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Personal Bee, Personalizing Recommended News

The Personal Bee is looking quite interesting in its early incarnation. The site says it’s

helping information producers and consumers capture the essential buzz from the roar of information washing over us all everyday. We believe that smart analysis of the information torrent coursing through blogs and mainstream news sites, coupled with the abilities of smart, aggressive and ambitious human editors, will help accelerate the evolution of our news media.

My former colleague Matt Marshall has spent substantial time on the site and offers some good details.

I have one strong objection to the Bee, however. It puts other people’s content in frames, keeping you on the Bee site (example). This is inappropriate behavior on today’s Net, and I’m surprised that such obviously Net-savvy folks would do this.

1 Comment on “Personal Bee, Personalizing Recommended News”

  1. #1 Ted Shelton
    on Apr 26th, 2006 at 3:21 am

    Dan: Thanks for your comment. Regarding framing — I have a couple of thoughts and would certainly be interested in your feedback. Our goal in placing a tool bar on top of the content pane was simple, we wanted to extend the rating, commenting, tagging, and emailing capabilities of the Bee to the place where the content was being read. We feel that these are valuable added features that extend the reader’e experience and further help publishers in making their content more viral. Furthermore it is relatively trivial for a publisher to defeat framing. For an example, just click on any NY Times article listed in the Bee (check the Headline News Edition) and watch what happens — NY Times performs a page re-direct immediately upon calling their server, and the frame goes away. So from my perspective, if a publisher does not want their content to be framed they can opt out. Finally, we place a “close” box on the panel so that the reader can close this panel at any time. We are working on an extension to this so that we can remember a particular reader’s preference to have a tool bar or not. I hope this satisfies your concerns – we are trying to be very publisher friendly in everything we do. If you have additional suggestions, we are very open to them. Best, Ted Shelton, CEO The Personal Bee, Inc.