Saturday, August 11, 2007

My own personal news site

Thoof is a very cool new site full of stories from around the web, that were submitted by users. Well, that sounds kind of familiar. It would be - if that were the whole story, but, it's not. Thoof has its own "personalization algorithm" that figures out what kind of stories that I would like to read about, based on my activity on the site! That is so cool - my own personalized news! See, if I like a story that I've read, I do nothing - just leave it alone. If I don't like a story or I'm just uninterested, after I've clicked through to the story, a new link appears under the title. That link says 'not interesting' and you just click on that and it drops the story off of your page and adds that into your algorithm. So then, I imagine, it won't show you stories of a similar nature. I think it is kind of like Digg meets Wikipedia. You have the listing of stories there, like Digg, but, you can also make changes to the listing, like Wikipedia. You can suggest changes to the introductions to the stories and their tags. And then other users vote on your changes. You are also able to submit the stories - all of the stories are submitted by users. And they have just added a ThoofRank badge that you can add to the bottom of any blog posts that you've submitted, to show the popularity of the post on Thoof. It will show a percentage relative to other Thoof stories. I am definitely loving this site and can see myself wasting spending a lot of time there. Oops! I already have!

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