By Gregory Heller
Social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit rely completely on humans to submit, categorize and rate news content. They rely on the theory of the wisdom of crowds, but anyone who uses them knows that there is a fine line between crowd wisdom and mob stupidity. Enter glaci3r.com, part of the loud3r network of sites that use, in loud3r's words, "a combination of human editorial input combined with semantic software to assemble all the best content, from a web-wide perspective, for any given topic. The technology learns from user behavior, allowing the site to react to the community's interests and preferences."
The site culls news from literally hundreds of source sites (including popular social bookmarking sites and sites like WorldChanging) and tags, organizes and rates them using machine intelligence, asserting the relative importance or popularity of some stories over others. The Semantic Web, or "Web3.0", introduces artificial intelligence into the mix which can process far more information than humans in the same amount of time. Of course if you find a story that is not covered on Glaci3r, you can submit it, or suggest an entire news source.
While some sites in the loud3r network are still in beta requiring a code, glaci3r is freely available. Once on the site, you can browse by topic (or tag) and each story offers links to related stories and related topics. You can comment on stories, forward them to friends via email or share them via social sites like FaceBook. You can also create custom RSS feeds based on tags and other criteria. Alternately you can forgo the RSS reader and subscribe to topics within the system.
Gregory Heller is a Partner at CivicActions, a consulting firm specializing in online strategy and web development with open source tools for socially responsible businesses and progressive non-profit and political organizations. He lives in Seattle, WA where he organizes the local EcoTuesday sustainable business networking events. Gregory blogs on technology, social media and CivicAction's work here.
Photo by Flickr/ahhyeah, licensed by Creative Commons.
