DISQUS

Steve Evans · 1 month ago

Interesting approach. I've been trying to figure out how I want to tackle this myself. What if the reader kept track of some metrics about the feeds/items as you're reading through them? Granted Google Reader now has a "Sort by 'Magic'" option that I'm guessing does this too, but they haven't put out any details on it. I was thinking about a reader that tracked the items you actually clicked into, how much time you spent looking over the item, how much content is in the item, did you click through to the actual article, etc. Then over time it starts filtering out the content that you normally dismiss. That way you don't have to do anything extra when reading through your feeds that you normally do, but it will start giving you the quality content you're after. Is that something like what you were originally thinking?

Andrew Shell · 1 month ago

Indeed. Actually a friend of mine created a website http://philtro.com/ which did some of this but eventually killed the RSS filtering because most people using his site were using it to filter twitter.

One of the issues (I've thought about this a bit) is some blogs pass in the full text of an article and others just a link or a snippet. There would need to be some logic to determine if you didn't spend much time on a post because it was a snippet, because it was a short post or because you didn't find it interesting. Also it wouldn't know if you were reading a post for a while or if you were checking your feeds then got distracted talking to a coworker. You would really need some sort of way to manually rank it.