The Bee Blog

SiliconBeat: The Bee Revisited

Matt Marshall from the San Jose Mercury's SiliconBeat tech blog takes the new beta Bee for a test drive and (mostly) likes what he sees. Says Marshall:

"It is chock-full of the latest Web 2.0 features, and it worth taking a look at.

"Rather than forcing you to rely on what the wider community of readers decide is important news, which is what Digg and Memeorandum do, Personal Bee lets "beekeepers" do the deciding, and gives you the beekeeper the infrastructure to organize and filter news however frequently you want. Anyone can become a beekeeper (though it is still in testing mode, so you have to request). Meanwhile, other readers can sit back and enjoy the beekeeper's filter. "

[Later: Oh, yes, when it rains it pours: PaidContent.org picked up on today's SiliconBeat item and did one of their own: News Personalization Site Personal Bee Gets $0.5 Million.

And still later: The SiliconBeat item also prompted John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to give the Bee a mention.]

Naked Bee

Shel Israel captures the essence of The Personal Bee perfectly in his post "Personal Bee Impresses Me" and after all of our hard work it was certainly wonderful to have Shel comment so positively about our public Beta. His three reasons for liking the Bee are right on target - I hope with our next release a fourth becomes more obvious as well -- the ability to take the value created in the Bee and use it elsewhere - websites, blogs, emails... all through our "widgets."

A New Look

The band of beta testers, friends, experimenters, new media junkies, iconoclasts and curiosity seekers who have been using The Personal Bee over the last six months have a distinct surprise in store. We launched our newly designed site, complete with some powerful new functionality, as a public beta after the sun set here on the Pacific coast Monday night (that's a fancy way of saying I (Dan) don't know the exact time we went live).

The redesign isn't of the radical variety. If you had gotten accustomed to finding things in a certain place, you'll still find them there. But we've got a genuinely gorgeous new "The Personal Bee" logo. Overall, we feature a cleaner, more polished look for those who come to The Personal Bee to read the news; for our Beekeeper/editor corps, we've sought to provide some new control over how their Bees look. It's the first step of many toward creating a site that's as visually exciting and engaging as the vision and technology behind it.

Beyond the design, we're also trying to give our Beekeepers new tools to put their stamp on the news editions they create. Our new version comes complete with the ability for editors to control the order of stories that appear on their Bees. We're offering new tools that allow Beekeeper/editors to write their own stories and add them to their Bees as well as to quickly add headlines to their Bees from any article they find anywhere online. We've also taken the first step to automate the process of enabling users to import their existing blogrolls through a new OPML import too. Our aim with these new features is to offer a tool that will allow individual editors to blend the power of RSS newsfeeds and their own particular expertise or passion to build authoritative and unique editions of the news that's most important to them.

Our CEO, Ted Shelton, will have more to say on our public beta, our goals and how we'll get there. We're already working on the next round of improvements. In the meantime, don't hold back: send us your comments, great thoughts and criticism.