Findory is a good source of customized news and blog entries
Lately I make sure I stop by Findory site at least once a day, when I feel like having a break and reading some news and blogs out there. Findory is news/blog aggregation/recommendation service, which keeps track of the stories you read and recommends the ones you might be interested in. Being a registered user, it’s easy to see my history there - I’ve clicked on 219 news stories and blog entries and launched 4 searches.
The 2-column layout (3-column, if you consider settings and ads) offers news on one site and blogs on another. Findory keeps track of the reading history, and it’s easy to delete the story from the history, if you happen to click on a story that you weren’t really interested in. Overall, the suggestions it produces (they are marked with a little spiky logo to the right of the story title) are quite relevant and many times I’ve found myself reading blogs that I would not have visited otherwise. Memeorandum seems to be in the same market, pulling news for headlines and then linking to the blogs discussing the news, but Findory just seems to be more usable. According to the company founder & CEO, there’s API in case someone wants to integrate the headlines into an application.
Few drawbacks there as well. For one, the related links just seem to be randomized. You can add some blogs to the list of Favorites, and then Findory would attempt to find a bunch of articles on a similar topic, but from what I’ve seen, it’s far from exact science. Two - if I read the story, just remove it from the list. The last thing I want to see when I load the front page is a bunch of stories I’ve read. I can always access them in my Reading History, why keep them on the front page? Overall, however, it’s a pretty interesting news/blog recommendation engine that’s also usable as a blog search.