On Noise and YouTube

27 Sep

Posted by Andy Brudtkuhl under General, Web

Noise Busters picture from noise-busters.com With all the great things being produced because of new media technologies there is one caveat - noise. Noise is all the crap out there that gets in the way of the signal (the messages you are interested in).

Noise is a hard problem to solve because it is subjective. For instance, gossip news (celebrity, valleywag, etc) is pure noise to me and forces me to have to ignore things - which takes time. Yet, many people seek this *information* which I deem as noise.

That is why many of the best websites / communities out there recommend things to me based on behavior. Netflix knows if I will like a movie based on my 700+ ratings and lets me know that whenever I visit the website. Amazon does the same as it knows my shopping habits and what I am in the market for at a given time.

I want more of that. I want YouTube to tell me what videos to watch instead of me having to sift through hours of crap. And, I want Google Reader to bubble up what I want to read right away instead of forcing me to read stuff I don’t care about - like Searchfox used to do (RIP Searchfox).

I’ve read about FeedHub and will be taking a look at it, however there are high switching costs when it comes to me and RSS feed readers. I also want a video site (talking to YouTube here) to take my ‘favorites’ and ‘rankings’ and use it to filter out the 90% of garbage I deal with when using your service.

[This all came up as I've been meandering around YouTube for tomorrow's Friday Video]

Tags: Noise, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, Recommendations, Friday Video

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4 Responses

Dean Thompson

September 27th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
1

I am the CTO of mSpoke, the creator of FeedHub. As it turns out, FeedHub’s goal is to be exactly what you are wishing for in this post: FeedHub *isn’t* a feed reader. Instead, it is a tool that makes your feed reader smarter.

You say “I want Google Reader to bubble up what I want to read right away instead of forcing me to read stuff I don’t care about”. That’s exactly what FeedHub does. Just export your OPML file from Google Reader into FeedHub, create one or more personalized feeds, and subscribe to those personalized feeds in Google Reader. Beyond a few minutes to do these steps, there’s no switching cost!

You make an excellent point in this post: “Noise is a hard problem to solve because it is subjective. For instance, gossip news (celebrity, valleywag, etc) is pure noise to me and forces me to have to ignore things - which takes time. Yet, many people seek this *information* which I deem as noise.” For that reason, FeedHub gives you complete visibility into how it chooses the content to “bubble up” in your feed reader, and complete control if you want to change something.

For example, by default, FeedHub will more likely to show you a post if it is popular on Digg. But what if that’s not a good reason for you, personally? If you prefer to let FeedHub do the work, then just give it a little time to notice that you don’t usually interact with posts that are popular with Digg. If you prefer to be more active, you can go in directly and change this.

Each particular rule, or characteristic of a post, is represented in FeedHub by a “meme”. For example, we have memes for specific topics, memes for broad categories of subject matter, memes for the del.icio.us hot list, memes for topics being covered today in top news feeds, and so on. If you want FeedHub to do the work, you simply let it discover the best memes for you automatically. If you prefer to be more active, you can adjust them yourself. Either way, the result is a deeply personalized (we like to say “individualized”) picture of what’s *information* for you and what’s noise.

I hope you will give FeedHub a try. If you do, I hope to hear about your experiences.
Nathan

September 27th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
2

Amen to the Google Reader bit! That’s awesome how the FeedHub CTO left a comment right away.
TJ

September 28th, 2007 at 7:18 am
3

That sure sounds great Dean, I hope feedhub is just what you say. Nice post Andy.
Andy Brudtkuhl

September 28th, 2007 at 8:46 am
4

Dean - Thanks for your comments! You are definitely on top of things. Your passion for your product definitely inspires me to give it a shot and I will let you know how it goes.