. The group produces movie, website, TV, game, book and music ratings as well as a number of educational tools for classroom use. The site can be personalized for kids between the ages of 2-17 years old and it's available in English and Spanish. This site tends to weigh the benefits of mainstream media sites.

PBS KIDS Island: This site offers parents reading resources, videos and games in English and Spanish. While the majority of the content is best queued up by a parent or teacher, the videos are of particularly high quality and completely commercial free.

National Geographic for Kids: This site offers kid-friendly games, videos, stories and activities for nature lovers. The same photography that has made National Geographic a hit with grownups is likely to please kids. Not surprisingly, the video content is equally compelling. Discovery Kids offers a similar experience and is a great site for visual learners.

Totlol: Totlol is a parent-moderated version of YouTube. The site offers video options specifically designed for children and even offers "age optimized interfaces" to ensure that kids of different ages get the most appropriate content. In 2008, ReadWriteWeb covered Totlol's beta launch. As of today the site charges a $3 per month subscription fee or $54 until your child grows up.

Photo Credit:Swaminathan

With today's Brightcove partnership, Boxee can point major networks towards a solution that allows them to increase control over their web video content and advertising. Brightcove offers customers the option to automatically serve video ads or they can choose to utilize a turnkey solution for customized ad placement. Meanwhile Boxee offers content owners a chance to move web video to television audiences. If Brightcove clients like Fox, Showtime Networks and A&E Entertainment welcome Boxee integration, other providers can't help but take notice. This is important given Boxee's battle for Hulu integration.

While Boxee users have always loved the Hulu app, Hulu's content partners requested removal from the Boxee community in early February. Boxee was forced to respond with a workaround solution. The new deal further legitimizes Boxee as a distributor of mainstream content. For a complete list of Brightcove customers and potential Boxee content providers, visit the Brightcove customers page.

About Appolicious

According to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Appolicious is "a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in..." but we think the new recommendation service is, as the name implies, closer to that of social bookmarking tool Delicious. As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your items - except here, instead of links, you're saving apps. Also like Delicious, you have the opportunity to "follow" other people whose items you enjoy. Similar to Delicious's "my network" feature, this will highlight people like you who save and share items that fit your interests. Again, we're talking apps not links.

The basic concept behind this idea is to mirror the real world of friend recommendations. You know, when your iPhone-carrying buddy says "hey, have you seen this cool new app?"

How it Works

Of course, in order for you to share your apps with others, you first have to import them into Appolicious. If you want to be more selective, you can manually type in the names of the apps you own, but the easiest way to get started is to do an app import.

The App Library Builder is a Java-based tool which scans your iTunes library for your owned applications. Getting to the tool is a bit harder than it should be we think, since it's not prominently featured on the main Appolicious homepage. However, from your "edit profile" page, clicking through on the link "view my full app library" from the blue box at the bottom of the page will get you going.

Once started, the app detects the location of your iTunes App folder then presents a list of all your apps. Checkboxes are provided so you can check and uncheck the apps you want to import. Unlike our experience with Appsfire, Appolicious accurately detected our applications...all of them (save for jailbreak apps). The apps are then added to your library.

Once imported, you have the opportunity to rate them or write a review, although these steps aren't really all that necessary. By simply owning an application and sharing it on the service, that in and of itself is a recommendation of sorts.

Finding Friends Needs Work

To get the best recommendations, you'll need to import some friends to Appolicious. Unfortunately, the service only allows you to import friends from Gmail or Yahoo! mail by logging into your account using your username and password. Despite featuring a Facebook Connect option for login to the site, there doesn't appear to be a Facebook friend import. Neither is there a way to import friends from other social services like Twitter, for example.

At the very least, you would think that when you land on a user's profile page there would be an option to add them as a friend, but even that isn't an option. Sadly, without better friend finding/following options, the entire service's concept could easily fail. We hope they'll address this issue in a future update.

Recommendations

For now, we can overlook the poor implementation of friending features because Appolicious itself serves up its own recommendations. Plus, by categorizing your "app personality" in your profile (I'm a "social networker" and "tech junkie"), you're offered recommendations from people like you - that is, those who have categorized themselves in the same way.

Conclusion: We'll Give it a Shot

Overall, though, we like the concept of a social network such as this. With a much better import process than Appsfire, it's already off to a good start. And the Delicious model is a great one to mimic for a recommendation service. As long as Appolicious can address the friending issues mentioned above, it could really be a contender for the best place to discover new apps from your friends. That is, unless Apple surprises us with an App Store update that perfects app sharing and recommendations in iTunes itself.

Update: Appsfire's latest version corrects the problems seen in the initial testing mentioned above.

We decided to follow up on and reprint that post here on a late Friday afternoon. We're sure many of readers either didn't see it at the time or hadn't yet discovered ReadWriteWeb. Not everyone who did read it agreed with our conclusions, so after the post below we've added some of our favorite pro and con comments from the original, plus a cool personal story from a member of the RWW community. What do you think? Does online noise play a meaningful role in your life?

Blogs, RSS, IM, Twitter and FriendFeed - the number of sources of sources of information online can feel like it's multiplying exponentially every day. It's easy, natural even, to feel overwhelmed. Especially when we are more familiar with the tightly controlled editorial policies of mainstream media.

The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.

Experiments in Noise Control

There are many ways you can roughly cut down on the noise in your information stream. More emerge all the time and this is a very valuable direction for services to be exploring. We don't want to argue that noise is always good, it's clearly important to spend some time without it every day.

The most recent entry into the noise filtering scene is probably FriendFeed's new "best of" feature. Late last night FriendFeed rolled out the ability to view just the items most popular with your friends on the service for the last day, week or month. It's something many people have been hoping for and there's no doubt it will prove useful. If you're not using FriendFeed yet, you can check it out and add me as a friend if you like here.

Other services that are good for filtering out noise are del.icio.us popular for a particular tag, AideRSS and Google Reader's overly friendly shared items from friends feature. We'd love to read about your favorite noise filtering tools in comments below.

On the Beauty of Noise

Filtering isn't everything it's cracked up to be, though, and you wouldn't want to live in a fully filtered world all the time. Social media noise is an essential part of learning and living on the web. Hear are some reasons why.

Unexpected opportunities.

Some people call it "serendipity," others call it "passive and opportunistic information acquisition." (Erdelez, see below.) The less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn't even think to look for.

Scanning quickly over large quantities of roughly relevant information can turn up invaluable resources, opportunities, context and contacts that you can passively process or opportunistically leverage at will.

Future Needs

It's one thing to find something you didn't know you needed right now, it's a whole other skill to be able to recall information that seemed marginally useful at best in the past at a time in the future when the need for it arises. Who can't remember doing that before?

The ability to recall passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. A person with a substantial reservoir of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team.

Maximizing Recall

Some people worry that being exposed to too much information will lead to not remembering very much of it. Scientists say that's not necessarily the case, though. Sanda Erdelez, for example, wrote the following in her study Information Encountering: It's More Than Just Bumping into Information

A majority of participants in my information encountering study, when asked about their past experiences of "bumping into information," were familiar with the notion of accidental discovery of information and could recall these experiences clearly

We may be afraid that we won't remember key information that rushed past us in a river of news, but Erdelez argues that when prompted about a particular incident of accidental discovery our memories are better than we might think.

We would argue here in fact that the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future. One useful strategy may be to spend some time going through a large amount of information just a touch more quickly than we're comfortable with.

General Knowledge

Beyond simple recall of particular information in the past, internalized noise can be just as useful in the formation of wisdom and perspective as introspection, thoughtfulness and other forms of attentiveness can be. Spend some time skimming, it'll make you a better person. You'll meet new people, learn new things - don't worry, it's fun.

Personal Growth

Serendipitous search in the offline world is believed to be one of the ways our understanding of the world expands. David Pescovitz at BoingBoing writes about Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson's PhD thesis titled Seeking One's Own: On Encounters Between Individuals and Objects:

"Ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable," Ottoson argues "materialize in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach."

That's more than just a beautiful reason you should read BoingBoing, it's an interesting understanding of the way that swimming through noise helps us become who we are.

Conclusion

Quiet time, time off-line, deep thoughts and long books are all beautiful things - essential to a healthy intellectual, psychological and social life. We argue, though, that the opposite of all those things - online social media noise, is also a great opportunity that deserves to have its worth recognized at a time in history when many of us are struggling to deal with it.

So take some time for yourself when you can, find a nice place to sit with a cup of tea and blow through a few hundred items in your RSS reader. If you can relax into it, it'll help you remember some of the reasons why you love the internet.

Creative Commons photos, Christmas 2007 series, by Flickr user Kevin Dooley.

Following up on this post

We write enough here everyday and read enough around the web that sometimes looking back at a post from earlier in the same year can feel like we're visiting another planet. This post, though, still feels pretty familiar.

A few things have changed, for sure. Hutch Carpenter, the blogger who made the chart in this posts about different ways to relate to noise, got a job at enterprise social bookmarking startup Connectbeam - in part, he says in announcing his new position, because of his use of FriendFeed! That's pretty heart warming.

In announcing his new job, Hutch wrote the following:

FriendFeed opened my eyes to the possibilities of knowledge as the basis of relationships. The ways in which content from a variety of sources is a powerful, addictive basis for learning, conversations and collaboration. How activity streams are compelling reads. I've been active on FriendFeed since March, and it shocks me how much I know about web 2.0 and technology in general versus last year. I've still got much to learn, and FriendFeed will continue to be a good source for that.

Diverse Reactions from Readers

Hutch's is a pretty happy ending to a story about noise, but not everyone who read our original post agreed with it.

One dissenter summarized a number of peoples' positions well when he wrote: "The web is about ME first and then comes the noise driven by the hype and the false version of truth that is popularity." That commenter, who went by the name "directeur," is building a startup based on this belief of his called FeedEgo.com. It's a personal relevance based feed reader and it's worth checking out, even if we do disagree with its creator about relevance vs. noise.

Some commenters said that balance was really what's most important. "Portland Broker" for example, wrote that "As with most everything, I think it's a matter of balance. Noise is everywhere; sometimes it's serendipitous, often it's not. A world that is overly filtered is lacking, just as one that is not filtered at all."

How can you as a person online create that kind of balance? Iconoclastic tech/culture blogger Stetoscope suggested the following: " I think what makes noise unbearable is the guilty feeling we have to not read everything. But if we takes some times to dive in the noise, without feeling guilty of what we have missed, it is just a positive habit." We like that advice and it sounds like it could work well with some of the tips we shared in a post last Spring titled Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader.

What do you think? Is social media noise good for you? How has it been treating you lately? If you believe in the need for balance, what are your favorite ways to create it?

Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.

There are many ways you can roughly cut down on the noise in your information stream. More emerge all the time and this is a very valuable direction for services to be exploring. We don't want to argue that noise is always good, it's clearly important to spend some time without it every day.

The most recent entry into the noise filtering scene is probably FriendFeed's new "best of" feature. Late last night FriendFeed rolled out the ability to view just the items most popular with your friends on the service for the last day, week or month. It's something many people have been hoping for and there's no doubt it will prove useful. If you're not using FriendFeed yet, you can check it out and add me as a friend if you like here.

Other services that are good for filtering out noise are del.icio.us popular for a particular tag, AideRSS and Google Reader's overly friendly shared items from friends feature. We'd love to read about your favorite noise filtering tools in comments below.

On the Beauty of Noise

Filtering isn't everything it's cracked up to be, though, and you wouldn't want to live in a fully filtered world all the time. Social media noise is an essential part of learning and living on the web. Hear are some reasons why.

Unexpected opportunities.

Some people call it "serendipity," others call it "passive and opportunistic information acquisition." (Erdelez, see below.) The less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn't even think to look for.

Scanning quickly over large quantities of roughly relevant information can turn up invaluable resources, opportunities, context and contacts that you can passively process or opportunistically leverage at will.

Future Needs

It's one thing to find something you didn't know you needed right now, it's a whole other skill to be able to recall information that seemed marginally useful at best in the past at a time in the future when the need for it arises. Who can't remember doing that before?

The ability to recall passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. A person with a substantial reservoir of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team.

Maximizing Recall

Some people worry that being exposed to too much information will lead to not remembering very much of it. Scientists say that's not necessarily the case, though. Sanda Erdelez, for example, wrote the following in her study Information Encountering: It's More Than Just Bumping into Information

A majority of participants in my information encountering study, when asked about their past experiences of "bumping into information," were familiar with the notion of accidental discovery of information and could recall these experiences clearly.

We may be afraid that we won't remember key information that rushed past us in a river of news, but Erdelez argues that when prompted about a particular incident of accidental discovery our memories are better than we might think.

We would argue here in fact that the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future. One useful strategy may be to spend some time going through a large amount of information just a touch more quickly than we're comfortable with.

General Knowledge

Beyond simple recall of particular information in the past, internalized noise can be just as useful in the formation of wisdom and perspective as introspection, thoughtfulness and other forms of attentiveness can be. Spend some time skimming, it'll make you a better person. You'll meet new people, learn new things - don't worry, it's fun.

Personal Growth

Serendipitous search in the offline world is believed to be one of the ways our understanding of the world expands. David Pescovitz at BoingBoing writes about Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson's PhD thesis titled Seeking One's Own: On Encounters Between Individuals and Objects:

"Ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable," Ottoson argues "materialize in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach."

That's more than just a beautiful reason you should read BoingBoing, it's an interesting understanding of the way that swimming through noise helps us become who we are.

Conclusion

Quiet time, time off-line, deep thoughts and long books are all beautiful things - essential to a healthy intellectual, psychological and social life. We argue, though, that the opposite of all those things - online social media noise, is also a great opportunity that deserves to have its worth recognized at a time in history when many of us are struggling to deal with it.

So take some time for yourself when you can, find a nice place to sit with a cup of tea and blow through a few hundred items in your RSS reader. If you can relax into it, it'll help you remember some of the reasons why you love the internet.

Creative Commons photos, Christmas 2007 series, by Flickr user Kevin Dooley.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_online_noise_is_good_for_y.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_online_noise_is_good_for_y.php Analysis Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:46:55 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick