I’m working on a little project with Sun-Times Media, owner of the Straight Dope. We’re trying to establish whether the smartest, hippest people on the planet (i.e., the Teeming Millions) can effectively crowd-filter the most interesting content on the Internet. If you’re interested in participating in this experiment, here are the details:
Many people each day collect URLs for interesting content from Twitter feeds and such, and save it for later reading.
A popular free app for this purpose is Pocket (www.getpocket.com). Whenever you see an online item you want to peruse later, you click on the Pocket icon and Pocket saves a copy for you.
Pocket lets you share your reading list with others, such as, for example, us. (They have an API that makes this possible.) We want to collect Pocket reading lists from the Teeming Millions, load them into a database, and see what content our users collectively consider the most interesting each day.
Our hypothesis is that you’ll do a much better job of sieving the Internet than if we simply tapped into the Twitter firehose. If so, we may incorporate this capability into a news app we’re developing.
Eventually we’d like to customize the news feed to the individual, but first we’d like to customize it geographically. Since our target market is Chicago, we’re particularly interested in seeing the extent to which the reading lists of Chicagoans differ from those of the average SDMB user. So:
If you’re a Pocket user, OR if you use some similar app and would be willing to try Pocket, AND you’re game to participate in our experiment, meaning you’d be willing to share your reading list with us, please email me at edzotti at gmail dot com. You can find out more about Pocket at www.getpocket.com. (FYI, we have no relationship with Pocket other than coding to their API.)
In your email, please indicate:
your name (optional)
your SDMB user name
your location.
It’s NOT necessary that participants live in the Chicago area. However, if you do, we urge that you participate, so that we have an adequate sample of local vs. non-local input.
The results of this experiment are for internal use, but I’m happy to let you know what we find out. If the experiment works and we develop a news app incorporating this feature, we’ll make it available to all for free.
No, all are welcome to participate. All we ask is that you tell us where you are. Those living in other dimensions who are able to provide next Friday’s Powerball numbers are especially urged to sign up.
Shouldn’t this be in IMHO or MPSIMS or something? Isn’t really ATMB.
ETA: I mean, in terms of response. More people hang out there. Apologies if it also is there, hadn’t looked before posting
Do we have assurances of anonymity? Meaning, “Now that we have your username, RL name, location and email we agree not to publish such information or sell it or give it away to a third party. We will aggregate information from many people, but we will not share names or emails with third parties.”
I don’t follow twitter, and I don’t have a smartphone or iPad or the like, so i can’t be a source of information. I’d be interested in seeing the lists, but from the above, it sounds like that won’t be available at least at first. If/when it does become available, will people on regular computers also be able to access the content lists? Or only people with an app?
A suggestion to consider (maybe not for the initial version, if it would slow it down getting it out the door): Allow users to “tag” the content with the appropriate SDMB forum. Top GQ content would be completely different from top Game Room content, for example. If it’s all lumped together, it won’t be as useful to me, and probably for others as well.
Assuming we get that far, we’ll start with a mobile app, but it’ll eventually be available on the Web as well.
I’m not sure what you have in mind, but we definitely want to target content to users based on their interests. Asking participants in the current experiment to tell us their favorite SDMB forum(s) would be one way to do that - thanks for the idea. The app will be separate from the SDMB, and not all app users will be SDMB users, so we’d have to come up with an alternative method of categorization once we move beyond the research phase.
I’m not (yet) a Pocket user, but a look at their site seems to indicate that it is available as a Firefox/Chrome extension/bookmarklet, and as a Mac app.
As for categorizing bookmarks into SDMB forums, that wouldn’t always work, since they’re just random web links, not forum conversations.
No. I’m simply asking Pocket users to make their reading lists available. Sorting through Twitter feeds and such looking for interesting links entails some effort, but my assumption is that Pocket users do this anyway for their own purposes. If a non-Pocket user makes a reading list and from here on out decides to store that list on Pocket and make it available, that’s terrific and I’m grateful, but I don’t expect people to perform any work for this project they wouldn’t do otherwise.
I use Pocket in precisely the manner described in the OP…and I have no expectation that anything I do on the Internet is private in the first place, so I’m in…
I use Pocket, but so rarely that my input would hardly be worth it. Also, for some reason, the RSS reader I use lately on my phone is occasionally interpreting a swipe down as a long press which then saves the random article that happened to be under my finger into my Pocket account.
I could probably do some action re-assigning to in the RSS app to avoid this issue though.