Sep 282009

“ From your 202 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,055 items, starred 28 items, shared 30 items, and emailed 0 items “ . This is what Google Reader trends say about me. What this means to me is that from what I read I consider valuable and worthy to be shared less than 1% of all the posts.

From the 202 subscriptions most of the noise comes from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Scobleizer’s Twitter Favorites, my own alltop page feed and my own readtwit feed.

Subscription Posts per day Percentage read
Digg 134.5 3%
Reddit 72.6 4%
Delicious 46.8 5%
Scobleizer’s 68.7 8%
My alltop 149.7 3%
My readtwit 22.4 5%

What annoys me most are the low percentages that I get from Readtwit and Alltop. I would have thought that if I choose my domains of interest (websites on alltop) and people I follow ( on twitter ) carefully I woud get a noise to signal ratio a lot bigger. It doesn’t seem to be the case.

From all the websites (services) that are trying to improve the situation (noise to signal ratio) it seems to me that only Postrank and Feedly are having a little bit of success (I do use these 2 services on a daily basis). The others such as Lazyfeed, Daily Perfect are still far behind.

I see a possible solution to this mess and I will try to describe it below.

I am pretty sure that Postrank filtration algorithm can be tweaked on a per person basis, but I am almost sure Postrank doesn’t have the resources right now to support this.

I am sure that the aggregation (clustering) technology that Google is using on the News site can be used on the Google Reader but I am also sure that Google has no interest in doing that since their scope is to have their ads displayed on as many pages as possible.

I imagine that Feedly which takes into account at the moment what I shared on Reader and what I twit in the last 30 days to decide what it’s more important to me could base their recommendations also on what my friends on Google Reader network and on Twitter promote.

Now if somehow someone could integrate all these 3 technologies together I know I would pay that company a small amount each week in exchange for a much better signal to noise ratio.

It took me a while, but now I have a very good and I hope future proof solution for keeping all my information that I gathered in the last few years. Below you’ll get a succinct account of what I had to do.

Continue reading »

Nov 152008

This morning on my Engadget feed I found a possible future gem. So far it doesn’t do much, but the concepts are very interesting. Still thinking about the implications.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Oct 102008

Since 2004 I’ve saved a lot of information in different formats and systems:

  • I have 2482 pages saved in Scrapbook ( Firefox extension ), around 320 MB of HTML and photos
  • I have thousands of documents on my hard disk in doc, odt, pdf format
  • I have a monthly notebook on Google Notebook since April 2006. In each notebook I saved anywhere from 10 to 100 pages.
  • I subscribed to around 150 websites using Google Reader and I am labeling for future use around 15 to 20 items each day.
  • I have an Outlook PST of around 6 GB from which maybe 1 GB is very useful information and also I have a Gmail account with more than 2 GB of useful information.

My problem lately is how to create knowledge in an easy way from all this information overload. I’ve tried all sort of web based systems for organizing information, but no luck so far. And I know that search such as Google or Copernic desktop is not enough for creating knowledge.

I am dreaming of an intelligent agent who is capable to create short briefs based on my interests, to answer some basic questions by accessing all the info that I have, to analyze calendar data (ical format), to be location aware.  I know that this is what semantic web is all about it, but this web is still 1-2 years away, and I am sure that as long as I have non structured information is going to be impossible for the semantic web products to generate knowledge out of the information chaos.

It would be great if this kind of agent would run on a smart phone and be with me all the time.

On a side note the more I use Google Reader, Gmail and Google Notebook, the more I feel the need to get all my acquired data from their systems, but I didn’t find yet the right app that could that for me.

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