The RSS Clutter

There's a fair amount of news out there. I use Google Reader to capture it all; however, it still can't make sense of the noise.

News and events are viral; they disseminate quickly throughout the internet. Take for example what happened today. Google accidentally labeled the whole internet as malware. Below every search result there was a nice warning: "This site may harm your computer." Even Google.com was labeled harmful. Interesting mistake.

While the dust settled and Google fixed the glitch, everyone blogged about it. Everyone. No everyone. I looked at Google News and there are 407 articles from 89 sources about the story.

As I went through my Google Reader articles for the day I heard about it at least 5 times. Makes sense, I follow tech blogs. But we can do better. A nice feature for Google Reader would be analyzing the content of my unread items and showing the unread articles by story. A way for it to say, "this article about Google malware is similar to these four; look at all of them now." Or one step further, look at your unread item by category: iPhone, Kindle, Google, etc...

This is hard; language is complcated. The fortunate part is that we know much more about the articles then what they say. We know when they were published, what sites and press releases they link to, the main subject (the tags), and the source. These content clues along with learning from the users - allowing them to teach the computer and say "Yes they're similar." or "No they're not" - you could build a very good content grouping engine.

Google News does it on a larger scale with the "All news and articles" link below each result. Let's try and leverage that for Google Reader.

Twitter and Breaking News Search

TweetNews:

This is an old hat by now in the blogosphere, but using Yahoo! BOSS and Twitter an yahoo engineer was able to make an excellent breaking news search engine. The tweets on Twitter measure freshness and the Yahoo! BOSS leverages the relevant search results and articles, so what you get are articles about what people are talking about now. On his blog you can download the source and play around with it. Or try it out at TweetNews.

Google News RSS:

I spent sometime fiddling with GoogleNews to put together a decent search about bicycles. Then I was able to grab a RSS feed for the search (click the RSS link on the left side of the screen). Now get updates on bicycle news from across the country in my google reader. One disappointment was that I wasn't able to make it prioritize certain sites like WashCycle or Streetsblog, but maybe I should make a Yahoo! BOSS mashup for that.