Tired Of Magazines Full Of Stories You Don't Like? Welcome To Zite, A Magazine Just For You

Have you ever opened a magazine and found there was nothing inside to read that interested you? What if that magazine could learn more about you and tailor the news based on your interests and reading patterns? Welcome to the world of Zite, the new iPad magazine, which hopes to do for news what Pandora did for music. You tell it what you like, and it does the rest. Developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, Zite relies initially on information you provide. First, it is important to link your Twitter and/or Google Reader feed. Second, you select sections for your magazine.

The categories available for these sections range from the typical (World News, Politics, Film & TV) to the more unique (Luxury Lifestyle, Pets, Entrepreneurship). In total, 34 categories are available to choose from, plus additional ones can be added simply by typing them into the “Enter your own” box. For example, typing in “Penn State” results in a list of suggested categories including College Football, Education, and Basketball. Once the setup is complete, your personalized magazine is ready to go. But it doesn’t end there; as you begin reading articles an algorithm begins to reformulate the magazine on each restart based on which articles you found interesting (and those you did not). According to CEO Ali Davar, speaking to Fast Company, this process is:

"It's a combination of semantic- and statistically based machine learning. It works by looking at the articles you click on and the characteristics of those articles. Is the article longer or shorter? Is it skewed toward one element of a topic or another? Is it a political blog? If so, does it have have a right- or left-wing slant?"

Zite isn’t perfect. In fact, I found it to be quite buggy and prone to errors. However, its design is fresh and the concept behind it is even more so. It will be interesting to see how it competes with similar magazines such as Flipboard and Pulse News Reader. Check out this video:

The free Zite app for the iPad is available in the App Store.