Finding Random Reading

Eric Hodel | Mon, 20 Aug 2007 03:13:43 GMT

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I’m really missing what reddit used to give me, which was things I liked to read that I didn’t know I wanted to read on the front page. Now reddit is full of dups and political stuff I don’t care about. It also has a recomendation feature never worked for me, I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the home page.

Google News solves the dup problem but has too much stuff I don’t care about. Sometimes it makes me laugh, but it still doesn’t tell me what to read, or even what I probably will like.

The recommendation service I love is Netflix’s, I’ve rated over 350 movies now and it is spookily good at picking movies I like. For example 11:14 has a silly-sounding plot summary:

Five seemingly random story lines intersect at precisely 11:14 p.m. in this innovative drama-thriller written and directed by newbie filmmaker Greg Marcks. Even though they’re strangers, Buzzy, Mark, Cheri, Jac and Eddie will become a part of one another’s lives—even if it kills them.

I forgot why I added it to my queue. When it arrived I thought it would be silly, but I really enjoyed it, and that wasn’t the first movie I’ve experienced this with. Also, it tells me to watch things like Afro Samurai and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that I would never hear about or know about otherwise.

What I really want is Netflix for for my random web reading. I don’t care about what’s popular, I care about what is well-written and interesting. Does this kind of thing exist yet?

Until then, I think I’m going to switch to clicking wikipedia’s Random article button when I get bored.

5 comments

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I agree. Although, at least Reddit still has stories. Digg’s front-page has become a picture gallery.

Jordan said about 2 hours later

So far Wikipedia is winning.

Eric Hodel said about 4 hours later

Have you tried StumbleUpon?

David said about 9 hours later

One of my friends had an idea where you could pick out some people that you thought were smart and interesting. Those people could select articles that they liked. And then you could see those articles.

Sort of like starring something in Google Reader and then having other people be able to see what you starred. Combining that concept with a netflix-like rating algorithm and that might solve your problem.

Ideally, you could ask the system for the top 100 articles that it thinks you would like best. Then, there’s a finite number of stuff for you to read that day (if you want).

Joe VAn Dyk said about 10 hours later

David: I don’t think stumbleupon is at all usable on Safari, and I can’t stand using Firefox for more than about 5 minutes.

Eric Hodel said about 24 hours later

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