For a long time, we’ve maintained The People Have Spoken, the blog of what’s popular on NewsBlur, with a simple algorithm that measured how often something was shared. While that’s a great way to see the stuff our users really like (Randall Munroe would probably win the NewsBlur equivalent of the Oscar), it makes it harder for everyone to find new stuff that they might not have seen or heard of before. So we’ve decided to throw a human into the mix. I’ll let Allie introduce herself in her own words:

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Hi, I’m Allie Pape. I’m a journalist here in San Francisco, and I met Sam when he e-mailed me about an article I wrote about making friends in the city. I love to read and spend most of my day paging through articles on the Internet, so I was excited to use NewsBlur as a way to manage and share my discoveries.

Sam’s given me the keys to the Popular account, so I’m going to be following as many active NewsBlur users as possible, and re-posting 3-4 articles per day that I think are particularly notable. I’ll also sprinkle in some things that I find outside of NewsBlur, if I think they’re interesting enough.

This is an experiment, and since I’m just one person, you will probably find some biases in the kind of stuff I like to post. I prefer long pieces to short, and I definitely have a few areas that are of major interest to me (food, pop culture, feminism and women’s issues, and socioeconomic trends) and a few that aren’t (sports, tech). I’ll try to read outside of my comfort zone when I can, but I can’t promise that I can be all things to all people. The hope is, though, that I can get more people reading NewsBlur, which means Sam can afford to hire other people with different interests to do additional curation for the community. And even if you think my taste is terrible, it’s probably more interesting than seeing the same three or four blogs’ posts over and over again.

If you want to know more about me or have comments or feedback, you can write to me at allie@newsblur.com.

I hope you’ll subscribe to the Popular blurblog, and that I’m able to introduce you to something new and cool you haven’t seen before.