A recent article on ReadWriteWeb asks the question ‘Is the Real-Time Web making news consumption better or worse?’

The article continues … ’it’s clear that we need better strategies to cope with news overload. Particularly as these days we’re not only getting more content, but getting it much faster.

There are ways to deal with information overload, which will go a long way to solving the issues.

The ‘what’ part of the formula – pick and choose what you follow and when – needn’t be just choosing a few news media websites and blogs. Why not take advantage of the fact that news sources have multiplied and become much faster to update news.’

topikality is listed as one of the clever ways you can fish from this vast ocean of news. You can read the full article by clicking here

The technical team has been busy over the last couple of months. They’ve fixed bugs, made some significant useability improvements and included a couple of exciting new additions.

Here are the highlights…

OpenId is great new addition for safer, faster, and easier registration and login. It’s ideal for anyone that struggles to remember all their passwords. You can learn more at Openid.net

We’ve made significant revisions to the topik creation process. The on-screen instructions are now easier to follow. Before saving a new topik a new verification stage has been added. You will see a list of articles that fit your topik query andhave the chance to refine your query before creating the topik. To avoid any conflicts we’ve ensured you can’t have two topiks with the same name and the topik name is now displayed in the URL.

Black listed domains are an exciting new addition. You can now exclude all articles from a specific source. This is great for avoiding those annoying web sites that blast out lots of low quality content you never read. You can read more about blacklisting domains in our previous blog post tips for training your topiks faster.

We love it when you suggest the web sites and blogs you like. As this enables us to share the content with all the topikality community. A few bugs were eliminated in this area and a new URL validation step ensures we have the correct address.

Anyone interested in the mechanics of the topikality learning engine may like this new feature. When you have sufficiently trained a topik the system starts to automatically remove articles it thinks you will find irrelevant. Previously you couldn’t see these articles as they were hidden from view. With this latest update these articles now appear on the discarded articles page. When articles you’ve never seen before appear in the discard articles page you know your topik is well trained and topikality is automatically eliminating the clutter for you.

Email your suggestions for improving topikality to feedback@topikality.com. We do our best to review and respond to every suggestion received.

One of the great things about topikality is how it learns what articles you like and delivers them to you each day. This saves us all a lot of time staying up-to-date with the topiks that are important to us.

To make use of this great feature you need to train topikality on what articles you find relevant and the ones that are of no interest. We’ve assembled a few tips that should make this process faster for you.

1. Use the up arrow and cross regularly
The arrow and cross appears next to every article summary and along the topikality voting bar. The more you use these to signify what articles you like and dislike the more topikality will learn what articles you find relevant.

The system needs a good sample of articles you like and dislike. At least 50 of each and more for general topiks. So keep using the up arrow and cross until you are happy with your stream of articles. The more you use them the more precise your feed of articles will be. When to stop is totally up to you.

2. Similar documents
When you find an article you like, and click the up arrow, topikality automatically tries to find three more similar articles that have recently been published.
Here’s how youcan use similar documents:

• Go to the topik Articles page
• Find an article you like
• Click the up arrow and wait a second
• If available, topikality will display up to three more articles that are similar and recent
• Click the up arrow on these articles if you like them and the cross if you don’t. topikality will quickly learn you like this type of information and find more relevant articles for you.

3. Black listed words
This is a great feature to quickly eliminate articles you never want to read. Here’s how it works:

• Go to the topik Articles page
• Find a word that commonly appears in articles you don’t want to read
• Go to the Edit topik page by clicking the little pencil edit icon
• Type the word into the third box ‘But don’t find articles with any of these unwanted words…’
• Click save topik

From this point forward any article with the unwanted word will not appear in your topik. Please note that articles already in your topik will not be deleted. You can simply ignore these articles or manually delete them using the above technique.

A good example of when I use this approach is my topik on the English Premier League (EPL). Often articles on the EPL refer to other sports and I don’t want to read these artices. So I use the above blacklisted words approach to eliminate sports like cricket, rugby, golf, etc.

4. Using search to train a topik quickly
This is one of the fastest ways to train a topik and a technique I regularly use.

• Go to the topik Articles page
• Find a word that commonly appears the articles you want to read
• Type this word into the search box at the top right hand corner of the screen and click Enter
• All the articles containing the word will appear on the screen
• Click the up arrow on all the articles you like
• Click the down arrow on all the articles that are not relevant
• The more articles you click the faster topikality will learn.

You can also use this approach to quickly find all the articles you don’t want to read, click the cross next to each article and train topikality to exclude this type of article in future.

5. Blacklisted domains
Sometimes you may see articles from certain web sites or blogs that are of no interest to you. Maybe you don’t agree with their views or the quality of their articles is not good enough. You can exclude all articles from these sources using the Blacklisted Domains feature. Here’s how it works:

• Go to your topik Articles page
• Find a web site or blog that you want to exclude
• Click the x next to the web address
• You should notice the web address now has a strikethrough
• In future updates there will be no articles from this web site or blog. Please be aware previous articles will remain in the topik.

I hope these tips make the training process a little fast for you. You may have a few more tips. Share them with everyone in the comments section below.

Len Chanoff conducted a comprehensive video tutorial on how he uses topikality. You can watch the video by clicking here.

Charles Knight of TheNextWeb.com recently asked me a similar question. I wanted to share my answer so everyone understands the direction we are taking topikality. Your thoughts and suggestions on how to best achieve this goal would be great.

Here’s the answer I gave Charles…

The purpose of topikality is to provide a system where “Anyone can be knowledgeable on anything”. This statement encapsulates a lot of things and is quite a challenge to deliver…

Anyone – means we want topikality to be easy enough for children to use at school.

Knowledgeable – means the user must have access to breadth of coverage, relevance of information and timeliness of delivery.

Anything – delivering quality results on every topic is quite a challenge. Popular topics are easy while specialised topics are quite hard.

We are on the way to achieving our goal. We’ve developed a pretty good solution for continuously discovering new content right across the internet, learning what the reader finds relevant, eliminating the clutter and delivering it quickly. Yet there is more work to be done.

Our current focus is delivering quality results on the more specialised topics and making it easier to use.

You can check out some example topics on twitter. We created the topics in topikality, trained the system to learn what’s relevant and automatically eliminate the clutter. We then continuously publish a sample of the results to twitter. The results are not 100% but they are getting closer to where we want to be.

Climate Change

Global Financial Crisis

English Premier League

FIFA World Cup

Cricket

You can read the full interview on TheNextWeb.com

We were recently asked this question in an interview by PJEntrepreneur.com . Here’s our answer…

Richard was initially inspired by a conversation with his partner about researching information relating to her work as a nutritionist and blogger. Given that Richard’s entire career had involved massive datasets and some machine learning, it seemed like a good idea to combine these two things.

My inspiration was trying to keep up-to-date on the things that really interested me. The traditional media was too general, industry publications often provided a single view of the world, and online systems driven by popularity weren’t what I wanted. Searching online everyday was too time consuming.

The concept was quite appealing. A system that knew what I liked, continually researched the Internet for me and emailed me a set of relevant articles each day. We set out to try to make this a reality.

We thought, even if nobody else likes it then at least it would be useful for ourselves.

Read the full interview here

Today the blog ReadWriteWeb reviewed the leading online tools and were impressed with topikality. Here’s what they had to say…

“Tracking topics on the Web can be a painful process, due to the amount of noise and difficulty of filtering it. So to help you out, we’ve selected and categorized the leading topic tracking tools. This is based on the discussion that arose from our earlier post about topic feeds, which are RSS feeds for keywords or phrases.

During the process of analyzing these topic tracking tools, we discovered…" read more here

Merry Christmas to you all. We hope you have a wonderful festive season and best wishes for 2010.

Thank you for being such great readers and topikality beta testers. Your comments, feedback, emails and suggestions have all been appreciated over the last 12 months.

Over the next couple of weeks we are taking a bit of a break to recharge the batteries. Rest assured we will keep an eye on topikality to ensure everything keeps ticking over.

The topikality team will be back in the second week of January.

We are asked this question occasionally, as people consider trying out topikality. To properly answer, I’ll provide a little background on our view of the world today …

The Problem. Most of us live in knowledge based economies which operate in global markets. To earn a living in this environment we need to keep up-to-date with our industry, markets, competitors, customers and profession. Yet content on the internet is growing at such a rate it’s too difficult and time consuming to consistently find these relevant articles. We need a tool that makes it simpler and easier. So we can stay ahead of the game at work and keep up-to-date with our interests, sports and hobbies.

A simple tool to help overcome the exponential growth in online content is the reason we developed topikality.

The Solution. Providing the ultimate solution to meet everyone’s needs will be nigh on impossible. So a range of solutions will most likely emerge. Each will have its strengths and each will have its place.

For example:

• Search engines are great at finding things one search at a time. Yet they often overload us with information and are inefficient at keeping you up-to-date on a topic over a period of time.
• Social bookmarking sites have the advantage of human based ranking. Yet the results are driven by the crowd (not your own needs) and can be susceptible to human error and spam.
• RSS Feeds and feed readers are efficient at managing high volumes of content. Yet they assume you want all content from each source and easily swamp you with information.
• Blogs by subject experts provide analysis, instruction and comment. Often finding them is hard and you need to read a number of blogs to gain a broad perspective of views on a topic.

The topikality solution. We created topikality with the singular purpose of continuously discovering and delivering the articles people find relevant. So anyone can simply and efficiently stay up-to-date on any topic they want.

You simply tell topikality what your topic is and it continually discovers content on the internet for you. The neat thing is how topikality learns what you like, and dislike, gradually providing better and more relevant articles each day. The more you use it the better it gets.

We take the approach of …

• Putting the user in control, as they know what’s important to them.
• The individual also knows what is most relevant to them. So there are no editors, crowds or experts telling you what you should read. You decide.
• The user can pick and choose which tools will work for them to discover and deliver relevant articles. So topikality includes content aggregation, keywords, Boolean queries, recommendation engine, training via machine learning, web site interface and email.
• Everyone has a different view of what is a credible source. So we let the user decide while avoiding spam.

In summary, we want topikality to be the best possible tool for continuously finding relevant articles on any topic. The user will always be better at knowing what is useful to them, so our role is to provide the tools they need and then get out the way.

What makes topikality different?

With topikality:

• You are in control of finding what’s relevant, not the crowd or an editor.
• It’s simple and efficient to use.
• 24 hours a day, seven days a week topikality continuously discovers relevant articles for you.
• It learns what you like, and dislike, constantly improving the quality and relevance of the articles delivered to you.
• The more you use topikality the better it gets.
• It’s easy to share relevant articles with work colleagues and friends in your social network.

When using topikality the key is the initial creation of the topik. A well defined topik sets you up for a highly relevant feed of articles. I’ll cover the creation of topiks in an article very soon.

Venturebeat recently reviewed topikality and posted an article that discusses how too much information is making it hard to find what you’re looking for. We need a way of finding and filtering what’s interesting to the user, and ignoring the rest.

You can read the blog post at Venturebeat.

Today the daily blog MakeUseOf posted an excellent review of topikality and how it tackles the problem of being swamped with info.

I especially like their comment…“Topikality, with its feature to spot trends in the articles I like (or dislike), gives me more control to find the needles in the web haystack.”

This comment highlights the purpose of topikality and why we started this project. To create a system that does the hard work for you of discovering and delivering those little gems. The articles that are relevant and valuable to you.

You can check out the blog post at MakeUseOf.

Today topikality launches into the public beta phase. After many months of development and testing this is an exciting time for us. Now everyone can use topikality to save time staying up-to-date with important topics.

The central idea of topikality is to help people manage information overload. We personally found it difficult to keep up-to-date with all our topics of interest and the problem seemed to be getting worse. The exponential growth of content on the internet was creating a problem for many people. So topikality was developed with the singular aim of being a more efficient way to stay up-to-date. A system that continuously discovers, delivers and shares articles you find relevant.

Thank you to all the beta testers already using topikality to monitor:

• their industry
• their company and brands
• competitors
• existing customers and prospective clients
• investments
• government announcements
• their favourite sporting teams and players
• Hobbies and interests
• interesting articles to share on Twitter

Thank you for all your feedback. It has helped create a better system.

You are free to register here.

We hope you like it.

Philip Scott & Richard Heycock

Just a quick post to say that we are attending the new Tech 23 event on Tuesday, 27th October. The speakers are presenting a range of interesting technologies and a bunch of new companies are showing their wares — topikality included. So if you’re attending we’d love to meet you so if you can drop in and say hi.

A week or so ago we deployed a number of new features to topikality, including our most asked for feature — article links from the email.

We’ve resisted making this change for a while, partly because it’s such a difficult problem to solve. But also we wanted to integrate the article voting and therefore the machine learning aspect of topikality, into this system. As you know, the more you vote for the articles you like, the better the quality of results you’ll get.

The new voting bar

Despair no more! We’ve implemented a system that takes you directly to the article page and adds a small voting bar at the top of that page. This means you can click on a link from the daily email you receive, which will take you directly to the article you’re interested in. You can also then vote on whether this article is relevant or not. This system bypasses the need to go through the topikality website. It also reduces the number of clicks you need to make, whilst still enabling topikaly to learn what you like.

Warning techie stuff [please feel free to jump to the next paragraph]. There are a couple of things that you should be aware of when using the voting frame: the voting frame is implemented using something called frames & if you know anything about html you will know these are not the best thought part of html! The issues with frames are that the status and address bar do not reflect the page you are on which can be confusing. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this. We think this is an acceptable tradeoff but if you don’t like this then you can opt out.

One other thing about the voting bar is that the similar documents functionality doesn’t work, you will need to be in the article view to use this.

Opting out

This new feature is optional, so if you don’t like it you can opt out. To opt out go to your preferences you’ll see “Use voting frame?” change this to no.

If you opt out you will still receive your daily emails, with the list of articles topikality has found for you. The links in this email will now take you through to that article on your topik articles page. You can then click on the article and vote to keep or discard, as you would normally.

The advantage of this mode of operation is you get to see the summary and you get the similar documents functionality.

Usability audit & bug fixes

We’ve also had a usablilty expert audit the site and have incorporated some of her changes. There will be more to come in the near futurewith respect to this.

And finally there have been a number of minor bug fixes and back-end infrastructure changes.

Anyway we hope this latest release will help make topikalty more usable.

The time has arrived for topikality to step out into the limelight. This week we’ll be attending
web directions south 2009 so feel free to drop in and say “hi”.

This is the largest event of the year for the web industry. There are some excellent speakers in the areas of design, development, business and W3C Standards. A select group of exhibitors, including topikality, will show their wares at the expo.

We’re looking forward to talking with lots of people. So drop by the P7 stand and find out how topikality can be used by you and your business:

• How to use topikality to learn what’s new, without wading through the clutter
• Web site owners requiring a smart content aggregation service
• News media publishers looking to provide a better, more relevant user experience for their audience
• Businesses looking to streamline business processes with high volumes of content
• Businesses looking to compliment their own content with the topikality web crawling services

Richard and I hope to see you there.