On using the real-time web for news recommendation & discovery

Owen Phelan, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Bennett, Barry Smyth

Abstract: In this work we propose that the high volumes of data on real-time networks like Twitter can be harnessed as a useful source of recommendation knowledge. We describe Buzzer, a news recommendation system that is capable of adapting to the conversations that are taking place on Twitter. Buzzer uses a content-based approach to ranking RSS news stories by mining trending terms from both the public Twitter timeline and from the timeline of tweets generated by a user's own social graph (friends and followers). We also describe the result of a live-user trial which demonstrates how these ranking strategies can add value to conventional RSS ranking techniques, which are largely recency-based.