Rojo's Charge

Rojo has announced a nice relevance feature that helps you sort through your feeds (and everyone else's).  Through a mixture of tagging and voting, relevance bubbles up through the crowd.  Or it is supposed to at any rate.  I'm going to dive further into this during this afternoon and see how far I can push the technology.

There's an undertone to the comments on Arrington's description of this service.  People are honestly saddened that Bloglines didn't do this already.  That's rare in the hypeconomy.  People don't bemoan the loss of a tool any more because new ones are free and easy to enable.  AskJeeves should understand that they have a real and rare fan base and they're going to lose it.

Rojo's Hyperbole:

Rojo Relevance - Feed Reading 2.0
Rojo Relevance Too much stuff to read? Here's our way of helping you sip from the fire hose: sort stories by relevance (instead of by date). Relevance is determined by such factors as how much a story is being read, tagged, and mojo'd by other users and we use that information to bring the stories you can't miss to the front page. Click the "Sort Stories by RELEVANCE" link in the top left of your screen and your stories will be sorted instantly.

I'm enjoying the evolution of these tools.  I'm enjoying the enthusiasm for them ... except for the guy on Techcrunch (arrington link above) that said

# Comment by Same Donaldson — March 17, 2006 @ 12:15 am

This stuff is really getting old now.

What "stuff" he's referring to remains a question.  But this is the same Web 2.0 criticism.  Some people really seem to dislike incremental improvement in web based applications.  Rojo has come up with a nice incremental improvement to RSS reading and relevance and should be applauded for it.  Now, as users, it's our job to be enchanted with it for a week or so and then start wondering "Why didn't they do X?"

Then, someone, will do X.

Photo: Clara Natoli

Technorati Tags: rojo, bloglines, tagging, folksonomy, relevance, attentioneconomy

Comments

[Martin Danner]

This relevance factor seems like it has a snowball effect; i.e., an item with a high relevance rating get more exposure, which gives it an even higher relevance rating, which gives it more exposure, and so on. So, does the cause the really great stuff to float to the top, or does it become another exercise in gaming metrics, like google's page count?

[Jim Benson]

It is hard to imagine a conversation ranking system that isn't susceptible to gaming. I fully agree, though. Every system that is out there is open to gaming and easy to exploit.