News Aggregator

Goal

The primary goal of this app is to encourage users to enter reviews and ratings. Our inspiration are social news aggregators such as reddit which attract participants to submit news stories (reviews) and evaluate, aka vote on, the stories and discussion.

We want to add an additional action in which users rate the impact in a particular interest of the subject of the news story. For example, a news article on reindeer magic would allow users to rate the sustainability of Santa, Sons and Elf.

Why? Because people like reading, sharing and discussing news, and system that make use of submission and user evaluations seem to work well. It's not too onerous for users to provide additional ratings in areas that interest them, especially for the utility it will provide outside of the news site (how's that for karma?).

Variations on a Theme

In addition to the standard news aggregator discussion view, we want to provide as-you-surf tools for submitting reviews and rating impacts. These tools might take the form of:

• Browser extension with controls in right-click menu and Tools drop-down
• Toolbar at top of web page (web page is in iframe)

The tools might support:

• Highlighting of text and then submission as review
• Rating of review being submitted
• Automatic extraction of company and interest for the review
• Automatic matching of page content to existing review or discussion

Comments and Questions

• A nice advantage of a news-aggregator approach for BILUMI is that it means visiting the site always offers something new and interesting to read. Instead of the site being task-oriented (perhaps even guilt-inducing, as it implicitly asks "Have you written a review yet?"), it becomes more enjoyable and informative, where even a five-minute visit is likely to reward the user.

• Would BILUMI need to scrape news feeds to get going, or could it get off the ground with users just posting links? The latter would already be rated and deemed worthy of attention, so that's a plus; the question is whether there is a critical mass of users to launch this effort. Scraping a feed would provide a source of reading material right away, but unless it gets enough rating activity, it might suffer from having too many irrelevant or uninteresting articles - plus it's probably more work to implement! > I'd much rather we work to build a community who provides news, since user-submissions work so well for other sites. On the other hand, bootstrapping can help get the ball rolling, and it's not clear to me how much we're interested in news/entertainment versus research, which might be harder and less fun to find and attract a smaller submission community. ~lucy

• Should company ratings be instead of interestingness ratings, or in addition? Interestingness is really valuable as a basic ranking tool, and it would be essential data for building truly collaborative filtering based on clustering techniques. The action a user could take on a article would be both scoring its interestingness (potentially just with an upvote, no downvotes) and rating any companies mentioned in the article. The rating mechanism on an article should account for the possibility that one article may inspire ratings on more than one dimension for possibly more than one company. > I up-vote for ratings in addition to interestingness ~lucy

• Note that identifying the companies mentioned in an article in a uniform way can be a little tricky and a source of dirty data. One user might input "P&G" while another types "Procter and Gamble." Autocomplete against a directory would make a difference there, but that's something for a later day. In the beginning, data can be cleaned manually.

• How should articles be classified or tagged? Is there a Labor Relations sub-reddit or a Chocolate sub-reddit, or both? Many people are interested in particular product sectors. If a sub-reddit exists as a particular tag that appears on articles, then an article can appear in multiple sub-reddits with ease. > Unclear. Currently, Labor Relations is an interest, which has a hierarchical relationship with itself and a many-to-one relationship with reviews. A single review can have different ratings per interest, so we tend to think of reviews as being filed in one place but with links to related reviews. > On the other hand, Chocolate is a tag. Anything can be tagged. Our UI currently supports tagging nodes, eg companies and products, but it could support tagging of reviews and interests.