Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

As a way to demonstrate some of the capabilities of Project Aura, we've created Aardvark, a blog recommender. Of course, the world probably doesn't need another blog recommender - but by building a blog recommender we get some experience dealing with a really large dataset that has lots of interesting characteristics. For one thing, we are using content analysis, classification and autotagging to help identify relevant content. We use incoming links and attention to determine how much authority a particular entry has on a topic. Since we use content as well as social data to identify relevant content, we are less susceptible to the cold start problem, and we are able to create recommendations based upon topics not just the usual "people who read X also read Y".

We didn't want to build yet another blog reader, everyone already has their favorite way to read blogs - and we didn't want to spend a lot of time crafting an attractive web interface like the Findory. Instead, we wanted to focus primarily on the back-end, on the quality of the recommendations. So instead of spending our time writing a fancy blog reader that you wouldn't want to use anyway, we just made it work with our favorite blog reader: Google Reader.

Here's how it works. Read your blogs in Google Reader like you always do. When you read an item that is particularly interesting add a star (using the Google Reader 'add star' link). Over time you should build up a pretty good collection of items that represents your interest. For Aardvark to generate recommendations for you, we need to learn what your preferences are. Luckily, the Google Reader allows you to export your starred items as a feed.

In Google Reader, navigate to your settings/tags section, where you can 'view public page' for your starred items. On this page you'll find a link to your starred item feed. Copy that so you can paste it into Aardvark. Here are my starred items.

Now you are ready to get recommendations from Aardvark. First, login to Aardvark (note that this isn't publicly available yet).

You can use your OpenID to register. When you register you paste in the URL to your starred item feed. Now Aardvark can notice the items that you are starring and generate recommendations for you based upon these items.

Once you register, Aardvark will give you a few feeds that you can add to Google Reader. This is where Aardvark will send your recommendations:

After you add the recommendation feed to Google Reader, Aardvark will keep the feed filled with items that you might find interesting:

Well, there you have it, a quick tour of how you can use Aardvark to get blog recommendations. We aren't quite ready to make it available to the general public - but if you think you might be interested, you can at least start to star items in Google Reader, so that when we are ready, you'll be ready.

BTW, Jeff built the web interface and integrated the OpenId support. The site really looks great.