Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS, is a must for digesting all of the information you want (and need) to keep track of in today’s world. It is like reading your morning paper on steroids where the information is personalized and collected for you. Interestingly, a German start-up is trying to bring this into the analog world. The true value in RSS is that you can absorb way more information by using a reader than going to individual websites.
Seem unrealistic? I can scan news updates from 104 different sites within 15 minutes, ignoring the ones that are not important and reading those that are. You could not even type in the 104 web addresses in that same time period. RSS is a must if you want to stay informed on the latest industry news or news of personal interest, but it is not perfect.
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The Problem
Although RSS readers allow you to pull together a lot of information from many different sources, the readers and underlying technology is not smart. If you happen to love breaking news and want to keep up with releases from CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Google News, then there are going to be many news articles that are duplicated. After all the major outlets tend to report on the same subject matter, so how could you get to the best information.
The Solution
- The first challenge is to figure out which articles are talking about the same subject. This would not necessarily need a complex algorithm but could be determined through keyword searches. Find the most used words in the article usually indicates the subject. Next, cross reference the most popular words across all articles. It might be useful to limit the search to a specific time window as most news outlets release information around the same time.
- Use analytics including page rank information to push the most viewed article to the top and tier the less popular articles. In effect, this is using crowd sourcing to the max as you are relying on the power of all internet users to deem what is worthy to read and what is not.
Put it in Overdrive
Why limit this information filtering to just RSS? Expand it to include status updates from Twitter and Facebook. In the end it is about a platform for delivering only the information that you want when you want it while minimizing the clutter. This has obviously been on Google’s mind lately from real time search to suggestive search announcements (maybe a long term goal of Google Wave too). It’s an open field perfect for a start-up to make a market.
