It's Rishi

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…

The goal of any news delivery medium is to provide maximum signal-to-noise ratio to its target audience. “Signal” is the set of news items that is of interest to a person. “Noise” is everything else. The reality is that an infinitesimally small percentage of news is interesting to any given person. And that percentage is shrinking every day because more news is being created on a daily basis: more frequently are more people documenting more people who are doing more newsworthy stuff every day.

In order to keep SNR high, news mediums need to focus on the news interests of their audiences more intensely than ever before. However, trying to create a single focus for a group of individuals, each of whose interests differ somewhat, is not a long-term solution. Sites like PerezHilton.com, a leading Hollywood gossip blog, and TechMeme, a leading (especially here in the SV) tech news aggregator, provide a certain segment of the news to an audience specifically interested in that segment. However, over time, the amount of news created in the news segment grows and the the segment bulges. The news publisher either must choose to further narrow their segment, which will alienate some of their existing audience, or publish a higher volume of news, which ultimately lowers the SNR to any given audience member. Either of these options is not a good choice.

Long-term, the only news deliver medium which is viable is the roll-your-own news concept. Geeks here this and start throwing out terms like RSS and OPML but the bottom line is that you don’t have to know technology in order to determine whether a piece of news is interesting to you. Over the past months, I’ve found myself going to news sites, including TechMeme, less and instead refreshing Google Reader more. I’ve added many feeds and the news that arrives is astonishingly interesting to me. Most importantly, my Reader is astonishingly uninteresting to most other people. This kind of relevance is ultimately impossible to achieve by any news publisher that tries to appeal to more than a handful of people.

I don’t want you to conclude from this that I think the penultimate solution is the RSS Reader. The concept of explicitly adding feeds to a reader is just not going to fly with mainstream folks. So what is the perfect news medium that allows you to roll your own news but doesn’t require any tech savvy? Attempts have been made (NewsVine, etc..) but I think we have yet to see the killer news app.

I came across a (relatively) new torrent aggregator for TV shows called tvRSS.net. It’s pretty awesome – much better than TVTorrent.info which I used to use but one day ceased to exist a few months ago. tvRSS.net has torrent listings for just about every popular show on TV right now and seems to stay very up to date. Torrent listings appear just a few hours after the show airs. You will notice that tvRSS doesn’t really “aggregate” tv-show torrents so much as just organizes torrents that are listed on mininova, a popular torrent search engine. Even though, it’s possible that there may be more torrents out there that aren’t on mininova, I’m guessing it’s pretty rare.

It looks like Brian/alienvenom, the creator of tvRSS.net, is really trying to build a best of breed TV show torrent destination – adding such simple, but novel, functionality like parsing torrent names so that they can be searched more effectively and removing torrents that are of the same show episode (but released by different groups). I’m definltey looking forward to what else he has in the works for the site.

Oh, if you are going to download torrents, make sure you install and run PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian blocks connections to peers from IP addresses which are known to be up to no good. An example of why you should run this is there have been many reports of people receiving threatening letters in the mail from HBO after downloading torrents of various HBO shows like The Sopranos and Entourage. PeerGuardian works off of a block list so it’s certainly not foolproof but it’d be stupid not to use it.

I heard on TechCrunch that Attensa for Outlook came out of Beta. However it’s no longer free and thus is no longer my RSS reader. I really hate to sound like a stingy bastard and I certainly don’t mean any ill will towards Attensa, but I just can’t see myself spending money for an RSS reader when there are plenty of free readers available and since Microsoft has already announced that the next version of Outlook will have RSS reader functionality built-in.

It’s kind of a shame because except for a couple weird memory-hogging and stalling issues, I have generally enjoyed using Attensa for Outlook since December when I first discovered it. Luckily, Attensa does allow me to export my subscriptions to an OPML file. Now the question is, to which free RSS reader will I import this into. I think I’ll check out Attensa Online, their free web-based reader which just launched.

Anyone else using a RSS reader they think stands out from the rest?