Feedzero Update - Improved RSS Ingestion!
The first update in a while! There’s a few minor backend changes but the biggest news is significant improvements to the system that reads our RSS feeds, hopefully permanently correcting the issue that we had when feeds would seemingly either not update, or update many days later.
This should mean that almost as soon as your favourite sites have updated their RSS feed, the new items will appear in your RSS feed.
We’re recommencing work on Feedzero after around 4 months of quietness (due to commitments on some other projects) and have a bunch of exciting plans, including improvements for new users, a new view mode, the ability to mark items as read (!!) and a few more bells and whistles. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.
Tags: changelog
October 17th, 2008 at 12:34 am
Great! I only started looking today for bayasian trainable RSS readers, and was happy to find feedzero (this still appears to be quite a novel idea for RSS aggregation websites).
In my case I use (or intend to) feedzero to filter through the new scientific literature that comes out in my field. As that is about 50 papers / abstracts per day, having a somewhat brainy RSS reader that narrows that down is a blessing. Looking forward to the improvements :).
requests thus far:
* some kind of settings dialog, where i can alter my settings for hiding / showing things I marked as disliked, things I probably dislike, things I marked as liked etc.
* some kind of bookmarking system so that I can store certain entries for later browsing.
* for fun: some (wordle?) representation of what your bayesian filter has learned so far.
suggestion for the algorithm:
I am not too familiar with spam trainers, but it might be worthwhile to let a user-settable percentage of the feeds slip through without being weighted. In this way you might give people that have overtrained their filter into not presenting anything with a few particular keywords into adding some nuances.
October 17th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Hey, thanks for the positive comments!
Re: your requests:
1) We’re experimenting with a few options here I believe.
2) Bookmarking - definitely something I want to see. Maybe something similar to Google Reader’s star system would do?
3) That is a cool idea; maybe some sort of ‘tag cloud’ kind of thing that shows the weightings of terms you like/don’t like.
Re: algorithm: it seems to work pretty well so far and afaik we don’t have anyone that is not getting any items in their filter. The key thing for the algorithm appears to be maintaining a good balance between items you’ve trained as ‘good’ and items you’ve trained as ‘bad’. One of the things on our TODO is some sort of visual indicator to help you get this balance right.