Leo understands threat actor groups

Research threat actor groups and learn more about their tactics, techniques, and procedures without the overwhelm

Cyber attacks continue to wreak havoc around the world. The actors waging these wars don’t just care about fraud either. They’re part of criminal organisations. Foreign governments stealing data for defense or national interests. Even terrorists or activists driven to disrupt and cause harm. 

What’s more, they’re increasingly capable and sophisticated. It’s a growing threat that can strike anyone at any time.

When you learn about threat actors’ tactics and motivations, you can better prepare against them, saving you the costs and headaches that come with a breach or attack. 

But there’s so much content to wade through when investigating these threat actors. It’s like fishing blind in an ocean. You’ll never know what’s coming back on the hook. More time and stress is spent on finding information about the threat, rather than acting on it. You can be overwhelmed. 

We’re passionate about helping you refine and streamline your open-source intelligence. That’s why we’ve taught Leo, your AI research assistant, to recognize threat actor groups. He can find them in your Feedly security feeds, prioritizing articles related to the actors and sectors you care about.

Let’s imagine that you work in the telecommunications sector, and you’re researching the tactics and motivations of MuddyWater, an Iranian threat actor group.

Cut through the noise

You can train Leo to read all your cybersecurity, foreign affairs, and cyber warfare sources, and prioritize articles related to MuddyWater.

Prioritize a threat actor

Leo continuously reads the articles in your feeds and prioritizes the ones that mention MuddyWater (or any of its aliases). It’s a powerful and effective way to keep up with their latest techniques, tactics, and procedures.

You’re in control

Leo has been trained to recognize all the threat actor groups referenced by the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This is a list of common names for hacking groups, as recognized by the global security community.

Asking Leo to prioritize MuddyWater in your security feed is as simple as creating a new Topic priority and selecting ‘MuddyWater’ as the topic.

Enter a threat actor alias in the topic field

When you prioritize MuddyWater, Leo will also look for other synonyms for that group like Seedworm and TEMP.Zagros.

You can combine topics with +AND and +OR to create even more targeted priorities for Leo. For example, use +AND to combine an actor group with an attack vector or a sector. This narrows his focus further so you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Continuously learning and getting smarter

Because Leo is integrated with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, it’s continuously learning and getting smarter. As new groups or aliases are identified, they’ll be automatically updated in your Feedly.

Leo recognizes threat actor groups listed on the MITRE ATT&CK framework

Break down silos

As you search and discover new content, share insights with your research team. Together, you can create a Threat Intel Report Feedly Board and bookmark the most critical insights you discover. You can also add notes and highlights about why a threat is high-priority.

We’ve already seen security teams create tactical Boards, such as a Vulnerability Report, to share with their operations experts. You might also want to build a CISO Newsletter to keep your management updated. It’s all possible within Feedly.  

Articles bookmarked in a Board can be shared with the rest of the team via daily newsletters, Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications, or pushed to other apps using the Feedly Cybersecurity API.

Share the threat intelligence you collect in Feedly with other teams and apps

Streamline your open-source intelligence

We’re excited to see how your security team will declutter your feeds and dig deeper into the critical threats that matter to you. Sign up today and discover Feedly for Cybersecurity.

If you’re interested in learning more about Leo’s roadmap, you can join the Feedly Community Slack channel. 2020 will be a thrilling year with new skills and bold experiments!

The Feedly Cybersecurity API

Feedly for Cybersecurity includes an API that allows cybersecurity teams to share the intelligence they collect in Feedly with other applications

150,000 cybersecurity professionals use Feedly to collect intelligence about the evolving threat landscape. 

Threat research and collection are one step of the overall threat intelligence, investigation, and response.

The Feedly Cybersecurity API allows security teams to easily integrate the insights they collect in Feedly into other systems and applications. Some teams use the API to extract data about threats and vulnerabilities and feed larger machine learning threat-prioritization models. Some teams use the API to create Jira tickets based on the content of the Feedly boards to make sure that critical vulnerabilities are reviews and patched in a timely manner.

Access to the Feedly API (up to 200,000 requests per month) is an add-on included in the Enterprise Edition of the Feedly for Cybersecurity package.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the Feedly API to access the content of your security feeds, your boards, and your Leo priorities.

Authentication

When you subscribe to Feedly for Cybersecurity Enterprise Edition, we will provide you with a special Feedly access token associated with your account. That token will allow you to access the content of your feeds, boards, and priorities and perform up to 200,000 requests per month.

Articles as JSON

The JSON representation of an article combines some of the open-source content included on the RSS or on the website, CVE/CVSS/Exploit information aggregated from vulnerability and exploit databases, as well as the results of the Leo cybersecurity models.

The title, content, and visual information give you access to the core of the content of the articles:

JSON representation of the core of the article

The commonTopics array represents Leo’s topic classification. The entities represent CVEs, products, or companies Leo has identified in the article. The CVE entity includes CVSS and exploits information extracted from vulnerability databases.

The estimatedCVSS represents the result of Leo’s CVSS scoring model. This is useful for zero-days and articles which do not mention a CVE explicitly. In those cases, Leo reads the content of the article and computes an approximative CVSS score based on the terminology used in the article or the tweet.

Leo enrichment of the article

Pro tip: When you have an article open in the Feedly web application, you can use the Shift+D keyboard shortcut to see and inspect the JSON of the article.

Use keyboard shortcut SHIFT+D to see the preview of the article JSON

Accessing the content of your feeds

Let’s imagine that you have a “Security News” feed which contains a list of known and trusted security sources you want to follow.

The Feedly API allows you to query Feedly and ask for the last 100 articles aggregated in that feed. The articles are normalized in a JSON format which includes the title, the content, the source information, as well as all some cybersecurity metadata (Leo topics classification, CVE metadata, CVSS metadata, exploit information.

You can use the Stream endpoint to get the last 100 articles published in a feed:

Overview of the stream endpoint

The most important parameter is the streamId. Each feed in your Feedly account has a unique stream id. When you select the feed in the left navigation bar, you see the streamId as part of the URL. The stream id is formatted as `enterprise/xxxx/category/xxxx` for team feeds and `user/xxxx/category/xxxx` for personal feeds.

Finding the streamId of a feed

The count parameter defines the number of articles the server will return. We recommend that you select a number between 20 and 100. If you need access to more than 100 articles, you can use the continuation parameter returned by the response to chain the requests and ask for the next 100 articles.

Finally, the importantOnly parameter allows you to get the list of articles in the stream that has been prioritized by Leo.

Troubleshooting tips:

  • Make sure that the requests you are making are authenticated using the token you have received from the Feedly team.
  • Make sure that the streamId is URL encoded when it is passed as a parameter to the Stream endpoint.

Accessing the content of your boards

Security teams use boards to bookmark critical articles everyone in the team should be aware of. They also often use boards to bookmark articles they want to share with other applications.

You can use the same Stream endpoint to access the last N articles manually bookmarked by your team to a board.

The only difference will be the streamId. Team Board streamIds are formatted as `enterprise/xxxx/tag/xxxx`. Personal Board streamIds are formatted as `user/xxxx/tag/xxxx`.

Finding the streamId of a board

If users have annotated the articles with some notes and highlights while saving the article to a board, those notes and highlights will be included in the article JSON structure.

JSON of notes and highlights

Example: Integrating Feedly with your ticketing system

Here is an example of how you can streamline the integration between the research and collection work of your threat intelligence team and the analysis and patching work of your operations team.

The research team creates a Feedly board called Critical Vulns where why bookmark articles related to critical vulnerabilities they want the operations team to be aware off and review.

Each time the research team finds a critical insight, they save that article in the Critical Vulns board, adding a note about why they think the vulnerability needs to be reviewed and patched.

Instead of asking the research team to manually create a ticket in your ticketing system (Jira, Service Now, etc.), you can write a small app which every 5 minutes connect to the Critical Vulns board, requests the last 20 articles bookmarked in that board, and for each new article, used the API of your ticketing system to create a new ticket. The app can enrich the ticket with the URL of the article saved in the board, the CVE information, and the notes and highlights from the researcher.

This is a powerful way to break the silos between your research team and your operations team and make sure that critical vulnerabilities are patched faster.

Pro tip: there is a simple solution to finding the new articles saved in a board. When your app processes a list of articles, it should save the first article in the list and the next time it uses the Stream Feedly app to get the latest articles bookmarked to a board, your app can use the newerThan parameter of the /v3/stream/content and pass that article id instead of a timestamp to get newer articles.

A lot more…

The Feedly web application and mobile applications are built on top of the Feedly API. This means that every piece of information available in the application and every action taken in the application is available in the API.

For more information about the Feedly API, please visit the Feedly Developer Website.

Streamline your open-source intelligence

We are excited to see many security teams use the Feedly API to streamline their open-source threat intelligence process. Sign up today and discover what Feedly for Cybersecurity can do for you!

If you are interested in learning more about Leo’s roadmap, you can join the Feedly Community Slack. 2020 will be a thrilling year with new skills and bold experiments!

Leo Understands COVID-19

Look beyond the big headlines. Leo can show you exactly what’s happening to your industry as a result of COVID-19, or filter it out.

Coronavirus news is everywhere right now. It’s not so much a wave of information as an ocean. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or miss a crucial market development. 

Or maybe you want to cut out the COVID-19 content altogether so you can find out what else is happening around the world. 

So we’ve taught Leo, your AI research assistant, how to help.

Mute or prioritize COVID-19 in your Feedly

Leo can already learn what you like to see and refine your Feedly. Now, he can mute or prioritize COVID-19 as well. And he does it across tens of millions of trusted sources. 

It works just like Leo’s other prioritization parameters such as keywords, topics, and events. ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ are just two of the terms he recognizes. Leo takes into account a variety of the virus’s other names, too, like SARS-CoV-2. 

Leo prioritizes mentions of COVID-19 and its wide variety of aliases

Once you give Leo a priority, you’ll get a specific view of how your industry is reacting to the pandemic. Then just save the most interesting publications in your Feedly Board. 

You can mute or prioritize one feed, or every feed, and those feeds can be personal or spread across your team. It lets some team members focus on COVID-19 news if they need to, while others look beyond it. 

Here’s a few examples to show how Leo’s coronavirus filter might work for you. After all, the virus is impacting every sector, whether you’re in retail, cyberspace, automotive or pharmaceuticals…

COVID-19 and biopharma

You’re a drug development director looking for news and insight around cardiovascular disease, and how COVID-19 is affecting this research. 

Let’s imagine you have a Cardiology feed in Feedly, and you’re following multiple science and medicine journals. Hit ‘Train Leo’ in the top left toolbar. You can prioritize COVID-19 subjects by entering it as a topic.

Preview the prioritized COVID-19 articles in your Cardiology feed

The publications displayed are now all about coronavirus and cardiology. 

Refine the search further with +AND or +OR. Here’s some more information about Leo’s topic combinations.

COVID-19 and cybersecurity

You’re part of a large tech company. Security threats may have emerged during the pandemic, buried by the noise online. 

Do the exact same thing. Click ‘Train Leo’ and enter COVID-19 as the topic.

Preview the prioritized COVID-19 articles in your Threat Research feed

You can see the most recent coronavirus-related publications from your sources in the preview. Choose whether to filter by Entire Content or titles that explicitly contain COVID-19 or its aliases.

New threats to your business can then be spotted and prepared for.

COVID-19 and retail

You’re a business intelligence analyst searching for COVID-19’s effects on stores and brands around the globe. Retail, one of the most disrupted sectors, is under intense scrutiny. The prioritization feature can help here too. 

With a Retail feed, you’ll preview countless pieces of content that tackle this subject. 

Again, just create a Leo priority around COVID-19.

Preview the prioritized COVID-19 articles in your Retail feed

And that’s it. You have a feed at the intersection of two subjects, with plenty of room for more priorities and further refinement.

Muting COVID-19

You might want to look past COVID-19 instead, and keep it out of your feeds. 

Muting is just as easy. Click ‘Train Leo’ and scroll to ‘Mute Filters’. Type in COVID-19. You’ll see a message asking which Feedly feeds you want to remove it from.

Here’s how it looks in a Tech feed. 

Preview the muted COVID-19 articles in your Tech feed

No more content on the topic will turn up in your Feedly, as long as the mute is active. It’s one of 1,000 pre-trained topics that Leo can mute right away.

Train Leo to prioritize or mute COVID-19 now

Whatever happens with coronavirus and your market, the trusted insights are here. Leo makes sure you’re never overwhelmed or struggling to see the big picture.

If you’re interested in learning more about Leo’s roadmap, join the Feedly Community Slack channel. 2020 will be a challenging year, but by staying informed, you can respond better and remain in control.

Power Search across the web

The internet is a cavernous place. Opinion and insight can emerge from anywhere. Whether you’re new to Feedly or not, you want good, trusted publishers to teach you more about a certain topic, market or industry. 

Feedly already digests and presents updates from the sources you value. But to really stay ahead of the curve, it pays to search beyond the publishers you already follow – to the blogs, articles, reports, and debates that are turning heads, but almost buried among the noise online. 

That’s why we’ve given Feedly the ability to look further with Power Search across the web. It drills down into the specific information you want to find beyond your existing feeds and sources.

In this way, you can learn something new, discover new sources for future reference and easily share reputable insights with your colleagues and social network. It intersects the exact content you’re looking for with super-specific topics and publications. 

Here’s what Power Search across the Web does, and how to use it. 

Introducing Power Search across the web

Search is a relevance game. It’s easy to lose time in the wormhole of search engines. Meanwhile, the low hit rate of typical news aggregators and alert features can leave you pulling hairs out.

Feedly gets around this with a carefully vetted database of more than 40 million trusted web sources. Collectively, they publish 110 million articles, journals, and videos. on a daily basis. 

But that’s still a crazy amount of info and analysis. So we help you refine this down with buckets – categories of publications that make a search super granular. 

You can think of each bucket as a list of trusted publications that focus on a specific industry, function or topic. They tell the search exactly what to filter. You get hyper-relevant content that can be saved to a Feedly board and shared with your team or out into the wider world. Six popular buckets are surfaced automatically yet other, more narrow buckets can be chosen – we’ll show you how to do this later in our guide.

Discover what trade publications are saying about a company. Track topics on strategy sources. Bring up the conversation around a product in business magazines. The knowledge is yours to shape and tinker with. 

Run-through

Okay, let’s imagine you’re part of the Innovation Hub at Aéroports de Paris. You’re looking for ground-breaking stories and reports about the airline industry. 

First, click on the search icon to open Power Search, select the new Across the web tab, and search for the airlines topic.

Go to Power Search across the Web and search for airlines

You get instant access to highly relevant articles from expert and trusted sources.

Search across the web for the topic airlines

You can also search for companies, people, products, or other keywords you are interested in.

Narrow to specific publications

The initial search is performed against a set of default buckets: strategy magazines, trade publications, business magazines, and tech blogs.

But you can narrow your search to a specific slice of the web. Click on +PUBLICATIONS and lookup energy for example. This is a powerful way to find articles about airlines across a broad set of energy publications.

Search for the topic airlines in energy publications

Refine your query with Leo topics and business events

You can refine your query by adding additional parameters (topics or business events) using the +AND operator.

For example, you can easily search for product launches related to the airline industry by combining the airlines smart topic and the product launch business event

Create more advanced queries with AND, OR, and Leo topics and events

Cut through the noise with Exclude

Okay, now let’s remove some results you 100% don’t want to find. For instance, any mention of COVID-19…

The Exclude feature allows you to filter out specific topics or keywords from the search results. Click on Exclude > +Topic and enter COVID-19.

Use the exclude feature to filter out the noise

Advanced mode

If you are a power user, you can use the Title Only knob to let Feedly know if you want to search only in the title of articles or the entire content.

The where on the web feature also includes a funnel button gives you more control over which publications should be included in the buckets. Pick leading publications if you are searching for a popular term and pick all publications if you are searching for a niche topic and you want your search to be as broad as possible.

Make your Feedly better 

Once you’ve discovered a great new article, you can click on the source name and see the other articles that the source has published. This is a powerful way to find new sources for niche topics.

If the content is highly relevant, you can use the +FOLLOW button to add that new source to one of your Feedly feeds and receive the next articles published by that source.

Use power search results to discover new insightful sources to follow

Your turn

15 million users are already using Feedly for their own trade and market analysis. Ready to join them? 

Cut to the heart of what matters. Set up your Feedly account today.

Save PDFs To Your Feedly Boards

You may know your way around our Feedly Boards already. They’re a place to save useful insights you’ve found in Feedly or around the web, and share them as newsletters with your teammates.

But insights can come from many kinds of media, including market reports, conference brochures, presentation decks, or whitepapers packed with industry knowledge. Typically, these exist in a PDF format.

Now, you can save PDFs to your Feedly Boards, so nothing is left out for a deep-dive understanding of a subject.

Here is a run-through

Let’s suppose you’re an analyst for JP Morgan, learning about breaking developments in financial services. Here’s how to add the PDFs you find to your Boards.

Say you come across a fantastic online market report. In this case, it’s all about the technologies set to disrupt financial services in the near future.

Copy the URL.

Then, return to your Feedly Board, choose + ADD STORY, and paste the URL.

Feedly will extract the PDF’s title automatically from metadata or the name of the file. You can also shorten and change the title yourself. 

Before you can save a story to a Board, add a summary.

Summaries show your team what they’re about to read and why it matters. They’ll also show up your Team Newsletter. 

Write your own, or do as we’ve done here and copy the first paragraph of the report’s summary.

Once you’re done, click ‘Save To Board’.

The Board should now have your PDF at the top.

It’ll stay there for anyone in your team to view and comment on. Add as many PDFs as you want to populate the Board, so you can easily access all the reference points you need in one place.

If your board is configured with a team newsletter or a Slack or Microsoft Teams notification, the PDF link will be automatically included and shared with your teammates.

Your turn

Follow these steps to add slides, brochures, guides, market reports and more to your Boards. Now that you can save any insights you come across, you can be sure that crucial information never escapes you or your team when building a fuller picture of a topic.

Get more out of Feedly now with Team Newsletters when you upgrade to our Business plan. You’ll also get additional Boards, sources and sharing functionalities.

Mute Market Reports with Leo

We heard from lots of users that market reports can be a considerable source of noise when you use keyword alerts to track updates about companies.

We are excited to announce a new Market Reports Leo topic. We have taught Leo to read articles and understand if they are about market reports so that you can easily mute them from your feeds and save hours.

Let us show you how it works

Let’s imagine you have keyword alerts to track updates about various Health companies such as Amgen, Novartis, and 23&Me.

Market reports represent a large portion of the articles in our feed

As you can see, a considerable amount of these articles are noisy market reports. Let’s train Leo to read this feed and filter out all the market report articles.

You can find the Mute Filters skill when clicking on Train Leo.

Find the Mute filters skill in your feed

In the Mute Filters editor, you can select the topics and keywords you want Leo to mute. Search for the new Market Reports Topic.

Search for the new #market reports Leo topic

You can see a preview of all the articles that Leo has recognized as Market Reports and that will be removed from the feed.

Leo mutes articles he recognizes as market reports

Leo will continuously read your feed and remove articles he identifies as market reports, letting you focus on the topics and trends that matter to you.

Our feed is now free from any noise coming from market reports

The Leo Market Report Mute Filter helps us cut through the noise and track company updates a lot more efficiently.

Yuan Shen Yu

Train Your Leo Now

We are excited to see how many Feedly users declutter their feeds and dig deeper into the topics and trends that matter to them. Sign up today and discover what Leo can do for you!

If you are interested in learning more about Leo’s roadmap, you can join the Feedly Community Slack. 2020 will be a thrilling year with new skills and bold experiments!

Feedly’s 25 Keyboard Shortcuts

At Feedly, we’re passionate about saving you time. Even seconds. So here’s another useful tip to speed up your reading flow!

When you press “?” anywhere in Feedly, you’ll see a list of all available keyboard shortcuts.

Here are all 25 shortcuts at a glance:

List of 25 shortcuts. Tip: Make sure that you do not have caps lock on!

Backed by popular requests from the community, today we introduce 2 new shortcuts: gg and t

gg – Jump to… Anywhere You Want

If you have hundreds of sources packed inside a dozen feeds, gg will be a simple way to search and navigate specific sources and feeds.

Use the gg shortcut to quickly jump to a feed, source or board in your Feedly

t – Save to Board

When you find an interesting article and want to save it to your boards – the shortcut t comes in handy.

Use the t shortcut to save an article to one of your boards

Wisdom from the Community

We take your feedback close to our hearts. Let’s team up on our journey to continuously improve your Feedly experience by joining the Feedly Community Slack channel.

Leo and Summarization

Reading through a large number of articles every day can be time-consuming, especially if those articles are long.

Helping you save time is a problem we are very passionate about, so we are excited to release today a new Leo skill called Summarization.

We have taught Leo to read and summarize the articles in your feeds so that you can more efficiently scan through articles and determine which ones are relevant.

Demo

Leo automatically reads all the articles in your feeds and summarizes them.

Articles lists showcase those Leo summaries as articles descriptions

Leo summaries in article lists

When you open an article, Leo also highlights the key sentences which are part of the summary. The goal is to help you get to the key insights more efficiently.

Leo reads and highlights the most important sentences

Board newsletters and slack integration also take advantage of the Leo summaries for the article descriptions.

Available Now

The Leo Summarization skill is available now to all users in the Pro+ and Business plans.

If you prefer not to see the blue highlights, you can turn them off via the Leo Summary Highlights preference.

If you have feedback about the Leo Summarization skill, you are welcome to join the Feedly Lab slack channel and discuss it with the product team.

Leo and Topics

Broad business and tech publications produce hundreds of articles per week. Not all those articles are relevant to the topics, companies, or products you care about. Manually filtering out the noise can be overwhelming and time-consuming.

Relevance is a problem we are very passionate about. We have spent the last two years designing and building Leo, your AI research assistant to help declutter your feeds and save time.

Unlike black-box recommendation engines, Leo has a set of skills that let you define and control what is relevant to you.

We are excited to show you how the Leo Topic skill lets you track specific topics, companies, and keywords in your feeds.

Let’s get started!

Companies, People, and Products

Leo knows about all the companies, people, and products listed in Wikipedia and in the news. You can ask Leo to look for any of those named entities (and their known aliases) and prioritize articles that are a match.

You can, for example, look for mentions of your competitors or prospects in your industry or tech feeds.

Train Leo to prioritize mentions of Tesla across a set of trusted business sources

Smart Topics

Leo understands how to recognize articles about hundreds of “smart” topics (like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, blockchain, energy, health, etc..). He’ll be looking for thousands of different terms related to that smart topic. We designed smart topics because an article can be about artificial intelligence without including the term “artificial intelligence”.

Train Leo to prioritize #AI across a set of broad business sources

We continuously teach Leo new smart topics. If there is a specific topic you would like to sponsor, please email leo@feedly.com

Keyword Matches

You can also ask Leo to look for exact matches of a keyword you are interested in. In this mode, Leo behaves like a saved search.

Train Leo to look for exact matches of the “downsizing” keyword in your business feeds

Composable with AND and OR

You can design more sophisticated priorities by combining multiple topics using AND and OR. AND means that both of the topics need to be present. OR means that either of the topics needs to be present.

Train Leo to look for mentions of DNA or CRISPER and cancer in your health industry feeds

Composable with Other Skills

The topic skill can be composed with all the other Leo skills allowing you, for example, to easily prioritize articles that reference a product launch (business event skill) while also being related to #artificial intelligence (topic skill)

Train Leo to prioritize product launch articles related to #AI

Or high severity software vulnerabilities (cybersecurity skill) related to docker (topic skill)

Train Leo to prioritize critical Docker vulnerabilities

Continuously Learning

You can use the Leo “less like this” down arrow to correct Leo when a topic detection is incorrect. This feedback is channeled to the Feedly ML Team and to the datasets used to train Leo, making topics increasingly more accurate and relevant over time.

Leo continuously learns from your feedback

Available Now

The Leo Topic skill is available now on both Web and Mobile for both Feedly Business and Feedly Pro+ users. We look forward to seeing how you train your Leo and how much time you can save.

If you have feedback about the Leo topic skill, you are welcome to join the Feedly Lab slack channel and discuss it with the product team.

Leo understands funding events, product launches, and partnership announcements

Industries are changing at a faster pace than ever. Keeping up with new threats and opportunities can be overwhelming and time consuming.

Today, we are excited to announce a new Leo skill that lets you easily track key business events like funding events, product launches, or partnerships.

Here is a quick demo

Funding Events

We have trained Leo to detect and understand funding events. This means that you can now ask Leo to read your tech, business or industry specific feed and prioritize articles related to funding events – saving you a tremendous amount of time.

Track funding events in your feeds

Product Launches

We have also trained Leo to detect and understand product launches.

Track product launch announcements in your feeds

This means that if you are part of a sales or sales enablement team, you can ask Leo to read TechCrunch or New York Times and notify you each time one of your customers or prospects launches a product. You can leverage that product launch event to create a warm approach and engage in a smart conversation.

Partnership Announcements

Finally, you can also easily prioritize the fraction of articles referencing partnership announcements.

Track partnership announcements in your feeds

Composable with other skills

The business event skill can be composed with all the other Leo skills allowing you, for example, to easily prioritize articles referencing a product launch (business event skill) and related to #artificial intelligence (topic skill).

Track funding announcements related to #artificial intelligence

Trained across 24 industries

Different industries use different vocabulary to describe these business events so we trained Leo across 24 different industries.

Leo’s industries

Continuously learning

You can use the Leo prompt or the “less like this” down arrow to correct Leo when the event detection is incorrect. This feedback is channeled to the Feedly ML team and to the datasets used to train Leo.

Tell Leo when he has detected a wrong event so that he can learn

Available now

The Leo business event skill is available on Web and Mobile now for Feedly Teams users. Because we have been getting a lot of Leo requests from non-Team users, we will also be launching a $12/month Pro+ plan in October which will include Leo, a Twitter integration, and all other Pro features.

If you have feedback about the Leo business event skill, you are welcome to join the Feedly Lab slack channel.

Leo and Mute Filters

Some of the sources you follow in Feedly are broader than the topics and trends you care about. That additional noise can add up and become overwhelming or result in you wasting precious time.

We believe that noise is the enemy and we have been building a new Leo skill called Mute Filters to let you cancel that noise.

In this article, we will show you how to use Leo mute filters to mute keywords, companies, people, topics, authors, sites, and more.

Let’s get started!

Mute keywords

Want to avoid a spoiler about Game of Thrones until you have finished reading all the books or tired of hearing about Pokemon Go or the latest Apple monitor?

Train Leo to mute Game of Thrones

You can train Leo to mute specific keywords and remove all mentions of those keywords from your feeds, temporarily or permanently.

Note: with Leo Mute Filters, you no longer need to use quotes around phrases with spaces. Leo will take care of converting the input into the right query.

Mute companies

Curating content to share on Social Media and want to avoid mentions of your competitors?

Train Leo to mute mentions of SAP in your business feed

You can train Leo to mute each of your competitors and automatically remove all the articles mentioning those competitors.

Mute people

Want to avoid articles about specific celebrities, politicians, or executives?

Train Leo to mute mentions of Kim Kardashian

Creating a Leo mute filter for a celebrity, politician or executive will automatically remove all the articles that mention that person from your feed.

Mute topics

Following a broad source like TechCrunch, Wired and Forbes but do not care about topics like gaming? Or following a keyword alert for a public company but do not care about financials or market reports?

With Leo mute filters, you can mute topics and increase the focus of your feeds. Leo ships with 1,000 pre-trained topics.

Mute authors

Do not like a specific author from one of the sources you follow?

Train Leo to mute a specific author with the author: operator

With the author: operator, you can train Leo to look for specific authors and mute all the articles from that author in your feed. (Sorry Katherine, we actually love your work!)

Mute title patterns

Want to remove articles which have a specific keyword in their title?

Train Leo to look for a keyword in the title of an article

With the title: prefix, you can train Leo to look for a mention of a keyword in the title of the article and mute the matches.

Mute sites

Finding some of the sources referenced in Google News Keyword Alerts irrelevant?

Train Leo to mute specific sites using the site: operator

With the site: prefix, you can train Leo to mute specific sites from your keyword alerts.

Forever or temporarily

When you create a Leo mute filter, you can specify a duration.

Select a duration

Once you have trained Leo with a mute filter, you can easily remove, pause or resume that filter via the Train Leo page.

Pause or remove a mute filter

Like with all the other Leo skills, it was important for us that you always feel in control and can continuously refine your Leo as your needs evolve.

While reading

When reading articles, Leo will highlight the most salient entities mentioned in the content. This makes it easy to click on them and priorities or mute those entities.

Mute an entity while reading

You can also highlight any snippet of text and mute that phrase

Highlight and mute any phrase

Finally, when reading an article, you can click on the Less Like This button and easily mute one of the topics Leo has associated with the article

Train Leo to mute a topic vis Less Like This

On mobile or on the web

The Leo mute filter skill is available both on the Web and on mobile (version 65+).

You can train Leo to mute topics and keywords on mobile.

From a feed

Train Leo to mute mentions of Apple on your Business feed

From an article

Train Leo to mute mentions of Spark New Zealand

From less like this (long swipe from right to left)

Train Leo to mute a topic via Less Like This

Curious about trying Leo Mute Filters on some of your feeds? Join the Leo program

FAQ

What happens to mute filter v1?

Pro users will be able to continue to use a more basic version of mute filters. The syntax of those mute filters have changed to the v2 syntax to allow more efficient processing on the back end.

Some of the v1 mute filters using advanced queries can not be migrated to v2 will remain active as legacy filters until user delete them.

Are there limits to the number of Leo mute filters a user or team can create?

One of the benefit of the Leo mute filters is that they can be processed more efficiently by our back-end. As a result, we are increasing the limit of Leo mute filters for Teams user from 100 total to 100 per feed.

Can non-Teams user access Leo?

We will be offering Leo to non-team users later this year via a Feedly Pro+ priced at $12/month. You can request early access to Pro+ here.

Can a mute filter target a specific source?

No. Mute filters can target a list of sources (what we call a feed) or all your feeds.

Meet the New Feedly Dark Theme and Navigation Bar

We are excited to launch a new version of the Feedly Web UI that improves the navigation and add support for a cool dark theme. Here is a quick demo.

More visible Add Content (+)

The profile and add content are now more visible in a left band. Teams users will also be able to more easily add new teammates and share feeds and boards.

The new left band

Pin or unpin

You can continue to pin or unpin the navigation bar

Unpinned

Right-click Menus

You can right click on a feed, a source, a board, or a priority and use the contextual menu to quickly manage your resources.

Right-click on any oject

Easily rename inline

Renaming your feeds, sources, or boards is going to become a lot easier.

Rename inline

Drag and sort

Drag and drop and easily re-order your categories.

Drag and sort sections

This impacts both the order in the left navigation and the order of the sections in the Today page.

A Cool New Dark Theme

The day/night icon on the left band makes it easy to switch from the default white theme to the new cool dark theme.

Thank you!

We would like to thank Gregoire Vella for leading the design of these two projects. We are very excited to have Gregoire as part of the design team. He has a really sharp eye and he is a pleasure to work with.

We would also like to thank the Feedly Lab community and Twitter community for all the bugs and suggestions reported during the beta.

We are continuously shifting to a more open and collaborative process. If you are actively using Feedly and want to share ideas or frustrations, please join the Feedly Lab Community on Slack or Twitter.

Happy reading!

-Edwin

Leo understands Vulnerability Threats

Do you need to keep up with the latest vulnerabilities and threats but do not have the time to read all your security feeds? We can help.

In 2018, fifteen thousand vulnerabilities were discovered, the number of exploits doubled and more than four security articles were published every minute. Keeping up with all these trends can be time-consuming and overwhelming.

This is a problem we are very passionate about and have been researching with two of the largest security teams in Silicon Valley.

Today, we are excited to announce a new Leo skill called Security Threats.

We have been teaching Leo to read security articles and find or assess the severity of the software vulnerabilities they mention so that he can help you focus your attention on the most critical threats in your feeds first.

Here is a demo!

Let’s look at how you can train your Leo to prioritize articles mentioning critical vulnerabilities related to Microsoft, WordPress, or Docker.

Cut through the noise

Leo reads and prioritizes the most critical threats in your feeds

Leo continuously reads your feeds and short-lists the most critical vulnerabilities in the priority tab.

For example, you might have a cybersecurity feed connected to niche security experts, vulnerability databases, keyword alerts, etc. with thousands of new articles per month.

You can train Leo to read those 1,000+ articles and prioritize the 30 or so referencing high severity threats (CVSS > 8) and related to vendors you care about (Microsoft, WordPress, Docker in the example above).

Leo’s new Security Threat skill

You’re in control

Leo is not an opaque recommendation engine. Instead, Leo has a set of skills that gives you control over defining what information is important to you.

The new Security Threat skill allows Leo to read an article, lookup CVE, CVSS, and exploit information from multiple open source databases and determine how critical a vulnerability is.

The new Security Threat skill also includes a sophisticated machine learning model that allows Leo to assess the severity of a threat based on the vocabulary used to describe the software vulnerability. This is particularly useful for zero-day vulnerabilities which might not have a CVE or CVSS.

Training Leo to prioritize vulnerabilities is very simple.

Creating a Leo cybersecurity model

The first layer of the model captures the severity threshold. High means CVSS > 8 or CVSS > 5 but with an exploit.

The second layer of the model captures the list of vendors.

Control and transparency are core Leo design principles.

All the articles prioritized by Leo have a green priority marker. Clicking on that marker offers an explanation of why the article was prioritized and the opportunity to refine, pause or remove that priority.

Full control and transparency

When an article is related to a CVE, you can also click on that CVE to get additional information about the vulnerability: description, CVSS score, exploits, patches, etc.

Quick access to CVE information

Continuously learning and getting smarter

Leo learns from his mistakes. When a recommendation is wrong, you can use the “Less-Like-This” down arrow button to correct Leo.

Leo learns from Less Like This feedback

You can let Leo know that he misclassified a vulnerability, miscalculated the severity, or misidentified a vendor.

Leo learns from your feedback and gets continuously smarter.

Streamline your open-source intelligence

We are excited to see many security teams declutter their feeds and dig deeper into the vulnerabilities that matter to them. Sign up today and discover what Feedly for Cybersecurity can do for you!

If you are interested in learning more about Leo’s roadmap, you can join the Feedly Community Slack. 2020 will be a thrilling year with new skills and bold experiments!

Feedly Mini for Chrome gets smarter in version 5

One million Feedly users rely on Feedly Mini to quickly add new sources to their feeds and save essential articles to their boards.

Saving insightful articles to your boards allows you to share and shine with your team and train Leo. The more articles you save to a board, the greater the accuracy of Leo’s like board priorities.

We are excited to announce a new version of the Feedly Mini Chrome browser extension that makes following sources and saving articles even easier.

Saving an article to one of your Feedly Boards

One of the popular feature requests for Feedly Mini was the ability to add a note to the article being saved to a board.

Quickly annotate and save web pages to one of your Feedly boards

In version 5, if you have access to the annotation features, you will be able to add a note to the article you are saving to your boards.

If you are part of Feedly Teams and have connected Feedly Teams with Slack, you will be able to mention a teammate or a Slack channel directly in Feedly mini and quickly notify your teammates.

Following a new source

We are also bringing the power of our new discovery experience to Feedly Mini v5.

Quickly follow a new source

Let’s imagine that you are browsing the Web and you discovered a new source you want to follow in Feedly.

When you click on the Feedly Mini icon, Feedly Mini will automatically discover the RSS feed for the page you are reading and show you a popup with information about that source.

You can click on Follow in Feedly to preview the RSS in Feedly and add it to one of your feeds.

You can also click on Explore to tap into the collective wisdom of the Feedly community and determine what are the sources that user often co-read with the source you are looking at.

No more having to look at the source page to find an RSS URL and manually searching for that URL to be able to add it to one of your feeds.

This is the first step for us to bring some of the work we are doing with Leo and discovery to Feedly Mini. Let us know what you think by joining the Feedly Lab Slack community and expect to see more in the next three to six months as Leo matures

Meet Leo, your AI Research Assistant

Keeping up with topics and trends you care about within a sea of articles can be overwhelming and time-consuming.

Filtering out the noise so you can focus on what really matters is a challenge we are deeply passionate about.

Today, we are delighted to announce Leo, your AI research assistant.

How Does Leo Work?

We have been teaching Leo how to read and analyze information so that he can declutter your feeds and deep-dive into topics and trends you care about. With Leo, instead of spending hours going through hundreds of articles every day, you can free your mind, focus on what matters, and stay on top of your field. 

Unlike opaque algorithms, Leo gives you total control over your feeds. Leo has a set of skills that help him understand the world and enable you to define what is relevant to you.

Leo allows you to prioritize topics, trends, and keywords of choice; deduplicate repetitive news; mute irrelevant information; summarize articles, and so much more. 

Leo’s skills help him read articles and understand the world

The Topic skill lets you prioritize specific keywords, mentions, topics, and trends.

The Like-Board skill lets you train Leo by example. If you have curated over the time a board of specific topics or trends, you can ask Leo to read that board, understand what you are interested in, and prioritize future articles he thinks you’re likely to save to that board.

The Business Events skill lets you track industry activities such as funding events, partnerships announcements, product launches, leadership change, etc. of your interest.

Leo is much more sophisticated than a simple news filtering tool. It’s a true AI that uses machine learning and NLP to filter out the noise.

Jon Henshaw (Lead SEO Analyst – CBS Interactive)

Let’s take an example!

Imagine that you follow a broad business feed connected to many sources with thousands of new articles per month.

You can ask Leo to read all of the articles and prioritize the most insightful ones in the new Priority Tab. This will save you an enormous amount of time.

Leo reads and prioritizes the most relevant articles in your feeds

With Leo, you are in control of the priorities.

Let’s imagine you are interested in the Facebook Cryptocurrency trend. With just a few clicks, you can train Leo on this new priority:

You are in control of the priorities

Once trained, Leo continuously reads all articles in your feed and prioritizes the ones mentioning Facebook and related to cryptocurrency.

Articles prioritized by Leo have a green priority label, which gives you a clear understanding of why the article was prioritized. You can then take further actions such as Refine Priority, Pause or Remove that priority.

Control and transparency

Leo is smart! He continuously learns from your feedback:

  • When you save an article to a board, Leo considers that action as a positive signal that reinforces Leo’s learning.
  • When Leo is wrong, you can use the “Less Like This” down arrow button to correct Leo and improve future recommendations.
Use the Less Like This down arrow button to correct Leo

Leo helps us to find the signals in the noise. With Leo, we can basically automate knowledge gathering and focus on growing our expertise.

Tino Klähne (Head of Strategic Design – Lufthansa Innovation Hub)

Train Your Leo Now

We are excited to see many Feedly users declutter their feeds and dig deeper into the topics and trends that matter to them. Sign up today and discover for yourself what Leo can do for you!

If you are interested in learning more about Leo’s roadmap, you can join the Feedly Community Slack. 2020 will be a thrilling year with new skills and bold experiments!

Experiment 08 – New Compact Magazine View Option

Listening to the murmurs in the Lab Slack channel, it seems that controlling the density of the articles is important to the community. Some users like to see a mix of images with the article summary, some people prefer to see only text, some people want more density, some less. In Experiment 08, we took that feedback into account and added a new density preference which can be applied to text only, magazine, and card views. The result is more control over how you want to consume your feeds.

Note: The view and density settings can be configured for each source, feed, or board. There is also a global option in the app settings.

New icons

As part of Experiment 08, we are pushing out the new set of icons (designed by the talented Daniel Klopper)

Polish and bug fixes

The team also took advantage of the Experiment 08 build to fix the following bugs and rough edges:

  • Added button to go from no unread to all articles (Thank you Daron, John, Rogerio)
  • Return to feed list after swiping the last/first article (Thank you Peter & Scott)
  • We added support for Firefox and Chrome as favorite browsers on iOS (Thank you Donhack, Peter, Jon)
  • We fixed an authentication error related to trying to login to Google in a webview (Thank you P and Anks)
  • We fixed the iPad framing bug at first launch (Thank you Michal)
  • We fixed the image loading issue where sometimes the preview would show an image but not the opened article (Thank you Mark)
  • We fixed the long titles in header bug (Thank you Chip)
  • We improved the Youtube integration (Thank you Seb)
  • After refresh at the end of the Today page, we are not staying on the Today page (Thank you Paavo)
  • We added an option to open a source from an inlined article by tapping on the source name (Thank you Xeor)
  • Separated auto-mark as read between mobile and Web. You will have to re-select auto-mark as read on scroll in the mobile settings if you want to activate it.
  • Improved discover search auto-completion history experience (Thank you Jesse)
  • We polished the back mode of the paged scrolling option (Thank you #paged-scrolling)
  • We fixed the conflict between the text selection and the close gestures
  • Refreshing the All page after mark as read in the All page footer (Thank you Dallas)
  • Fixed rename source bug (Thank you Dallas)
  • Make discover language sticky (Thank you Eduardo)

Next: Switching the Classic App and the Lab App

The next two weeks are about fixing bugs and rough edges and getting to the point where we can replace the classic app with the new lab app. Your feedback is going to be extremely useful during that time. Once you have 48.0.2 installed, if you experience any bug or run into a part of the experience which does not feel polished, please add a message to the #bugs Slack channel. The dev team will be actively monitoring that channel and try to fix as many bugs and rough edges as possible.

Experiment 07 — iPad, Power Search, and Paged Scrolling

Experiment 07 comes with 5 different parts we want to share and discuss with you: iPad/Tablet Preview, Power Search, Settings, Paged Scrolling, and Pro upgrade – all on both Android and iOS.

iPad and Android Tablet

After twelve weeks of phone exploration, it is time to shift our focus to the tablet and see how some of the innovation translate to a bigger screen. In Experiment 07, we are sharing with you some ideas we have around how the iPad compact, text-only, magazine, and cards view might look like.

Questions for the community

Question 1 – Are you satisfied with how the new mobile views look on the iPad and Android Tablets?

Question 2 – Are you satisfied by the new navigation model and the side-by-side implementation?

We look forward to your feedback on the #ipad slack channel.

Power Search

Power Search is the ability for you to search for specific articles in your Feedly feeds and boards. You can think of it as a personalized search engine focusing only on the sources you trust. It is one of the top Feedly Pro features. In Experiment 07, we implemented a mobile-friendly version of the experience available on the Web.

Like on the Web, you can use operators (AND, OR, quotes, etc..) to refine your searches and use filters to narrow the result to the right sources, content time or popularity.

Questions for the Pro community

Question 3 – Are you satisfied with the new mobile Power Search user experience? Where you able to easily find a specific article in your Feedly?

Question 4 – Is there a feature we could add to Power Search to make it more useful to you?

Please join the 07-power-search channel on Slack if you would like to discuss the Power Search feature with the product team.

Settings

As part of the continuous polish effort, we added settings support. You can now access the settings panel from the bottom of the left navigation bar and customize: the theme, the start page, the auto-mark-as-read behavior, the default view, and many more features.

Paged-Scrolling

The lack of paged scrolling has been one of the biggest “snakes” in the new design. About 10 % of the users seem to prefer paged scrolling to the new smooth scrolling. We decided last week to try to understand more. We created a private Slack channel with the 75 people who were not satisfied with the new smooth scrolling. Through these conversations, we learned that what users really liked about the old experience is that it made it easy to not over-scroll or under-scroll and empowered users to scroll through content faster.

As part of Experiment 7, we are pushing out an idea a few users suggested: it would be nice to have a preference which would allow you to have some kind of intelligent scrolling that would automatically stop at the right place.

If you go to the new settings panel, you will see a “Paged” scrolling option that should allow you to play with this idea.

Question to the community

Question 5 – If you are part of the “I miss the old scrolling” camp, is this option enough to remove all the frustration caused by the lack of productivity? Let us know in the 01-scrolling channel

Upgrade to Pro

As part of Experiment 07, we now allow non-pro users to upgrade to Pro and either unlock some interesting feature or just back Feedly. To thank the Lab community, this mobile upgrade to Pro offers a free 30-day trial.

Question to the community

Question 6 – If you end up trying the upgrade experience, please let us know what you think and if there are friction points we could remove.

Question 7 – If you are not a Pro user, please let us know if there is a feature we could add to the Pro offering to inspire you to upgrade!

Please use the 08-pro Slack channel for all the Pro related conversations.

Next Three Weeks

The focus of the next 3 weeks is to finalize the iPad implementation and polish as much as we can.

Question 8 – If you still see any gaps preventing you from using the new Lab app as your primary reading/research experience, we would love to hear about them.

We would like to thank once again everyone in the Lab community for participating in this giant experiment and helping us design the best Feedly possible. Your feedback and ideas help us better understand how you use the product and how to optimize and refine our decisions.

-Edwin, Petr, and Emily

Love the Web? Love reading? Join the Feedly Mobile+AI Lab initiative

Listening and learning – Article to article swipe

The Mobile+AI Lab is now 4,000 strong! It is an incredible learning opportunity for us. It feels great to see the community actively participate in the key design decisions.

The most popular feature request from the past 2 weeks is the ability to swipe between open articles.

John took some time this week to enable swiping in the Lab app. Now, when you have an article open, you can swipe to the previous or next article without having to go back to the list.

We are also taking advantage of this build to add some other feature requests and bug fixes.

Questions for the community

Question 1 – What are the missing features or design frustrations preventing you from switching to the Lab app from the old Feedly app? Please let us know in the #general channel of the Lab Slack.

Question 2 – Do you use Feedly on an iPad? Did you join the new #ipad channel on Slack?

Here is the detailed changelog:

  • Fixed “Edit source settings freeze” Thank you Paul Adams and DCDawg
  • Fixed “Nav bar is clipped on iPhone SE iOS 12” Thank you curiouscamilo and Heals
  • Fixed “Long press to open mark-as-read options on iPhone 6”
  • Removed “Second level hide gesture feels dangerous and confusing” Thanks JayDB
  • Added “Double tap to close an article”
  • Fixed “Honor visit website directly preference” Thank you Daron B, Dan Newman, Scott S.
  • Started “Landscape mode support” Thank you kolepard and Borja L.
  • Fixed “Amazon link crash” Thank you audioper
  • Fixed “Allow paste for the password in the Login screen and search screen” Thank you Patrick, Dwight McKay, Lars, sonofcy, Paul Adams
  • Fixed “Adding sources in discovery does not work” Thank you Alex Frances
  • Added “Define option to text selection menu”

-Edwin, Emily, and Petr

Love the Web? Love reading? Join the Feedly Mobile+AI Lab initiative

How to Send Newsletters On Demand

There are some common questions about the “send now” feature for team newsletters. Here is a quick reference to guide you through the steps.

Sending newsletters on demand makes it easy to grab a snapshot of your team boards and feeds. We want to help your team move forward and save time!

Time is of the essence, so let’s review the steps and jump into your questions!

How To Send Now:

  1. Save new articles to your board (Nothing saved since the last email, the board won’t send now)
  2. Open your Newsletter dashboard
  3. Select the board or feed to send now
  4. Click send now
Newsletters are proving to be a useful tool for team collaboration.
Our teams use them internally, and we will keep building with your feedback in mind.

Thank you to all the teams who have sent questions, feedback, and bug reports!

FAQs

Why didn’t I receive my newsletter? Common problems & solutions:

  • No new articles saved since the last newsletter sent. It will only send if there are new articles available (ie. saved) in the board.
  • Solution: For now, we suggest removing and then re-saving some articles to the board. After that, return to the newsletter dashboard and hit “send now” once again.
  • It works the same way the very first time you activate a newsletter and for your future scheduled newsletters.
  • Maybe the newsletter is in spam.
  • Solution: Please check your spam folder and add Feedly <teams@feedly.com> to your address book. That will tell your email provider to deliver newsletters to your inbox.

What articles will (or won’t) be included in the newsletter when I hit Send Now?

On-demand newsletters only include new articles saved since the last newsletter sent. This is the most common reason why a newsletter doesn’t send.

To send an on-demand newsletter with specific articles, we suggest removing and then re-saving those articles to the board. After that, return to the newsletter dashboard and hit “send now” once again.

What about analytics?

Coming soon 🙂

How do I add newsletters to my Feedly account?

We suggest starting a 30-day free trial of Feedly Teams. The trial gives you full access to newsletters and our support team. We are here to help you and your team get the most out of Feedly.

Thank you for trying newsletters! Have a question not answered here? Ask us in the comments or in the app.

— Victoria, Remi, and Emily

More posts about Newsletters:

Newsletter examples

Introducing Team Newsletters

All Newsletter tutorials 

New AI-Driven Discovery Experience

We love the Web because it is an open and distributed network that offers everyone the freedom and control to publish and follow what matters to them.

We also love the web because it has enabled a new generation of content creators (Ben Thompson, Bruce Schneier, Tina Eisenberg, Seth Godin, Maria Popova, etc.). Those independent thinkers continuously explore the edge of the known and share insightful and inspiring ideas with their communities.

Connecting people to the best sources for the topics that matter to them has been core to our mission since the very start of Feedly.

But discovery is a hard problem. The web is organic, a reflection of the global community’s changing needs and priorities. There are millions of sources across thousands of topics and we all have a different appetite when it comes to feeding our minds.

About twelve months ago, we created a machine learning team to see if the latest progress in deep learning and natural language processing could help us crack this nut.

Today, we are excited to give you a preview of the result of that work with the release of the new discovery experience in the Feedly Lab app (Experience 06).

Two thousand topics

The first discovery challenge is to create a taxonomy of topics.

You can think of Feedly as a rich graph of people, topics, and sources. To build the right taxonomy, we started with the raw data on all of Feedly’s sources. We had to create a model to clean, enrich, and organize that data into a hierarchy of topics. Learn more about the data science behind this.

The result is a rich, interconnected network of two thousand English topics. And it’s mapped well with how people expect to explore and read on the Web.

Some topics are broad: tech, security, design, marketing. Some are very niche: augmented reality, malware, typography, or SEO.

On the discovery homepage, we showcase thirty topics based on popular industries, trends, skills, or passions. You can access all of the topics in Feedly via the search box.

The fifty most interesting sources

The second discovery challenge is to find the fifty most interesting sources someone researching any topic might want to follow.

Ranking sources is hard because not all sources are equal. In tech as an example, you have mainstream publications like The Verge or TechCrunch, expert voices like Ben Thompson, and lots of B-list noisy sources which don’t add much value.

In addition, for niche topics like virtual reality, some sources are specific to VR while others cover a range of related topics.

To solve this challenge, we created a model which looks at sources through three different lenses:

  • follower count
  • relevance (how focused is the source on the given topic)
  • engagement (a proxy for quality and attention)

The outcome is new search result cards. You can explore the fifty most interesting sources for a given topic and sort them using the lens that is most important to you.

Neighborhoods

One of the benefits of the new topic model is that the 2,000 topics are organized in a hierarchy. This makes it easy for you to zoom in or out and explore many different neighborhoods of the Web.

For example, from the cybersecurity topic, you can jump to a list of related topics that let you dig deeper into malware, forensics, or privacy.

One more thing…

We have done a lot of research over the last four years to understand how people discover new sources. One insight we learned is that people often co-read certain sources. For example, if you are interested in art, design, and pop culture and you follow Fubiz, there is a high chance that you also follow Designboom.

With that in mind, we spent some time creating a model that learns what sources are often co-read. The idea is that a user could enter a source that they love and discover another source they could pair it with.

You can learn more about the machine learning model (we call it feed2vec) powering this experience through the article Paul published here.

As a user, you can access this feature by searching in the discover page for a source you love to read. The result will be a list of sources which are often co-read with that source.

Thank you!

I would like to thank Paul, Michelle, Mathieu, and Aymeric for the great research work they did to take this project from zero to one. People who have tried to tackle discovery know that it is a very hard challenge and the results of this project have been very impressive.

We would also like to thank the community for participating in the Battle of the Sources experiment. Your input was key in helping us learn how to model the source ranking. We are going to continue to invest in discovery and we look forward to continuing to collaborate with you.

We would also like to thank Dan Newman, Daron Brewood, Enrico, Joey, Lior, Paul Adams, Ryan Murphy, and Joseph Thornley from the Lab for reviewing an earlier version of this article.