FeedWinnower: layering structures over collections of information streams
Citation: Lichan Hong, Gregorio Convertino, Bongwon Suh, Ed H. Chi, Sanjay Kairam (2010) FeedWinnower: layering structures over collections of information streams. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1145/1753326.1753466
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1145/1753326.1753466
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1145/1753326.1753466
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): FeedWinnower: layering structures over collections of information streams
Download: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753326.1753466
Tagged: HCI (RSS), streams (RSS), feeds (RSS), filtering (RSS), facets (RSS)
Summary
FeedWinnower is an enhanced RSS feed aggregator which uses facets to help people sort through feeds while maintaining serendipity. It generates four facets: topic, people, source, and time. Users can combine facets iteratively and interactively to "slice and dice" their feeds.
- Topics - extracted by noun-identification, and displayed in a tag cloud.
- People - icons for each creator (i.e. person or organization) are displayed, along with the number of items they produced
- Sources - sources such as delicious, Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter are displayed, along with the number of items
- Time - the time facet is a zoomable interface - look by day, month, or year.
Clicking on any of these facets shows the subset and regenerates the facets.
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
This is a practical approach for fighting information overload, to help readers get a quick sense of what's in their feed reader. It draws on our understanding of email overload, and on the structure of feed items.
