AOP: Guardian looking to develop more user interaction tools, claims communities head

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Guardian Unlimited is looking at extending the range of user interaction tools to increase how its readers can use its editorial.

Speaking at the Association of Online Publishers conference , in London today, Meg Pickard, head of communities at Guardian Unlimited, told delegates that the news site was looking to develop the 'attention data' areas of the site.

The Guardian, like many other news sites, currently shows data to the users about the most popular stories on the site and the most commented on.

"This is certainly something that we are looking at extending, the social impact or social activity that is going on around the site," Pickard said.

"It's a way of showing what's the zeitgeist, what the temperature is right now, and being able to reflect that back to the audience, it's something we're looking at quite hard and how we can extend that in particular topic areas as well as across the board."

She said that User Curation was something the Guardian has a good opportunity to go into successfully.

"With something like keywords, the question is how can we extend that idea. The keyword is a classification that we put onto an article, but how can we extend that so that it's personally useful to a user…what if I select [and tag] great places to go on my trip to Florence. But what if you want to go on a trip to Florence, Rome and Piza?

"How can you put those [keyword] together and string them together in a sort of clippings alignment? Watch this space for some more interesting stuff to do with clippings, which is actually curation."