News personalisation as it should be
Friday, 12 November 2010, 08:00
Online news was supposed to lead to “The Daily Me”, hyper-personalised publications where the homepage is magically tailored to each user’s interests. But with a handful of notable exceptions – particularly certain mobile sites – few news sites have implemented personalisation features in any significant way.
TheMediaBriefing, the new media news aggregator edited by my friend and former Press Gazette colleague Patrick Smith, is showing everyone else how simple it could be.
The site uses semantic tagging technology to (re-)categorise media news from dozens of sources. Each category created by this tagging process generates generates an index page, like this one for (my new employer) the Financial Times.
With one click, logged-in uses can chose to “follow” those categories that they are interested in. This generates a personalised homepage, called “My Tracker” that merges all the their “followed” categories.
The interface is familiar to anyone who has used Facebook’s Like buttons to add friends and topics to their news feed. It uses the existing category structure of the site, so it’s the sort of thing any news site could implement. It’s a surprise so few news sites do anything similar.
The only other similar feature I’m aware of is on The Sporting News, which allows users to follow individual categories on Facebook using Facebook Like buttons, and has claimed massive success in driving traffic from this. Are there any other examples out there?
Vimeo: Briefing Media
Friday, 24 September 2010, 14:27
Corporate video: "Meet Briefing Media, the company combining traditional journalism with the latest semantic technology to help you make better business decisions."
Rory Brown: The Michaelmas Itch – and a new beginning in business media
Thursday, 2 September 2010, 14:01
Rory Brown: "Over the past few months Neil and I have been discussing the opportunities to launch a series of niche B2B sites without the legacy issues that many traditional publishers face. … in summary we are looking to combine some very clever semantic technology with traditional niche publishing disciplines to create a series of websites. I’m delighted that Patrick Smith has also recently joined us as our first Editor. … The initial site aims to launch towards the end of September …"
Journalism.co.uk: New business news site to make use of semantic search tools
Wednesday, 25 August 2010, 15:01
"Two former business media managers [Neil Thackray and Rory Brown] have joined forces to create a business news site which will provide information and analysis using semantic technologies."
Neil Thackray’s Business Media Blog: A Future for Business Media
Monday, 23 August 2010, 11:22
"In the next few weeks we will be launching a new business media company trading as Briefing Media Ltd…. The co founders of Briefing Media are me and Rory Brown. … We are using an innovative semantic search algorithm to organise and navigate the content with each vertical site being supervised by an expert analyst who constantly updates and improves the taxonomy and the content. … You probably want to have a look at our first site – but you will have to be patient for a month or so. We expect to release our first vertical towards the end of September and have already identified six more to develop over the coming months."
