How Does FeedHub Learn About Me?

Probably the most common question people ask is “how does FeedHub learn about me?” Let me take this opportunity to tell you about how we learn about your interests. Very simply, we learn about you based on the implicit usage of your personalized feed and any explicit gestures you choose to share with us.

We use this information to distill a set of “memes” that describe your preferences. Each meme represents some characteristic of a post, like its topic, popularity in del.icio.us, or number of Diggs. Each meme also has a strength that indicates how predictive FeedHub expects it to be in choosing content you’ll like. As we learn about you, FeedHub automatically discovers new memes for you and strengthens or weakens memes appropriately. For more information, check out our help page on memes.

So, we learn these memes and strengths in several ways:

1. Interaction with Your Feed
2. Interaction with Your Memes
3. Access to Your Digital Identity (optional)

Interaction with Your Feed

There are a number of ways in which FeedHub learns from your interaction with your feed. FeedHub quietly monitors what posts you read and ignore in your personalized feed - no effort required! If you provide negative feedback by clicking on the link to tell FeedHub to “don’t show items like this” or “drop this source”, FeedHub takes that as explicit evidence that you don’t like the post or source.

When you like an item in your personalized feed, you’ll probably want to share it, tag it or find out who else is talking about it. Many posts come with Feed Flare - these interactive options - already installed. (Typically provided by FeedBurner.) If a post does not have existing FeedFlare, FeedHub adds it for you. When you use a FeedFlare option, we take that as implicit evidence that you like the post.

Interaction with Your Memes

We also provide complete transparency and empowerment, so you can tweak the memes that are selecting stories for you.

Click on the “more details” link on a post in your personalized feed to see the memes that recommended that specific story for you. You also can examine all of the memes for your personalized feed. Completely optional, but it is a great way to see what’s happening under the covers and it helps FeedHub learn new or important memes for you more quickly.

For more information, check out the FeedHub help on interacting with your memes.

Access to Your Digital Identity

If you’d like, you can choose to provide us access to your digital identity. The things you do on the web tell a lot about who you are. For example, if you read a post you find interesting, you might tag it in del.icio.us or write about it on your personal blog. Access to your digital identity lets FeedHub learn automagically from these kinds of gestures. Update this information and other elements of your digital identity in your FeedHub profile.

And remember – the memes we’re using to choose content for your personalized feed are completely transparent. You can see and adjust them anytime.

Try it Today

Try FeedHub today to see just how smart your feed reading experience can be! www.feedhub.com

Also, please let us know how we’re doing.