Using Winnow

Winnow is an auto-tagging engine built by Peerworks that tags and filters about 250,000 items harvested over the last three months from about 2,500 blog feeds. Every night Winnow harvests and tags the new items from all its feeds, and archives the items that are three months old.

A tag in Winnow is not just a name, as in today’s typical tags. Winnow uses smart tags to find information of the most interest to you. And Winnow constantly finds additional items of information that match tag definitions. Plus, each item can be given any number of tags in Winnow, making for a very flexible way of organizing information.

TO GET STARTED…

To view collected and tagged items, go to the Items page. The sidebar on the Items page controls your view of items. To view all the items Winnow has collected in the last 90 days, click “Show All” near the top of the sidebar. That’s a lot of items, but the list shows quickly because Winnow doesn’t load the items until you open them.

When you click on a tag or feed name in the sidebar, Winnow shows you all the items with that tag or in that feed. You can further filter items by showing only manually tagged items or items you’ve already read. Items can be sorted by date and by strength of tag match.

WINNOW HELP

Click the Help link at the top of any Winnow page for more information on how to use that page. An overview and all available help pages can be found in Winnow Wiki.

Help for viewing items
Help for creating tags
Help for adding feeds

BLOG

See Winnow news, features, and tips in the Winnow News blog.