First Impressions: Veritocracy

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com – Veritocracy learns to find the best perspectives, on the topics that interest you. To get started, just read and vote on the articles you see.
What is Veritocracy?
”The ultimate objective,” says CEO Lee Hoffman, “is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it.”

I was able to snag an invite to the closed Beta of Veritocracy through a write up on TechCrunch. The title of the article, Veritocracy = Digg + Techmeme, was interesting enough for me to try to sign up through my phone while walking into a restaurant to get some lunch. Unfortunately due to the AJAX sign up form(along with validation) that appears after you enter the invite code, it renders off screen on a iPhone 3G. With some guessing and hitting the “Done” button I was still able to sign up even though only half the sign up form was able to be seen. No worries, it’s in Beta…besides who registers for a Beta site from a phone…

Once you get your confirmation email and log into the site you are presented with your personal page, in which you see a brief overview of the Top 2 articles for numerous categories.

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com

What’s appealing is that once you begin to start reading articles and rating them, the system will adjust to your preferences and show you articles according to your ranking of articles. Not sure how long it would take for the algorithm to start sending articles tailored to your interests but it will probably take some dedication from the user. Think of the Digg Recommendation engine as a site of it’s own and you’ll have the quick idea of Veritocracy.

In order for the system to send you specific articles you need to rate a number of articles. Luckily if the articles are submitted via the feed feature and show the full story vs the excerpt you are able to view the articles in a lightbox like feature, which is truly convenient as it allows for quick reading and rating.

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com

The appeal of publishers getting their stories to those readers who would be most interested in the topic is promising, but will take a lot of user contribution. The articles you see when you log in are not to be the most popular articles on the site but the most appealing based on your history of rating articles, submitting and commenting.

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05. September 2008 by Gabe Diaz
Categories: Blog | 3 comments