Move over Techmeme, here comes Spotback

Following RSS feeds is unquestionably the best way to follow a lot of tech-related news but it can get awfully boring.  Aggregators like Techmeme do a pretty good job collating the top stories of the day but often many of those aren’t of particular interest to me.  I recently found the Spotback site that aims to change that, and my experience so far says they are succeeding.  Spotback takes news from a lot of sources, culls out the ones that you’ve indicated you are most interested in, and presents them in a nice newspaper-like format consisting of excerpts of the stories.  If you see one you like just click the headline and it opens another browser window with the original news article for your reading pleasure.  One of the coolest features of Spotback is the rating system.  Each article has a rating slider that the logic behind Spotback uses to determine what you like to read.  Over time I am finding it to get uncannily accurate and I enjoy visiting the site daily.  A really neat thing about the ratings, when you give an article a positive rating a new, very similar story opens up immediately.  It’s a nice concept well executed and I am surprised no one is talking about Spotback, although that may be because it’s still in beta.  You can customize the presentation quite a bit so play around with it and see how you like it.  I’ve tried similar sites before but Spotback is the one I return to over and over.

Comments

[matthew]

Kevin & James, you may want to give megite a try. You can create personalized Megite with your reading list. It is kinds of intelligent rss reader.

[Rick Mahn]

James,
Thanks for the info on Spotback - I've added it to my list of news sites for daily review. We'll see how well it compares to the rest of the meme trackers!

-Rick