StartupRoar Adds Personalized Subscriptions
Aggregage, the platform that powers StartupRoar has added a powerful personalization engine. That means that the site now allows users to sign-up and have their content personalized based on their interests.
You can sign-up via the "Personalize Your Content" button on the right side of the interface shown to the right of the red arrow below.
By the way, I should point out that the four top articles on the site when I took the screen shot were all great:
- The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success- Vinicius Vacanti, September 12, 2011
- Hacking Angel List | VentureArchetypes Blog: Seed Stage Capital- Seed Stage Capital, July 13, 2011
- Hiring a CTO for Your Startup- SoCal CTO, April 27, 2011
- Competitive Research 101 for Startups- Instigator Blog, August 30, 2011
It's what I love about the site. It always has great, fresh content from a wide variety of industry professionals. Every time I visit it, I find something that I missed that was really good content.
Now with personalization it's even better. The picture below gives a sense of what's happening:
Curators handle finding the best sources of content. The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views. These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc. Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content.
What's new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information. The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share. It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing. You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:
This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity. You can always visit and manually select interests as well. You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.
The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:
- Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
- Topic match – does it match up with your interests
- Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this
The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.
The reason that I'm most exited about this is that I partly use StartupRoar to make sure I don't miss things that is good content that is relevant to me. Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.
I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
