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Seeing the memes for a single post

When you view a post from your personalized feed in your feed reader, you'll see some information about why FeedHub chose the post to show you.

The strongest memes for this post is that it is in the category Cookies, Cakes and Pastries and the category Food and Cooking. To see all of the memes used to choose this post for you, click "more details".

The meme for category Cookies, Cakes and Pastries appears in the meme display, but where is the meme for the category Food and Cooking? Although Food and Cooking was one of the system-learned memes that selected the item for you, memes that have been more successful at choosing good posts for you have replaced it in your feed. Remember, the only "forever" memes are the ones you set!

Organizing your meme view

FeedHub does not order the memes within the display areas. You can drag memes anywhere you want within a credibility space without affecting the memes' strength.

Changing which memes you see

Each meme has a date associated with it, and that date is the most recent time that the meme appeared in any of your source feeds. You can choose to display the memes from several different time periods in your meme display.

Here are my memes for the past week in my Web 2.0 feed:

I can choose to see only my memes for the past day, week, or month, or even my results from a meme search.

Searching for Memes

You can search for memes that will find content with a particular search phrase. For example, I am interested in posts about Google.

I type "google" into the search box to see what memes find posts that contain the phrase "google".

If any of the relevant memes were already in my Web 2.0 feed, they would appear in one of the three display spaces to the left of my search results. In this case, none of these memes have been used to choose posts for me.

To add one of the discovered memes to my feed, I just drag it into the display space that reflects the strength I want to give it. I happen to be very interested in hearing what search engine guru Danny Sullivan has to say about Google, so I drag the relevant meme into the "Yes, Please!" space.

What are these spaces for?

The meme display has three spaces to show the positive memes associated with the post or feed. The memes are not arranged in any particular order within each space, and you may drag them around and arrange them as you choose within a space with no effect on the memes' strengths.

Dragging a meme from one space to another changes the meme's strength. Here's a rundown of how the spaces are organized.

• Yes, Please!
  The memes in the Yes, Please! space are the strongest ones for the item. If the post matches a meme in the Yes, Please! space, FeedHub is confident that you will want to read it.
• Usually
  The memes in the Usually space are positive, but less so. FeedHub will only show you posts matching these memes after it runs out of Yes, Please! content, but it will show you these posts whenever space allows.
• Sometimes
  The memes in Sometimes are positive enough to break ties in which posts to show you, and can even single-handedly cause FeedHub to show you a post if it runs out of Yes, Please! and Usually content, but these are the weakest positive memes.

How does FeedHub use memes to find content?

FeedHub uses a complex alchemy with lots of inputs to choose content for your personalized feed. Your memes are FeedHub's way of distilling what it knows about your preferences into a form that you can review and change.

Very simply, each meme represents some characteristic of a post - topic, tags in del.icio.us, and lots more. Each meme also has a strength associated with it that indicates how predictive FeedHub expects it to be in choosing content you'll like. FeedHub automatically discovers new memes for you and learns meme strengths by noticing which posts you interact with.

When you give feedback on a meme - dragging it from Yes, please! to Sometimes, for example - you are telling FeedHub roughly what strength the meme should have. FeedHub tries to strike a good balance, taking your explicit input very seriously but still using its own judgment in working out the exact strength for each meme.

Memes are not search expressions! Each meme represents an idea or high-level characteristic of a post, which happens to be summarized into a short word or phrase. This works better than search phrases for the purpose of continuously collecting the best content from your feeds.

IMPORTANT! Memes you create in your feed, or memes whose strength you set by editing, are the only memes that the system will not automatically replace with better-performing ones when it finds them!

Create Memes

In FeedHub, you can create memes in your feed to help FeedHub find the content you want. Most of the current memes represent a very specific type of content, like posts Covered by Top News Feeds. You can only have one instance of this kind of meme in your world. If you try to add another, FeedHub will remind you that you already have one.

A meme like Tagged Topics, can be edited to look for specific kinds of posts (in this case, those tagged by a particular del.icio.us user). You can add as many instances of this type of meme as you'd like.

You can create a meme in your feed by simply dragging the meme name from the Create New Memes box into one of the the display spaces to the left. The new meme opens, and you can enter the settings you desire. I want to find posts tagged in del.icio.us by dthompson over the last year, and I want FeedHub to always show me those items.

No Thanks

Sometimes, you'll encounter memes that you really don't like. In the case of a meme likely to predict content that you don't want to see, drag the meme to No Thanks. It will receive a negative strength and FeedHub will know that you actively dislike content with that meme.

For example, I am rather tired of seeing items about Move On.org's comments about David Petraeus, so I drag that topic meme to No Thanks.

If you drag a meme to No Thanks, you cannot undo the action directly. You'll need to re-create the meme in your personalized feed.

No Opinion

Sometimes, you'll encounter memes that are irrelevant to you. You don't especially like the meme, but you don't dislike it - you just don't care. Drag those memes to No Opinion. This tells FeedHub not to consider those memes when choosing your content.

For example, I have no opinion whatsoever about the topic meme "guillotine", so I drag it to No Opinion.

If you drag a meme to No Opinion, you cannot undo the action directly. You'll need to re-create the meme in your personalized feed.