It reads your blogroll and gives you recommended sites that you might like, using data from Phil Pearson’s Blogging Ecosystem.
Like Amazon's recommendations, you can tell it which recommendations you've read already or aren't interested in, and it will update the list of recommendations.
Mark does an insightful thing with the algorithm, which works by:
looking at the sites I currently read in my homegrown news aggregator, looking them up in the blogging ecosystem and seeing which sites they link to, weighing them slightly by popularity (based on the natural log of their incoming links) but also dividing by the number of other sites they link to (because a midlist site that only links to a handful of people is more relevant than a popular site that links to 100)
So the gizmo doesn't just refer you to Doc and Dave and Dave and Slash -- it finds less overwhelmingly popular sites that you might be interested in.
This overcomes a flaw in the arguments of Linked and Nexus, which both focus on the winner-take-most chacter of small-worlds networks, and ignore the interesting ecological roles played by sub-hubs.
Posted by alevin at November 22, 2002 12:06 AM