Blogsurfr.com : get recommended blog content, in a decentralized way
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$30,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$50,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
3 monthsA lot of evidence shows that the main way for surfers to actually discover new blogs is by following related links on the blog themselves. Blogsurfr.com introduces the concept of automatic building of blogrolls, going as far as the post-to-post relations...
To explain this project in a few sentences, we could say that what I envision is a mix between Digg and Stumble Upon for the blog world.
The idea here is to create a central platform that would manage the "tagging", "classifying", "voting" and most of all "recommanding" for all the content that would be automatically inserted in the site by the blog authors.
By using a "widget" that blog owners would insert on their sites and a toolbar that any user could insert in their browser, visitors could have access to "related content" as well as "recommended content", no matter where they are on the web.
The "related content" is based on the tagging of the current post the visitor is reading. The "main site" would allow blog owners to tag their own content, and would also try to tag it properly using semantic technology. That way, when a readers get to a text about "mac book", the related content would pull out all related content, going from mac book, to apple news.
Users would also be able to vote directly from the original article by using the widget, and for each vote the site would record all the meta data, to always give more advanced recommandations.
So no matter, where the reader is, he would always have access to his recommended/related content blog roll!
1 commentHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Geo-aware recommended content
The blogsurfr.com site allows to pass recommended content to any user, anywhere as long as he's a member of the site, so the site can then record the recommandations.
The idea of the geo-aware recommandations would be to let the user of the site insert his "city/neibourhood" so that then the site can recommend content based on his location in two ways :
1) On the blogsurfr.com widget we would show recommandations based on the meta data of voted content and also on the "Users like you";
2) Another section of the recommended content widget section would be to pass geo-aware recommended content. That means that we could pass content authored by neighboors of the user, that talk about that neighboorhood and city, and finally content voted on by neighboors of the user.
Once that geo-aware content is passed to the user, he then can filter is by thematics, so for example he could see all the "politics" posts that the neighboors of the user voted on, that would be a good way to see what the people sharing the same environnement as the user are interested in and what they are blogging about. All that automatically.
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
Mobile content recommandations no matter where the user is
Blog authors would "register" on blogsurfr.com so that their content would automatically be agreggated (in part) and tagged (using OpenCalais). Once registered to the site, authors would then install a "widget" on the sidebar of their blogs. That widget would be the main "tool" of Blogsurfr.com and the main innovation as well.
All the information and recommandations will be passed directly to the readers by the widget, no matter on which blog the readers are, as long as the original blog is subscribed to the service. Otherwise the users can still install a toolbar to access their recommended content from anywhere.
Once that widget is installed on a blog owner site it has many functionnalities :
1) Identify the user as the blog author, thus enabling such features as revenue sharing;
2) Pass related content on a "per post" basis directly on the original blog post;
3) Allow visitors to vote on the content, directly from the original source. For each vote the system would record the meta data of a post (source, tags, and user that voted for that content as well) to always give better content recommendations;
4) Allow blog author and readers to directly tag his content directly from the original blog post;
5) Allow visitors to login to the central platform directly from the original blog;
6) Once logged in, allow users to access recommended content from any site that has the widget installed. Login would be persistent, meaning that no matter on which site the visitor he can have access to recommended content;
6a) Recommended content would be the following :
1- Recommended content by the current blog author
2- Network wide recommended content
3- Geo-aware recommended content (rec. content by neighboors)
7) Related content would be the following :
1- Related content by tags (fresh content, top quality)
2- Related blogs that have the same interested, based on tags used.
So as you can see, this project is all about the deentralized web, meaning that the power of the platform would be available not only on the site itself but all around the web on all the member blogs.
That is our innovation : automatic tagging (semantic organizing), vote handling (vote from anywhere to enhance the quality of recommandations) and content recommanding: anytime, anywhere, for anyone.
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
This question has not yet been answered.
