Idiomag is a fascinating project that combines syndicated media content, user feedback, recommendation technology and now Attention Data to produce a very attractive personalized “web magazine” about music.
It’s applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what’s new on the web.
Live for just over a year, the Idiomag site has just added the ability to pull in your listening history from a variety of other services (Pandora, Last.fm, iLike, Mog and MyStrands) in order to personalize your content. Unannounced but also newly available is APML import, a very exciting means to allow users to personalize web content based on their activity on any other site that supports APML export. Though APML is just in its infancy, Idiomag may quickly become the showcase example of a site that supports import of the data format.
I don’t know why more sites don’t take some stab at accepting inbound APML and offering personalization of content, but I sure am glad to see this site doing so. The APML page on Idiomag could use some explanation and I don’t see that it’s linked to elsewhere on the site – but there’s not a whole lot of demand yet either. What’s important is that this service is in the game.
The degree of personalization is really impressive. The video below demonstrates how Idiomag pulls in syndicated content from all over the web and assembles it seamlessly. The automated integration of text and media is particularly striking.
Just like Pandora or Last.fm, your recommendations get increasingly fine tuned by voting for each “article” you like or dislike. My APML file doesn’t have much music in it but I plugged my Pandora profile into Idiomag and am already discovering some cool new music. It’s an awesome product that is best experienced by trying it out.
The biggest problem with the service is probably its limited content. It’s only useful for some musical genres and is far from unlimited in what it offers even in those. For a quick, personalized, daily read with some videos and videos, though, I’m really impressed.
Check out this video below to see how it works.
