Friday, July 24, 2009

Feature of the week: Stay tuned to interesting content by following interesting users

A good starting point when searching for interesting resources in BibSonomy are other users with similar interests. In a prior post, we showed how BibSonomy can help you to discover these similar users. We're now happy to announce a new feature which makes it easy for you to keep track of interesting resources of these people - you can now just follow them!

The basic idea is like this: Once you stumble upon a user who seems to be interesting, you can use the follow-link on his user page to add him to your list of followed users. Think of this list as a buddy list of people with similar interests as you have. Here are two examples where you can find this link (on the user page and on the personalized user page):

On the followers page, you find then a list of all users you are following (and all users following you :) ). This page summarizes all recent posts of all users you are following, ranked personally for you. So the most relevant posts to you are shown at the top of the resource lists (we compute relevancy based on the tags you use). Here is what this page looks like:
You can also add and remove users from your list of followed users on this page. In addition, you can change some settings of the applied ranking algorithm and see which method is best in finding the most relevant posts for you.

Feel free to play around with this feature - we hope it can help you to "dig" through the resources of users with similar interests and finally find some pretty cool and relevant stuff for you!

Best,
Dominik