A nifty personalized news site

I’ve written thousands of words about personalized news, for OJR here and here, and on my blog here.

So I was intrigued when the Greg Linden, the founder of Findory News, steered me to its personalized news site.

In a word, I was impressed. Whenever I chose a story that interested me and clicked back to Findory News, the site became a little more updated with stories that would catch my interest.

This is the only way personalization will succeed, through a seamless and transparent process rather than asking users to fill out lengthy questionnaires about areas of interest.

Go ahead, try it.

Greg also pointed me to two other personalized news sites, Memigo and Gixo, but I didn’t find them as compelling.

Greg, I’m certain, is open to feedback, so let him know what you think by posting comments here. My own 2 cents:

• There were one or two occasions where I spotted a couple of headline links that looked intriguing, chose one, but when I returned the other one had disappeared. So I’d like to see a heading at the foot of the page of links that had rotated off the main area.

• I regularly click through to certain columnists, writers and reporters to see what they’re writing about. I’ve long been disappointed that personalized news sites don’t do this, given that it’s patently plain users flock to sites like DrudgeReport.com not for Matt’s masterly reporting but for the wide variety of links to known quantities. This may be harder to pull off for reporters — I don’t know how difficult it is to parse bylines — but surely it would be easy for columnists.

• I’m not always sure what has changed when I click back to the site, so it’d be nice to have some visual signal (even a different-colored link) that tells me what’s news since my last visit.

• Too bad portals like this aren’t able to offer an entry to news sites that bypasses the registration firewall. Why not a one-time registration at Findory that suffices for the top news sites?

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.