The Webnovo project attempts to bridge the gap between content and consumer by building a news oriented community on a foundation of collaborative filtering and recommendations. The amount of content on the internet is growing at a staggering pace, and the pervasiveness of RSS feeds and other syndication forecasts the future of news on the web to be centered on aggregation and personalization. With the age of “citizen journalism†upon us, content creation is no longer a pressing concern – in fact, we’re beginning to experience content overload. For example, The New York Times has over 60 blogs as part of their on-line addition.
In the most basic sense, Webnovo will function like an online news reader; accepting user submissions and aggregating them. Webnovo will allow users to submit news stories from any online source with syndication: a blog, the AP wire, an online newspaper, or website. The system will then monitor a user’s reading habits and begin to infer digital communities based on the collaborative tastes of many users. Almost immediately, the system will begin recommending new and well reviewed content to community members. As more information is processed the interest and region based communities will become hubs of relevant information. Because Webnovo is an aggregator of news stories, the presentation format will be very similar to familiar print newspapers.
Additionally Webnovo will provide a way of identifying community experts who will be able to generate credible and in-depth content reviews. Research in social networking has shown that a minority of community members are inherently good at discovering the content that drives the majority of the community. The ease of use and automation of Webnovo will allow non technical experts to easily make their knowledge available to the masses. All users, especially experts, can elect to have a direct link to their reviews made public allowing them to easily share their knowledge with peers in the physical world.