October 14, 2004, 9.00pm • 10 comments » • 852 Views

News that learns to love

An interesting conversation started on Poynter’s Online-News discussion list about intelligent customisation of news.

We’re not talking about the kind of self-assembly categories boasted by My Yahoo!, which lets uses create a Daily Me of sorts by selecting only the categories of stories they want to read and the number of stories from each.

No; inspired by the way Tivo learns your TV programming preferences by analysing watch you watch, correspondents were wondering whether any publishers are using similar techniques for online news.

Which reminded me of Findory.

Findory is a personalised online “newspaper” that learns to customise the news stories you are shown by watching the types of stories you read. Its About page is an interesting read:-

Findory News shows you articles that you want to see. It adapts to your reading habits and emphasizes news articles from around the world that are most likely to be interesting to you. By paying attention to the news you’ve read recently, Findory.com finds the news articles you don’t want to miss.

All of which should, in theory, give you a higher definition of news customisation than merely personising the categories you are interested in. It’s a snazzy glimpse at what could be.

Findory still carries several sections for news that lives within specific categories. But you can also search the news, a la Google News, and you can even have your personalised stories delivered by email and RSS feed. Plus, Findory remembers the articles you’ve read, so you can always go back and read that interesting story, without bookmarking it.

So far, I have read five stories via the site - three on last night’s disappointing Welsh international soccer game, one on the seizing of Indymedia’s servers and one on Napster targeting the youth market with pre-pay cards (so, three sport, two tech). As a result, Findory is showing me stories about soccer, technology, general world news and US sports. Not enough on Welsh soccer, maybe, from my limited reading so far, but Findory is definitely on its way to knowing me. A separate site section also does all the same stuff from weblogs.