I'm (as I expected) really digging my new iPad at the moment (many thanks to Jess for that surprise birthday present!). And the app I was most looking forward to did *not* let me down. That app is Flipboard.

Flipboard

For those who don't know Flipboard (and its like) are part of a new breed of apps which are trying to help us make sense of the ever increasing rush of information which we are expected to consume on a day by day basis; it can be overwhleming so these new apps need to be our intelligent agents; sifting on our behalf.

Flipboard's main take on this is to try and present your (say) Twitter stream in a much more magazine like manner - and boy does it do a good job of it! Pages flip (hence the name) in a pleasing, tactile manner and the content is laid out in different sized sections depending on how *important* Flipboard thinks that particular blob of content is. Images and click-to-play videos flow beautifully with this type of approach. 

(Note: perhaps I'm being thick but I can't yet figure out on Flipboard how to see an aggregated feed of *all* of my stuff - I seem to have to select the 'channel', such as Twitter or Facebook, and then can only see that silo?)

Zite

The other app I'm playing with is Zite which, Flipboard, does a grand job of displaying content in a lovely, non-twitter-feed like way. Zite seems to come at the whole problem from a slightly different angle to that of Flipboard in the sense that, when you configure your Zite account, you select topics that you are generally interested in and, via voting topics up or down as you read them, you can influence the content you see over time; i.e. it tries to learn & adapt from your reading behaviour.

Voting Irregularties

My question, though, is this: how accurate is the Zite voting mechanism in representing and adjusting the overall content flow to my individual tastes? I mean, if I vote "yes" on an article about near field communication (NFC) & foursquare posted on the tech news site Techcrunch, what does that vote actually mean? Does it mean I seem more articles about NFC? Or more location based topics such as foursquare? Or (shudder!) simply more Techcrunch posts? There's a difference.

Be My Outer Perimeter

I do love these content aggregation services such as Flipboard & Zite and I'm all for any methods which can influence it & make my information feed more relevant to me. Anything which helps reduce noise & gives me more signal has got to be a step forward. Funnilly enough, RSS readers never did it for me - I need more intelligence than simply scanning my eye down a list of blogs in Google Reader  - I want the smart people I follow on (typically) Twitter to be my outer perimeter for news: sifting through the firehouse of updates and digging out the nuggets of gold. All for me!

But this whole thing of sorting signal from the noise is not an easy task - making sense of all the faves/retweets etc and turning that in a weighted stream of information? Not a trivial task. How can you programmatically work out what a (say) blog post is actually *about*? What it actually relates to? If (say) Flipboard can take a good stab at working out topics then we've got almost our own personalised newspaper with news, tech, sports sections tailored to our tastes.

I'd like that.

Joel

(note: please shout out if there are any other apps like Zite/Flipboard I should look at)