Douban moves on in collaborative filtering, launches a clustered blog portal

Written by Luyi Chen on February 2, 2007
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Douban 9On last day of the last month, social recommendation community Douban launched a clustered blog portal, Douban 9. So finally users know where their voting resulted into.

Douban 9 is organized into 5 channels. They don’t give an explicit name to each channel, just name them with channel 2, channel 3, etc. But this is not a problem for Douban users. Some of them has already guessed right topics of each channel. For example, IT channel is the channel 4. According to Douban’s official blog, these categories are totally generated by algorithm based on user subscriptions.

A portal to reflect commonly hot stuffs is widely adopted by information recommendation service, like Findory, Tailrank and Reddit. Douban’s personal RSS reader is especially like Findory, which shows you articles ranked by hotness, freshness, and your voting history.

Douban’s clustered channels are very like the social view concept once adopted by Tailrank. That’s hottest articles from perspective of a group like minded people.

Speaking of recommendation engine, I love how Reddit does. It not only allow me to vote what I like, but also to nuke what I don’t like. And it has a hide button, so that I don’t always see duplicated information. The problem of Douban is that if you don’t like anything in its recommendation, you are stuck. The bad effect is that it will cost you more time to train Douban’s filter.

A collaborative filtering engine only matters after it has enough users, no matter how good your algorithms are. Douban still has a lot of user education work to do to accomplish this goal. Users should be notified that when they click the button, they are not only recommending articles to others, but also telling the system to show them more like this. Explain a clear incentive to users is always a good idea, refer to An interesting side effect of user recommendation systems.

There’s another online RSS reader Zhuaxia, with a lot of users in China. It also has a popular articles section, based on user voting. But Zhuaxia users don’t have the same clear incentive as Douban users. So in the long run, Douban 9’s hottest articles will have better quality.

Also read our previous post, why you can use Douban as your daily RSS reader.

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