The Personal Bee - A Better Way to Read News
Michael Arrington
15 comments »
Company: The Personal BeeBlog: Here
Launched: Unknown. Presented at Bar Camp
Location: Menlo Park, CA
There’s something I’ve been griping about for a long time (most recently to Adam Marsh on the first evening of Bar Camp): I read hundreds of feeds every day (320 as of today), and it takes frickin forever to go through it all. There is a better way to find good content in a massive number of posts from hundreds of feeds than clicking on each feed and screening it yourself. And I know what it is.
My idea? Automate the process, and return the results visually. A Tag Cloud is a perfect way to do this. Imagine if all of your unread feeds were scanned, keywords and/or tags were analyzed, and a tag cloud was created where you could see words with font size and boldness determined by how prominent they were in the posts. That way, you could just click on what you want to read, and ignore the fluff.
This appears to be what The Personal Bee (note: this site is down quite often) is experimenting with. Created by Nicholas Chim as a side project from his day job, Personal Bee has this to say about itself:
The Personal Bee is a “discovery engine” that helps you discover information from a collection of RSS feeds. In contrast, client-based RSS readers and web-based RSS aggregators merely catalog your RSS feeds. These tools are adequate if you subscribe to fewer than 5-10 news sources per topic of interest. Compared to RSS search engines, the Bee captures the latest “buzz words” in a topic area without requiring you to pre-specify search terms.
Adam Marsh tells me that Nicholas presented at Bar Camp, although I was not present at the session (thanks for passing this on Adam). I wish I was there. Personal Bee has a number of public feeds (see Web 2.0 for instance), and you can also register and create your own private or public feeds.
As you can see from the screenshot, a tag cloud is placed prominently in the left sidebar. Things like “Feedster 500″ and “Pandora” are big - things I want to click on right away. When I do click on a word in the tag cloud, the relevant content is pulled.
Bloglines, Pluck, Rojo, Attensa, NewsGator, and others: Please note this application, and listen to your power users. There is a better way to show new data, and it is so easy to implement.
I’ll be playing around with this application a lot in the near future.
This is interesting. I have an idea kicking around about something like this but maintained over time. A kind of What was hot this week? Month? You are compiling a great list and something like that would help out.
I once asked Google News for a ‘yesterdays newspaper’ but it didn’t go anywhere (as far as I know). Google News shows up to the minute hot topics but my idea would do the same thing but rank the news over the course of the whole day and give more of an idea of the big hot topics.
The cloud idea can (will) miss some subtle comments. Things that some popular blogger, lets say Scoble, mentions that is important and if you are keyed in, you’ll notice it but, since everyone doesn’t blog about it, it won’t show up in your cloud.
Also, have a look at this http://www.tagcloud.com
Lets you select feeds or even import your Bloglines OPML and create you own cloud.
Scott, good comments. Thank you. I actually profiled Tagcloud a month or so ago and linked to it above - oh crap its a broken link. See here - http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=68.
I was thinking about this app more tonight. The tag cloud is cool, but the stuff I want to read won’t necessarily be the biggest stuff. Something to think about.
Another way to cope with the avalanche of too many feeds to read everyday is to leverage on the power of your friends to filter the best bits.
The site http://www.tazlog.com/ calls this “collaborative reading”. You can create a group of collaborative readers and discover their best readings everyday without reading every feed yourself.
The service is in an “invite only” mode. Drop me a mail if you wan’t to get in: benoit [at] rigaut (dot) com.
I don’t have an account at protopage, but I tried this for a couple of days, and there were a couple of items that kept it from actually being useful to me. The channels felt limited and its interface was bumpy (why the blue & gree tags?), as well as a flawed use of Ajax that hobbled the back button because by fetching content without a page refresh.
Have you seen Findory?
http://findory.com
It learns from the articles you read, searches thousands of feeds for you, and builds you a personalized front page of news. You can just click on what you want to read, and ignore the fluff.
Greg Linden, Founder & CEO, Findory.com
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