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Rojo Gets Relevant
by Michael Arrington on March 16, 2006

rojologo.jpg'class=Rojo added a great new relevance feature tonight, and the result is a sort of personalized digg.

You can now view your feeds by date or relevance, with relevance being determined according to other users votes (think diggs), total reads and total user tags. The result - a nice way to sort through your daily feeds to find the most popular posts.

Rojo has also added a number of categories - breaking news, entertainment, technology, etc., with the included feeds editorially picked and the ranking by relevance and freshness. This is a good way to find popular posts from sources that are not included in your feed list.

Rojo is ahead of the pack again in terms of features, and relevance is a hot topic right now. The question is whether this is going to be enough to drive user adoption in the extremely crowded feed reader space. Richard asks a different question: “I wonder if this will wake Bloglines out of their slumber?”

Comments rss icon

  • Most interesting is how, in some ways this is similar to former Rojo founder Kevin Burton’s TailRank. Granted, Tailrank “diggs” something when it’s linked by another site, but if they make that change, Rojo would seem to beat TailRank.

    (I don’t know any details, but both sites seem to have a lot of similarities in design and technology…)

  • This stuff is really getting old now.

  • I have been using Rojo for quite a while now and indeed it keeps on getting better:) I used to read my feeds on Bloglines but I prefer the way Rojo allows me to tag things.

  • Son of a…

    I was totally working on something like this. Mine is more advanced though, so I guess I can continue. I knew someone would beat me to it.

  • Excellent, Rojo is getting better & better and with some bloglines features, it will clearly whip Bloglines’s butt unless Bloglines really wakes up from it’s deep slumber. I’ve tried both but personally it’s Bloglines for me. Though I’ve always been searching for something better. http://chronotron.wordpress.co.....bloglines/

    @Mike:
    1) Please increase the width of your comment form
    2) Can you please do a full-time review of the top 5 web-based readers - Bloglines, Rojo, Newsgator, and 2 others and highlight their best features, shortcomings, comparing their functanality, etc. It’s been long.

    This Web-based RSS Race better get hot with a new-entry which provides the best of everything. I’m ready to jump. Is there any Web 2.0 coder reading this.

    Cheers
    ~ CC

  • Hmm. It sounds great for folks interested in keeping up with the most interesting articles, but maybe not for me. As a blogger, I try to avoid (though it is near impossible) blogging about the same things everyone else does. So this would push stories up the chain that everyone is already talking about, which, for me, wouldn’t be what I need. Still, it’s a neat feature, and well done.

  • Im not so sure what is ‘new’ about this.. I’ve had a ‘by relevance’ link on my account for at least a month now. Trouble is, I’m not sure how ‘relevance’ is derived by Rojo. Can someone clarify this?

    I must confess, that I miss searchfox.com, which sort of watched what *I* paid attention to and ordered news based on that. After a few days it did a pretty good job of showing *me* what *I* wanted to see (and not what everyone else thought was interesting). That was progress, but sadly gone now.

  • Maybe I’m a bit dense but isn’t this the same as the Top Stories section at Digg (http://digg.com/topstories)?

  • Rich, if you miss SearchFox, you might try Findory.com.

  • rich campoamor, my post explains how the Relevance feature works.

  • http://reddit.com
    Reddit is somewhat similar, it has some help from Paul Graham.

    This is another cool startup that he has a hand in: http://inklingmarkets.com “Buy and sell shares in what you believe will happen. The highest priced stock is the crowd’s prediction.”

    And some cool cell phone / mobile phone (hey I’m English) Geo-Tagging site.
    http://flagr.com/

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