Category Archives: personalisation

Nieman Journalism Lab: NPR’s Infinite Player: It’s like a public radio station that only plays the kinds of pieces you like, forever

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"This week, NPR unveiled Infinite Player, a web app that mimics the simplicity of radio, but with a personalized twist. Press play to hear the latest NPR newscast, followed by a never-ending playlist of random feature stories. It doesn’t stop till you turn it off ... Michael Yoch, NPR’s director of product development ... said he took a cue from personalization products like Zite, Flipboard, and YouTube’s LeanBack..."

Bloomberg Blog: Introducing Bloomberg Queue

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"The way this new feature works is simple. You see a story you want to read, but you don't have time right then. Add it to your queue (using the + sign), and read it later. Or, if you've read a story and want to save it, you can do that too and "star" it, or search within your queue for it."

We'll also suggest stories you might find interesting based on what you've already added to your queue.

Monday Note: Read, Share and Destroy

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Frédéric Filloux: "In recent months, we’ve seen a flurry of innovative tools for reading and sharing contents. Or, even better, for basing one’s readings on other people’s shared contents. In Web 2.5 parlance, this is called Social Reading. ... All of theses apps start with the same raw material. They collect and rearrange RSS feeds, they crawl Twitter or Facebook streams. Unfortunately, from a news publisher vantage point, all these aggregating apps kill value by removing ads from the articles they assemble for our reading pleasure."

Retail Week: Retail Bytes: Asos to make Amazon-style personal recommendation

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"Asos.com has become the latest retailer to make personalised recommendations for customers. Instead of showing the same suggested products to every person, the fashion etailer will use a customer’s previous buying history, and the similar purchases of others, to generate more targeted suggestions for new purchases."

Online Journalism Blog: Bella Hurrell on data journalism and the BBC News Specials Team

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"Data is only useful if it is personal – I want to find out about schools in my area, restaurants near me and so on – or when it reveals something remarkable. The duck pond debacle from MPs expenses data or the Iraq civilian death records kept by the US revealed by Wikileaks’ release of the Iraq war documents are both examples of individual stories from big tranches of data that really resonated."

New Media Age: Power is shifting in who chooses the news

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Michael Nutley: "The role of editors has been vital to the media success stories of recent years, where niche audiences have proved willing to pay for products closely tailored to their interests. ... We may be approaching a tipping point, however, driven by the rise of social media. There are a raft of startups using people’s social networks to create personalised news feeds ... The problem with the Daily Me approach to filtering is that it only gives you information about things you tell it you’re interested in. The serendipity of newspapers — the way you find yourself reading about an issue or a sector you didn’t know you were interested in — is lost. But by tapping into the interests of your social graph, you tap into all their interests and serendipity is restored."

Nieman Journalism Lab: Who is The Daily trying to reach? What problem is it trying to solve?

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"While News Corp. may be home to properties like The Wall Street Journal, the design language of The Daily is surprisingly tabloid: big headlines, big pictures, short stories, and a populist feel. The sections — with “Gossip” given a high second billing to news — seem much more New York Post than WSJ. Is that the right choice for iPads, which (at least at the moment) disproportionately attract a richer, more content-sensitive audience than something like the Post would? My gut instinct was that The Daily would aim more at a high-end audience than it seems to be."

Nieman Journalism Lab: “You are what you read”: NYT CTO Marc Frons on the paper’s new article recommendation engine

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Marc Frons on the New York Times' new recommendation page: "While a lot of the rec engines out there are framed around content that users have read previously, “what we try to do is look at people’s patterns, and how they move around the site, and what sorts of different things they might look at,” Frons notes. The engine tries to accommodate the complex dynamics of usage and movement as people navigate a through a news experience. "

ReadWriteWeb: How Media Will Relate to Facebook in the Future

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"[The Independent] announced last night that it now offers granular subscriptions by Facebook. Instead of just "Liking" the entire site and getting all its articles pushed to your Facebook newsfeed, you can now limit your Like to particular authors and some topics on the site. I just subscribed to trailblazing journalist Robert Fisk's Independent articles on Facebook. This might seem like a small change - but it's not. Media sites all over the web are sure to implement this kind of feature soon."