Daily Archives: May 11, 2010

May 11 2010

Genieo – Another Means for Auto-Curating The News

I have talked about intelligent news readers here in the Studio before, so why not again? Genieo (link here) is another entrant in the arena of relevance-based reporting. Genieo is a desktop application based on proprietary algorithms that “read” user behavior, learn relevancies and feed back content tuned to user interest. That information is viewable through a dynamic, personal content portal, a/k/a home page. From the site:

The company’s vision is to become the leading source of user behavioral modeling, supplying content and application providers with effective means to address their users’ needs, and help advertisers and publishers with targeting personalized ads, with the utmost precision.

The process is simple enough – download the Genieo software and make your settings, allow Genieo some time to pull together your interests and profile and create your home page, and open your browser to your page. It will show, in magazine format, top news headlines, actual and real-time updates and filtered Facebook and Twitter updates. Everything shown will be related to your interests and Genieo will refine those interests over time as you use their service. You can also manually adjust interests to direct the process.

Some cool adds? Genieo will auto-update your bookmarks as you visit sites and manage these bookmarks based on your level of interest and interaction with them, all without interfering with your browser’s own bookmarking system. A Mini Topic Filtering System sifts through all information at the “highest resolution”, continually bringing items exclusively relevant to you. You can pull real-time updates from events you are following, stocks, sports (WORLD CUP!!!!) or developing news stories. Unobtrusive notifications of updates are displayed on your screen as you work. And, of course, there is the ubiquitous ability to one-click share your stories with your networks.

Genieo offers an interface modded for iPhone – simply navigate to my.genieo.com, log in, and get your information iPhone-sized. You can also pull your Genieo feed into your favorite RSS reader.

Lots of relevancy-based coolness from the fine folks at Genieo! Curate your own news now, automatically!

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May 11 2010

Google Now Sending Scholar To You Via Email Alerts

Google Scholar made a big splash a few months back when it rolled out case law and law journals as an option within its Advanced Search function. People “buzzed” around the new service, wondering if it would be the big “Wexis” killer with its free format. While it has taken some pot-shots in the comparison tests, Scholar is still a more than viable means of securing legal information and is getting better by the day.

Google has taken another giant step closer to besting the big guys with its roll-out of free Alerts for Google Scholar results. Activating an Alert is as simple as running a search and following a few simple steps. After getting positive results, look for the envelope icon on the upper left corner of the page. Click the icon, select the number of entries you wish displayed and that is pretty much it. Alerts work for traditional Scholar results and, most importantly, legal cases and journals!

Alerts will bring you new material as it is entered into the database based on your search query and parameters. Advanced searching is available for Alerts to the same extent available in a regular search.  While you cannot limit your Alert to results from a smaller subset of sources, you can limit Alerts by author’s name or part of a name or from pre-built “collections” listed on the Advanced Search page.

While only available via email for now, Google likely won’t stop at that delivery source. As with traditional Google search alerts, I expect RSS feeds will be coming down the road.

I am unaware of how frequently Google updates its information or the length of the time span between information creation and entry into the Google Scholar system. One of the benefits of paid services is the quick turnaround time on data entry. Of course, speed is an issue with respect to discoverying new case law on a particular question. But, as a supplemental means of securing FREE notifications on legal searches as they happen on issues that do not require up-to-the-minute updates, it seems to me to be  impossible to beat Google’s combination of price and service!

Kudos, Google, to further tilting the legal research playing field in your direction!

Hat tip to Resource Shelf.