Hey All,

As we announced last night on ReadBurner Weekly Live, we’re launching new story categorization on ReadBurner. While we work on some finishing touches, we figured we’d put something up for you to play with and give feedback: test.readburner.com.

In case you missed the show, here’s what we’re doing in a nutshell:

1. Dynamically generating categories on the fly based on the stories being shared by users.

2. Each category contains some of the Top / Climbing / New stories for that topic, and lets you click “More” to see more of any of these three types of stories.

3. Hot Topics on the sidebar shows you some of the topics that have been trending over the past 24 hours.

4. The top navbar is also dynamically generated, but based on long-term sharing habits – hence, you see topics like Obama, McCain, Music, Google, etc. These will change over days and weeks as opposed to hours.

5. Some things we’re working on/known issues: (1) each story on RB will contain a link to its category page (2) a page showing the top 100 or so categories (3) some categories obviously need to be cleaned, like “Shared” (4) each category needs a link to its respective RSS feed

All of this stuff is the building block for both new features you’ll see on ReadBurner.com and the platform we offer to developers and web publishers. As such, it’s extremely important that our categorization algorithm be awesome, and we will work to continually improve it. Definitely let us know stuff that doesn’t make sense, stories that are miscategorized, and other improvements you’d like to see.

We plan to push these new features live to the main site on Friday, but in the meantime, drop us a note (info -at- readburner -dot- com) or leave a comment with your feedback!

Meanwhile, in case you missed last night’s show with Adam, Drew, Duncan Riley, and Louis Gray, it’s embedded below: