NYT has a new recommendation engine

from niemann labs
"http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/you-are-what-you-read-nyt-cto-marc-frons-on-the-papers-new-article-recommendation-engine/?=sidebarpromo

“A more personal connection”

“The whole idea is to expose our readers to as much of our great journalism as we can,” Frons told me. On the web, it can be hard to find the things you like — not to mention the things you don’t know you’d like until you like them. The new Recommendation engine, Frons says, “allows us to expose content to our readers that they wouldn’t see any other way.” And it allows the news organization, more broadly, “to establish a more personal connection between what we do online and what our readers do online.”
While a lot of the rec engines out there are framed around content that users have read previously, “what we try to do is look at people’s patterns, and how they move around the site, and what sorts of different things they might look at,” Frons notes. The engine tries to accommodate the complex dynamics of usage and movement as people navigate a through a news experience. The Recommendations page displays a range of stories — stories that are connected, in particular, “by your various interests,” Frons says, “not just what you looked at last.” (That focus on pattern is the reason the Times built its own engine, in fact, rather than teaming up with an existing personalization platform.)
The bonus for the user (and, I’d add, for the paper that wants to encourage user loyalty): The more Times articles you read, the more relevant, ostensibly, the recommendations will be.
But while the system is educating the Times about your interests, it’s also educating you about them. As Frons puts it: “It’s kind of like taking one of those personality tests where it tells you things about yourself that are only obvious in retrospect.” And the numbers — X stories about “World,” X stories about “Entertainment,” etc. — are stark. They quantify news consumption in a way that news consumption is generally not quantified. It’ll be interesting to see, from a user-interface (and, really, a user psychology) perspective, whether that running tally of stories read, and categories and topics followed, will affect what kind of news people choose to consume.
"http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/you-are-what-you-read-nyt-cto-marc-frons-on-the-papers-new-article-recommendation-engine/?=sidebarpromo

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