Custom Feeds: A New Prototype from The New York Times with Human Generated Metadata (No Kidding!)
It appears that we have another interesting/useful and yes, cool prototype from the NY Times.
We've blogged about Article Skimmer, an innovative, useful, and cool way to browse the NY Times several times since it first launched in February, 2009 and now we have a new service to try.
Our new custom RSS tool is intended for all Times readers — not just developers. It provides a simple way to query the Times Article Search API and a standard way to consume the results.
Jackson goes on to provide detailed instructions (read them!) on how to get the most out of "Custom Times Feeds" tool. Here are a few highlights:
To use it [Custom Times Feeds], simply start typing something into the text field at the top. As you type, the application will try to match your words to our normalized list of terms. You can then either add one or more of the normalized terms to your feed (which will result in more targeted results) or add your original search phrase. (To add a term, click the arrow next to it to move it to the list of Your Feed’s Terms. To remove a term from your list, click the X next to it.)
[Our emphasis] Alternatively, you can paste the URL of an NYTimes.com article into the field at the top. You’ll then see a list of the terms our indexers used to describe that article, so that you can create a feed of similar articles.
Once you add a term to your feed, you’ll see a preview of the results, along with a message indicating the feed’s “strength.” The feed strength is determined by the number of articles published about your topic(s) within the past 30 days.
You can continue to add terms and refine your feed until you’re happy with it. At that point, it’s simply a matter of naming the RSS feed and subscribing to it with your favorite reader.
[Snip]
[Our emphasis] The tool also incorporates the TimesTags API, which draws its power from a practice that is very rare nowadays: human meta-tagging. All New York Times articles are assigned keywords by real, live people, rather than by computers and search algorithms. And that means all the articles included in a custom feed are truly relevant to the topic specified.
Wow, what a great and practical mention of a skill that's part of the info pro toolbelt. Lately, we've been hearing more and more about the power of human data curation and in the case of The Times, metadata generated by people not machines.
Another tool that comes to mind that uses both human data curators and a massive amount of computing power is Wolfram|Alpha. For a growing number of fast fact queries along the ability to compute just about anything quickly, this interactive and computable almanac is a welcomed resource and so is the "Custom Times Feeds" prototype.
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