People Who Read This Article Also Read… by Greg Linden of Microsoft Live Labs (and formerly of Findory.com) is a comprehensive review of the uses of recommendation systems on the Web and their implementations. Recommendation systems is a topic that I love and Greg’s descriptions of systems such as that of Google News was very educational.

I’m a huge proponent of the idea that the newspaper, with it’s one-size-fits-all news, is dead. I discussed this in my prior post, Ok, I admit it one size fits all news will die. In this prior post, I discussed the fact that I consume most of my news today using my RSS reader. I’ve added several news feeds, from many topic areas, that I respect and enjoy to my reader and I check it every few hours. I have found that over the past couple years, my awareness of current events in topic areas that I am interested in has risen considerably.

However, there are limitations to the RSS reader. “Rolling” your own news feed takes time to create and maintain. I don’t expect that many will do this. More importantly, though, the scope of the news that is available to me is bounded by the content of those news feeds which I have explicitly included. I don’t doubt that every day I miss news stories that would be of high interest to me because they originate from news sources that I am not following. A news application that can show me news from both my explicitly chosen news sources as well as news stories that come by leveraging recommendation technologies (e.g. “Story X is similar to news stories which Rishi typically reads” and “Story X is being read by many people who have similar news tastes to Rishi”) will be the ultimate solution for me. What’s exciting is that I expect such a news application to be available very soon…