Archive for December, 2006

Netvibes Daily Hot Topics Module Released

December 11, 2006

The Daily Hot Topics Module for Netvibes is released. Click here to add this module to your Netvibes Start page Add to Netvibes

By adding this module in your Netvibes start page, you can see in one glance the daily Hot Topics in the blogosphere, and get to what you want to read faster.

Each day, the Wizag Topic Discovery Engine reads hundreds of thounsands of posts and categorizes them into emerging topics in near real time. You can personalize it using the feeds you want to read.

Intelligence Amplification for Individuals and Groups

December 6, 2006

Ryan McIntyre and Brad Feld came up with the term Intelligence Amplification, which I found to be a very good term to describe what we do at Wizag.

We use machine intelligence (semantic processing, learning of user’s interests) and human intelligence (what users do with the contents collectively and individually) to discover and amplify Hot Topics out of hundreds of thousands of news and blog posts. The objective is to bring to a user’s attention emerging topics that the user wants to pay attention to. So these Hot Topics are “intelligently amplified”.

We do this for individual users and for groups. The group version is like an AI-enhanced and private version of Digg for groups. In a Wizag group, which can be private or public, users not only have editorial power, but can also manage the membership and have a reputation system , and are supported by Intelligence Amplification functions.

Here are some other posts that talk about information overload (or RSS overload) and thus the need of Intelligence Amplification:

Ben Miller has a post listing some related blogs on Intelligence Amplification here.

Khoi Vinh talks about All Feeded Up

P.S. The Wizag group functions are in alpha testing now. Feedback will be appreciated. We are hitting hardware and bandwidth limit, so the site may be a little slow sometimes, but it should be a lot faster and more stable than before. We will have to move on to a higher end hosting platform to improve the speed.