Recommendations in Google Reader
Last week, Google quietly added recommendations to Google Reader. Now if you go to your google reader home page, you'll find a 'Top Recommendations' section:
Clicking on the 'view all' link brings you to a full set of recommendations:
You can preview a feed to decide whether or not the recommendation is a good one before subscribing. I like how they show how many subscribers each recommendation has - but that is just about the only feedback one gets about the recommendation. What I would really like is a Pandora-style "Why are we recommending this?" tab that could tell me why a something is being recommended. Text like "We are recommending this blog because you like to read posts about music recommendation on the web, and this blog focuses on iLike, Last.fm, Pandora and other music recommender sites".
Google reader doesn't just take my blog reading behavior into account when creating recommendations. It also uses my Google search history - so presumably if I've been searching and clicking on pages about a particular topic - say 'support vector machines' - Google could recommend a blog on machine learning
The recommendations seemed good for the most part ... of course it is hard to evaluate the recommendations - there were no real clunkers, but no new favorites either. Frankly, right now I am not looking to add more feeds to my collection of over 200. What I could really use is something that goes through the feeds that I am already subscribed to and gives me the cream of the crop - and leaves the redundant or irrelevant behind.
I couldn't agree with you more about wanting the Pandora-style "why are we recommending this" functionality. IMHO, that is one of the major drawbacks to most recommender systems, that lack of transparency.
Posted by jeremy on December 05, 2007 at 07:13 PM EST #