International Expansion: 100 New Sites

Feb 18, 2013

The internet is full of content, and sifting through it to find articles and feature stories that you might like can be quite time consuming. Sure, there are curators and aggregators that collate the best pieces on the web; but many times these aggregations might not be fine-tuned to your tastes. Scoopinion addresses this with a smart engine that tracks your reading patterns and accordingly recommends write-ups you will like. The best part is that all of the stories recommended by Scoopinion are those vetted and read by other users, assuring you of quality.

The Times of India, 14th Feb 2013

به جز دوستان، آشنایان، هفته‌نامه‌‌های گوناگون ادبی - فرهنگی – هنری و فیس‌بوک، سرویس‌های زیادی در اینترنت وجود دارند که پیشنهادهایی برای مطالعه ارائه می‌کنند. اما ممکن است هیچ از این موارد نتواند گزینه‌های خوبی را پیش‌روی شما قراردهند، به همین خاطر باید سری به وب سایت Scoopinion بزنید و از خدمات بسیار کارآمد آن استفاده کنیم.

Zoomit, 13th Feb 2013

As our readership grows, so does the number of languages we recommend stories in. In the past week, we were joined by readers from various countries such as Russia and Iran - and most notably India, where Scoopinion was featured in the largest daily newspaper, The Times of India.

English is the lingua franca of today's world, and much of online reading is in English regardless of location. Still, reading in your native language is a very different experience, and preferred by many. That's why we'll keep expanding our reach towards all the world's languages.

Last week, a hundred new sites were added to the whitelist. Articles from the sites below will now be noticed by the Scoopinion extension. Don't be surprised if your next digest has gems from great sites you never knew existed!

Is your favorite site missing? Suggest it to the whitelist!

Danish

German

English

Spanish

Italian

Japanese

Dutch

Norwegian

Portuguese

Russian

Lenta.ru
Roem.ru
Обещания
Цукерберг Позвонит

Swedish

Turkish

NTVMSNBC

Urdu

Daily Jang

Chinese

Sina

Image Credit: The Times of India

Scoopinion Makes Top 10 in Netted's "Best of 2012"

Dec 28, 2012

This genius browser add-on learns your reading preferences and emails you articles it thinks you might like. The recommendations (much like the technology behind them) are pretty remarkable.
Netted

Scoopinion took 6th place in the "Best of 2012" compilation of Netted by the Webbys.

Scoopinion visualizes your media fingerprint, revealing favorite sources

Nov 22, 2012

Feature story aggregator Scoopinion.com published today personal news reading visualizations to show their users how much they are reading different media sources.

The media fingerprint visualization is published to allow readers to master their reading. “We want to provide our users with the most accurate understanding of their news reading” says CEO Kobra Koskinen. Scoopinion users can use this personal data to learn about their reading behavior, tastes and habits. “It’s quite revealing to see in one chart what sources influence my opinions.”

Scoopinion media fingerprint brings personal analytics to news reading and journalism. “Nowadays everybody speaks about big data.” Koskinen says, “But big data should help each and every one of us, instead of just helping large corporations to target advertising and so on. It’s our data after all.”

At Scoopinion, users participate in crowdsourcing the media by engaging in their natural behavior of discovering and reading stories online. The is able to tell whether the story is engaging and immersive by following the total community behavior such as total scrolling and time spent on each part of each story. The community guarantees that only the stories that are engaging and immersive are found and shared with other Scoopinion users.

In addition to using the data to push up the engaging stories, the Finnish team of five entrepreneurs is now giving the data back to each individual user. “Personal reading data is a great way to reflect on and learn about your own actions.” Koskinen says.

Image Credit: Scoopinion

Your media fingerprint, visualized

Nov 20, 2012

Do you know what you spend your time reading? I thought I knew. After firing up my new Scoopinion media fingerprint, I can tell you I was wrong.

If you are already a Scoopinion user, you can see your fresh from the oven media fingerprint. It shows the time you have spent with the actual sites you are reading.

Most people have one or two primary sources as pointed out by this graph. I was surprised to notice that I had them as well.

Later, we’re adding more visualizations such as favorite authors and time of day you tend to read. Tell us what you think about the current page, and what information you’d like to see next, by commenting below (in English, please).

Image Credit: Scoopinion

My Digital Zen

Nov 02, 2012

There are many paths to a calm, meditative state in your digital life.

Here are my humble suggestions towards digital zen. Please comment to share your own tips. Let's help each other find a path to enlightenment.

Email

Read or unread, it's still on the table. Archive it. A clean digital table is the starting point of becoming a digital zen master.

Most powerful tip that has helped me is keeping inbox at zero. Null. Nada. Every time I check my mail, I should have enough time to clean it.

Earlier I thought this was impossible. Then I discovered my dear friend . A strict inbox zero policy with Boomerang and generous use of my Google Calendar as a todo list significantly reduce my digital anxiety.

Other email apps I use include Rapportive. It keeps me from opening tabs to find contextual information about the email sender or recipient. Most often I tend to use the possibility to follow the person at Twitter directly from Gmail.

Occasionally, I also use Yesware to know when my emails are opened. It's not pretty and I tend to keep it turned off, but it has been handy a couple of times.

Workflow

As I mentioned, I use my Google Calendar as a todo list for items that I'm not doing during the next four hours. It's far from perfect, but gets the job done better than any list-based todo list I have tried.

For the next four or so hours, I write my todo list from calendar to nowdothis.com. I also use a notebook with a hand-drawn productivity matrix, writing down every item as either urgent-important, not-urgent-important, urgent-not-important or not-urgent-not-important.

Insight, ideas and reading

I use Kippt to save and share relevant links I haven't read yet. I also sync many of these links to my Instapaper. I love to read all the items shared to me, so I encourage my friends to send me everything that might be insightful to me. I have been trying out using a shared Kippt folder feed named "Johannes" with an IFTTT recipe to let my friends share the links they think I should read directly to my Instapaper and vice versa. So far, it's something of a success. If you want to join in to this test, drop me an email.

At Instapaper, I use likes to send items to my Evernote through another IFTTT recipe. However, I'm definitely not using Evernote at its full potential. This is because I'm in love with the simple Dropbox syncing iPad notebook called Plaintext.

I open Instapaper only in the evening and at the gym, keeping the hard-core longform stories and articles from interrupting my workflow during the day. Of course, I use Scoopinion a lot, often sending longer articles to Instapaper.

During the day, for example after lunch and during coffee breaks, I tend to relax reading the mid-length topical stories from quality magazines. My new personal favorites, discovered via Scoopinion, are Mother Jones and Smithsonian magazine.

Please comment if you know of additional or better ways of reaching digital zen. Let's end virtual anxiety once and for all.

Image Credit:

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