What is your goal with topikality? How close are you to achieving it?
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.
You can read the full interview on TheNextWeb.com