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?
currybetdotnet: Navigating newspapers: Part 1 – We are what we label
Thursday, 29 January 2009, 14:59
Martin Belam: "The names, language and labels that we use to describe things unwittingly tells people a lot about our attitudes and beliefs. The order in which we describe things helps communicate the relative importance and interest we place in them. So I thought it would be interesting to look across the UK newspaper website landscape and look at the way the papers sign-post their content to the user. In short, how do they label their navigation?"
Vincent Maher: Strategies for tagging large volumes of content
Saturday, 20 September 2008, 15:17
" During the redevelopment of the Mail & Guardian Online, I had several very interesting discussions with the editorial staff about the logic of tagging. … Based on this discussions, I have put together a list of several approaches to tagging and categorisation and my thoughts on the pros and cons of each.
Saturday, 14 June 2008, 14:41
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"The point of the Topic Pages is that they bring together content from all around bbc.co.uk. Obviously, many different systems produce all that content, and in general they don’t tend to share content very well…"
