Table of contents

Thoof is a user generated news and information service that learns about what you are interested in and delivers news that you care about.

Thoof is dedicated to anyone interested in news and information. Thoof's "personalization algorithm" means that users access news and information based on individual likes and preferences on the very first visit. Users become part of the Thoof democracy by proposing changes/additions to posted content; all users can vote on whether the change is beneficial.

If you want the whole truth about news and information shaping your world, Thoof is the only way to get it.

Thoof prevents the "angry mob" from determining relevance and controlling the distribution of news. Thoof tries to serve the individual interests of each user, rather than assuming that everyone is interested in the same topics. Thoof also allows users to improve the quality and accuracy of news items, much like Wikipedia.

• General feedback
  Please email feedback@thoof.com if you have suggestions, complaints, or any other feedback about Thoof.
• Media contact
  Josh Morgan, Morgan/Dorado PR, email: josh@morgandorado.com, phone: 916.941.0901

You can find a list of recent news and articles about Thoof on our Press Page.

Ian Clarke
Ian developed the initial concept for Thoof, and is Thoof's Founder and CEO. Ian is formerly the co-founder and Chief Scientist of Revver, Inc, and in his spare time, Ian is the founder and coordinator of the Freenet Project.

Andrew Clarke
Andrew is a co-founder of Thoof, and Thoof's Chief Technology Officer. Andrew is former development manager at Revver and former CTO of Cematics Ltd, a UK based peer to peer consultancy. In his spare time Andrew enjoys surfing, keeping fit and all forms of gadgetry.

Alan Ren
Alan is a co-founder of Thoof, and Thoof's Chief Financial Officer. Previously, he was VP of finance at Revver, Inc. He also held executive and management positions at Sony and Gateway Computer. He was the founder and CEO of ACG International, a consulting firm helping U.S. companies investing in China.

Scott Miller
Scott is a co-founder of Thoof, and Chief Architect of the site. In his spare time he leads development on the SISC programming language, and spends time enjoying nature around Austin.

Jonathan Locke
Jonathan is a Senior Architect at Thoof, and is also the creator of the Apache Wicket web framework, the open source technology at the heart of Thoof's website.

Tammie Lister
Tammie is responsible for Thoof's website design, and is also the founder of Logical Binary. She blogs about design at Diary of a website.

Just scroll down as you would with any other website. Thoof uses a technique called "pageless" to automatically add stories to the page when you get close to the bottom, giving the impression of a near-infinite length page.

You will notice that stories can be one of three colors, blue, green, and grey. These colors indicate:

• Blue: The story is new, you haven't seen it before
• Green: You have seen the story before, but haven't read it
• Grey: You have read this story

Thoof just looks at which stories you click on. If you click on a story but find that the story wasn't interesting, then you can click not interesting, but first please consider improving the title, summary, or tags on the story.

We noticed that on many user-submitted news sites, a lot of the stuff submitted isn't necessarily new, indeed in many cases the same things are re-submitted repeatedly. We think the reason for this is that while some news and information is time sensitive, a lot isn't. So we thought, if something is interesting and not time sensitive, and the user hasn't seen it yet, why not show it?

So, when you submit a story to Thoof, or edit an existing story, you can tell us whether it is time sensitive. If its not, we will happily show it to people that haven't seen it yet, even if its months from now.

Firstly, please ensure that you are logged in (if you aren't logged in, you can still submit a story, but nobody will see it until you log in or register, and confirm your email address). Click on Submit Story in the navigation bar near the top of the page. You should provide the link to the story (eg. http://website.com/story.html), a short title, a summary, and at least two relevant tags, but preferably more.

We welcome submissions to Thoof, but in the interests of Thoof and our users, we must impose a number of limitations.

Stories submitted to Thoof must not infringe the law or the rights of any third party. They must not be libelous, defamatory, obscene, abusive, offensive or otherwise harmful to Thoof, or its users. Thoof also does not allow submissions intended as, or appearing to be, advertisements for websites, products or services. Submissions pointing to websites which merely redistribute content found elsewhere are also not permitted, and will be removed. Repeated violations may result in a user's account being disabled.

A good story title and summary will explain the linked webpage clearly, and in an impartial way. It shouldn't be a sales pitch for the story. If the story is about an opinion, then say so, and also talk about whose opinion it is. Avoid hyperbole, and aim for about 3 sentences in the story summary.

You should not be afraid to use plenty of tags on your story, Thoof won't try to display all of them. The tags should be a mixture of general (like "politics" or "technology"), and specific (such as the name of a specific person). When you start typing a tag, Thoof will suggest tags to you, you should try to use one of these suggested tags if it is appropriate. Look at other Thoof stories to get some ideas for what tags you should use.

The ThoofRank is a fair measurement of how interesting a story is to readers with interests in common with the story. It is expressed as a percentage relative to other Thoof stories, so a ThoofRank above 50% indicates that a story is of above average interest to those readers. When a story has just been submitted it will start out with a low ThoofRank, but this will increase as more people see it, so please be patient.

After you submit your story, you will be shown how to obtain the ThoofRank button so that you can embed it in your blog or web page.

On our tools page here.

Yes, but rarely. While we very much value any contributions to Thoof, we reserve the right to edit or remove posts at our sole discretion, and we make no assurance that a story posted to Thoof will remain on Thoof indefinitely. Reasons to remove posts include ensuring a good experience for Thoof users, and compliance with the law.

Users who submit multiple stories that must subsequently be removed may find that their accounts are disabled.

Tags provide a description of the concepts or categories to which a story belongs. A well tagged story should list these concepts in a few succinct tags, which aren't redundant. Good tagging not only helps others understand what a story is about, it also helps Thoof find interesting stories for you and others. Here are some basic dos and don'ts for tagging:

• Use two broad tags instead of one specific tag, for example: olympics and running rather than olympic running.
• Try to include a mix of broad and specific tags, like running, and 100 meter dash.
• Don't use multiple tags with small differences. For example, you don't need to tag with basketball, basket-ball, b-ball. This won't help users find the story, and just adds clutter.

Do you ever find yourself in a mood where you just want to see funny videos, or perhaps you just want to read about politics? Well, we have just launched the latest of our new features, Tag Streams, that will allow you to do this.

You will see some default tag streams at the top of Thoof's front page. Lets say you click on the "funny + video" tag stream, you will only see stories tagged with both "funny" and "video"! But it gets better, if you don't like the default tag streams, you can delete these and create your own!

To create a new tag stream, use the search box to search for the tag or tags you are interested in. Alternatively, you can just click on a tag on a story. On the search results page, Thoof will suggest a number of tag streams, and you can add one or more of them by clicking on the '+' button.

To delete an existing tag stream, simply move the mouse over it, and click on the orange remove button that appears to its right.

Thoof will occasionally ask you a question, although you are under no obligation to answer. If you do choose to answer these questions, Thoof will use your answers to show you stories that you are more likely to find interesting, and will also show you how others answered the same question.