We are testing a Personalized News and News Visualization site at http://diggol.com. Its main differentiations from the online RSS readers and aggregators are:

1. It automatically discovers the topics that are being talked about in the news and in the blogosphere. You can quickly look at the discovered topics to decide what to pursue further. Its intent is to help overcome the information overload from too many feeds.

2. It provides a unique, intuitive graphical view of the topics and their correlations (click on the TopicMap in the navigation bar to see). You can click the nodes in the automatically generated TopicMap to find posts in each topic.

3. Posts are automatically classified into the discovered topics, and the topics that each post belongs to are shown so that you can easily find other posts covering the same topic.

4. A TrendGraph shows what topics are on the top, on the rise, or are fading away.

5. The whole thing is personalized to each registered user, meaning that you can pick the feeds you want to track or upload your OPML file. In addition to topics that the system automatically discovers for you in your feeds and in everyone else's feeds, you can specify what topics you want to monitor. You can vote, tag or comment on posts, and the system learns from what you vote/tag/comment/monitor and read to rank the topics and posts according to your interests.

Please take a look and we look forward to your comments.

P.S. A topic is represented by a meaningful word or phrase extracted from the posts using natural language processing and filtered using a knowledge base. A topic is expanded using syno-, hyper- and hyponyms when possible.

Generally good! Two things I'd change:

1. Your logo seems to be two-and-a-bit logos. There's too much to take in. A good logo should communicate the brand in one glance. Personally I'd keep the bit on the far left; it's good.

2. You need to play to your strengths. If your Topic Map is what makes you different from your competitors, then make it more high profile.

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Dave,

Thanks for the suggestions, I agree with both. We will take them into consideration in our revision before we formally launch it.

Paul

I really like your site. The design and content seem really sharp. But the one thing that I'd urge you to some how integrate is a selection box, perhaps on the left side of the page, where user's eyes go first typically breaking news categories into National, State, and local news in some form.

Of course news is a hugely growing part of the net and you are in an extremly competitive market so I think anything you can do to assist the surfer in making a selection easily will help win you a following.

Good luck with the launch!

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Diggol,

not to sound picky, but did you actually run a google search for Topic Maps? If you did, you couldn't have missed this: www.topicmaps.org. I believe, the term "topic map", especially with both words capitalized, is already taken. You could be better off with "topic graph" or something.

Please, don't make people confused about what you mean by topic maps, it's really not to your benefit.

the site is very well designed.
the first thing to notice is that there is an ip address in the addressbar rather than a website url.
then, iam glad i have seen a site that has no google ads. because nowadays it is very common to have full of google ads on websites.
logo is very nice and attractive.
well done

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Thanks to everyone for the reviews.

MikeinFlorida: Thanks for raising this question. We were aware of Topics Maps. It is an ISO standard. On apperance, we bear some similarity to it. Our nodes and connections are discovered automatically from texts. Our lines connecting nodes carry more information (strength of correlation) and are clickable. In our internal documents, we used to call it TopicGraph, as you suggested. We thought there is some awareness of Topic Map and because of the similarity, so we chose the TopicMap name. We will re-think it.

Bugmenot: On the selection box, what do you think the Categories and Hot Topics box at the upper left corner? They are supposed to serve the purpose of selection box, helping users drill down to what they want. The Hot Topics are automatically discovered using natural language processing and ranked according to users interests.

Crush: Since we are still in testing, we have not pointed the DNS to the domain name yet. That is why it shows an IP address.

To all: I would appreciate very much comments on the TopicMap (or TopicGraph), do you think that it is a useful thing in navigating the topics and get a quick glance of what are being talked about? Note that the topics and the map are all automatically discovered and generated

Please do. The similarity is too superficial to justify adopting the name. As you said, Topic Maps is a standard and the standard defines pretty well what is and what is not a topic map.

On the other hand, you could introduce some structure to your "nodes" and "connections", make them conform to TMDM, and provide export to one of Topic Maps exchange formats, such as XTM. In this case you'd be actually using the standard, and IMHO would have all the rights to name that feature of yours "Topic Map".