The Daily Hot Topics Module for Netvibes is released. Click here to add this module to your Netvibes Start page 
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.
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.
We put the Wizag site back online today. It has a new look now. The Hot Topics are divided into four tiers, each represented by a color bar from left to right. This way, only 15 topics are displayed each time and they are all in one color. It is easier to see.
The site is faster and more stable. We are working on optimizing the pages (combining scripts and css, optimizing graphics, etc). In addition, we need to move to a new hosting company that provides better SQL database support since our database (feeds, semantic rules, and learning data) has grown substabtially.
Last time I mentioned that we will be releasing a new function. We have not finished testing and debugging the new function yet so that part is not live yet. There are some hints on the site that give clues as to what the new function is about. However, it may be very different from what you think. Please stay tuned. We will email all existing users to announce the new service.
Since the TechCrunch post, a lot have happened.
I was delighted to read what Matt McAlister (Senior Product Manager of RSS and Social Media at Yahoo) said of us yesterday:
“Wizag is one of the most promising start pages I’ve seen yet with its learning and categorization concepts. The design is awful and the speed is unusable, but those problems are easier to solve than developing really new and interesting algorithms. I’m hoping they figure these things out, because I would love to use it more.”
Matt summarized it really well and we are working on it. We are doing an overhaul of the database and a new graphic design.
Microsoft’s leading blogger Alex Barnett saw what we did and offered to help on the SQL database performance. He solicited help from the SQL performance group in Microsoft (Umachandar Jayachandran, Gaurav Bindlish). They provided proactive technical support, helped us with several questions and the turnaround was very fast. Thanks a lot guys!
We are getting close to finishing the new database design. When it is done, the speed should be a lot faster. Also, most of the new graphic design is up on the site. Please let us know what you think this time.
We are covered by TechCrunch today. Marshall had pointed out to us that the UI was ugly. Except the topic discovery part which is solid beta, the UI (ugly, we admit), opml uploading etc are still at alpha stage. We will get a graphic designer to re-do the UI soon. What we think is the most important feature is the automatic Topic Discovery Engine, which filters through a large number of posts and discovers what are considered the current important topics based on
1. what are talked about in the posts
2. where the posts come from
3. how they are related to other posts (both by contents and by hyperlinks) and the importance of these related posts
4. the community of users’ attention data (what topics they track and how they interact with the posts)
5. your attention data (what topics you track and how you interact with the posts, weighted very heavily once you log in)
All attention data are time-decayed to reflect the current attention.
Our main motivation is to help users find out quickly what is happening and quickly get to what they are interested in. If you subscribe to a lot of feeds, there will be hundreds of posts per day and it will be very difficult for you to read them all. If you subscribe to tens or hundreds of feeds, you know what I am talking about. The Topic Discovery Engine discovers the topics that match your attention data and sort the posts into the topics.
For example, the topics that are discovered today include “fidel castro”, “minimum wage”, “google talk”, “british prime minister tony blair”, etc. These topics are more informative and objective than tags.
P.S. if anyone has trouble uploading your opml file, would you please email it to us at info@wizag.com so that we can find out what is wrong? Thanks.
