Today has been a big day for maemo.org: not only was the Maemo Community Calendar released for beta testing, but we also launched the new Social News section on the site. Social news is an area where users can easily with one glance see all interesting things happening at the moment in the maemo world.

We syndicate data from a lot of sources: official Nokia announcements, Garage project news, Tableteer, Flickr maemo group, YouTube maemo tag, Application Catalog updates, community blogs from Planet maemo and possibly in the future also ITT threads. However, Social News is not your ordinary aggregator. Instead of just showing everything in a single stream, we do some interesting relevancy calculation to determine what items are important at the moment and give those more prominence. Older and less prominent items slowly fall out of the news listing as time passes.

Relevancy-based display gives us a place where everybody can see the current topics. Social media is used for promoting items on the list. Here are some methods users can utilize the promote an item:

• Comment it on the maemo.org site (applies only to Application Catalog and Announcements)
• Add it to favorites on the site (by clicking the heart icon)
• Digg it or comment it on digg
• Blog about it and ensure the blog is listed by Technorati
• Bookmark it on del.icio.us

The more work-intensive methods like commenting and blogging are given the greatest value.

In addition to the “current news highlights” list, we also keep track of all-time favorites (starting from about two weeks ago), which can be seen in the Best Of list:

Social News is currently being beta tested as we tune the relevancy algorithms. Feedback is obviously welcome.

Thanks to Lasse Larvanko and Andreas Nilsson for the design!

Updated 2007-08-17: Lasse has a very good write-up of the service in Finnish.

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