Some of Robert’s ideas we’ve implemented already, others we haven’t yet. As always, the easiest thing for us would be to develop this “curation thing” step-by-step — following the seven ‘needs’ he described in his post.

For us management of news always has been and most likely will be a smooth combination of algorithms and user behaviour. Today, 5 days after our first discussion, we’ve launched the first step: the Social Media Newsroom SMN. Being a part of the well known Weltspion, the SMN shows those news stories people care about most — on the Internets outside of YiGG (as you will see, we show stories in English and German language).

With 2 clicks users can tweet these stories or add them to YiGG Neueste Nachrichten and to their accounts, respectively. This part of the SMN is the algorithmic one. 

Another part of the SMN is the user generated one: by adding a “tip @yigg” to any tweet, users can send news URLs to YiGG. If those URLs belong to known and trusted sources, stories will be added to Neueste Nachrichten, automatically. If those domains are unkown, they appear as user recommendations in the SMN and can be aded manually. The YiGG team will check those sources and add them to the pool of trusted URLs. By tipping YiGG, users can influence the stream of news shown on YiGG!

Next steps will focus on the story detail page. Now the detail page concentrates on a story — we’ll allow more users to edit a story detail page to turn it more into a topic detail page. This means we’ll modify our story concept from “user centric” (i.e. the user owns the story) to “story or topic centric” (all users can curate and enrich stories).

As always we love to read your feedback!

The post News Curation in the Social Media Newsroom on YiGG appeared first on MICHAEL REUTER.

Many of us complain about information overkill these days. Others — one of them is me — reply with: There’s no information overload, there’s just selection failure.

Anyway — those of us in the news business are trying to find ways to ease the daily consumption of news for the user by ranking, weighing, recommending etc. At YiGG we have launched the project ‘worldspy’ with that goal exactly: we try to ‘detect’ relevance of news we find in the world wide web and display those relevant stories to our users who, adding their individual tastes (recommendations, comments, etc.), again curate those stories.

Bottom line: our approach is a combined effort of both, algorithm and user generated relevance. First two day’s results are promising — we’re really looking forward comparing the results with the user generated only alternative we had before!

The post Finding Relevant News appeared first on MICHAEL REUTER.