In looking at various RSS aggregation services and products, I have yet to find one that would automatically learn what news I like and begin to filter down the content to that which has a higher probability of also being liked by myself.
The closest thing is in Google News where it shows you stories that you might like, however this does not take in to consideration two things:
- Incoming RSS feeds that you may want it to consider.
- Any respect for the frequency that you may access such a list.
Google Reader does allow you to add additional RSS feeds, however it still works like a traditional news reader. Continue to add more RSS feeds daily, and it will just get more bloated with feeds until you have to at some point go back and manually delete feeds no longer of interest.
In addition, many of these aggregators will have no respect to the frequency that you view them. If you view your news only once a week and only click a few articles, then it should only show you a few articles from the week. On the other hand, if you view a new article a day, then perhaps it should list one or two new articles each day.
An ideal RSS aggregation service would be one where you could add as many RSS feeds to ’seed’ the system, and never again have to manage a list of said feeds. In addition, the service would use the seeds of RSS feeds from others to also find interesting content. Then, it would aggregate this content and prioritize content you would be most likely interested in based on your past viewing trends. In addition, the service would keep track of the frequency in which you use the service and how many articles you would view on each visit, to tailer the list of content each time you visited.
Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to Monterey Bay Aquarium.
There’s this one section of the aquarium where you go to see the sea animals in the deeper parts of the waters. As you approach a large, oval shaped room, you begin to see thousands of small fish swimming around above you. Upon entering the room, you have a 360° panorama of fish swimming counter-clockwise around the upper rim of this room. The view was spectacular.
Update (2007/07/13): Added a link to use template in new spreadsheet.
In my last year at San Jose State University I have on multiple occasions needed to schedule meetings with multiple peers, both for class related and extra-curricular activities. Having gotten fed up with trying to schedule and reschedule meetings and not ready to deploy the ripoki system, I used Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create a solution.
You can use this as a template for a new speadsheet if you want: Meeting Schedule Template. You’ll need a Google Account (Gmail or not) to do this. Thanks to Jonathan Rochelle in the comments for the reminder tip.
Each row represents an hour of the day and each column represents a member of the group. Each member colors in their colum as to when they’re free or busy, and I can then look across and find a time when it’s all green to schedule a meeting. If someone changes their schedule I can simply go back and refind another time when everyone’s available.
While developing the idea, I first tried going horizontally, before transposing the schedule to a vertical implementation. The problem with going horizontally was primarilly a user experiance one - it’s easier to scroll vertically than horizontally in most web browsers. In addition, I found it easier to create new rows than to create new columns at the time.
This is just one of the many useful solutions I’ve implented with Google Spreadsheets. Other uses included a group to-do list, where members checked off cells to indicate they completed tasks.
I’ve yet to explore the Google Spreadsheets API, but I’ve heard there are additional things that can be done there.
