NetNewsWire and FeedDemond (from NewsGator) recently released their RSS reader as freeware so that they could get more information on user interaction: Attention. Here is what they’ve been collecting for a while:
Brent Simmons told me that almost every interaction you make in respect to your subscriptions and individual news items can be factored. Flagging, taking clippings, deleting and adding subscriptions, clicks, number of items read, and more can be recorded and used to make you a more productive news consumer.
Here’s why we’ll benefit:
With attention data, your news reader can build a profile of the items you most commonly read, make correlations, and only show you those items that are most likely to interest you, leaving the “uninteresting” items to float to the bottom.
This all might seem trivial if you just subscribe to 10 or less feeds, but once you have 80+ it’s starts to get really challenging. The other cool thing is that they will be taking a TechMeme-like approach to displaying relevant news articles. This is really important because of the conversational nature of the blogosphere. Different blogs tend to repeat the same news several times over (just like this article here). Getting the original and most revenant saves a bunch of time and stress (reduced number of unread articles….my current count 3,239)
TechMeme is an automated process that tracks and displays the most popular news stories at any given time. In addition, TechMeme shows all coverage and sites who link to the “original” or most popular versions.
Hopefully when the new version ships I’ll spend less time reading through my RSS reader and get some time to finish my site theme (or just find more sites to subscribe to…lol).
(Via Ars Technica.)
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