http://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betaFeedZero.com needs beta testers.60Wisey stop poking me with your towelhttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080411163202Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:32:02 GMTIt was only a matter of time before Nick turned this site into a Greek bathhouse.http://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080407090711Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:07:11 GMTShould have called it NittyGritty Newsmachinoratorhttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080406210943Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:09:43 GMTShould've called it GistFeed. Or Gistr. Or GismBot, lol :Dhttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080403221654Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:16:54 GMT...how are you supposed to know if you've missed anything you actually would've preferred to read, but which has been filtered out? Trust in the system, after about a dozen manual ratings it does its job spookily well. If you find that something is misclassified, you can correct it and the system will become smarter (in fact, you can literally see it grow smarter with the changing probabilities that a manual liking/disliking triggers). Of course nothing is foolproof, but I can give a guarantee that you will miss more interesting articles through human fatigue/ignorance than the system not picking up on it. "Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him." "You mean it controls your actions?" "Partially. But it also obeys your commands." Does it work on... It works on a large set of feed data, but puts the most weight on article bodies, titles and authors. ...does it include synonyms? No. Shhh. Words important enough to have synonyms (thankfully they're mostly nouns) are usually used in articles with the same gist, so are treated similarly. That's a good way of thinking about the system really, it understands the "gist" of the article. I can't see how this kind of thing won't run up against the same problem the aforementioned porn-filter/censorship software does... Porn and censorship filters take the easy (and stupid) way out and work off black/whitelists. FeedZero works more like an email spam filter, though with one massive difference. Spam email is deliberately crafted to avoid detection, whereas syndicated articles are not. I know that "IT'S GREAT SO SHUT UP" isn't much of an answer, so the best measure of its effectiveness will be how well it works for you. What's with the wanky name/logo? Yeah I'm not a fan of the name either, but good luck in finding an available .com (or even .com.au) that's even half sensical. It's no coincidence that a lot of newish sites end in a hard "r", e.g. Flickr, Frappr. Even Digg had to be spelt imaginatively. There should have been a logocomp in the channel! Photo(logo)comps fill up my cache with far too much homosexual porn. For the uninitiated, don't click and don't click.http://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080401221448Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:14:48 GMTThere should have been a logocomp in the channel!http://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080329234330Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:43:30 GMTSorry, due to my incredibly hectic, time-poor modern lifestyle, i don't have time to beta test for you free of charge ;) I'm too busy reading every single post on sites/blogs that simply don't have any content i'm not interested in, hence why i read them (Eg. Dereck Lowe's Blog, Pharyngula, EurekAlert, Bad Science, Physorg, Dans Data, plus journals, etc) Some things i would ask off the top of my head before even using it: Should we be huddled under a Markov Blanket while using it? (Hooray for maths jokes!) Once you've fed it a few criteria clicks and it starts to do it's thing "transparently", how are you supposed to know if you've missed anything you actually would've preferred to read, but which has been filtered out? If you have to review a list of filtered content to make sure you're not missing anything, that would defeat the purpose of the algorithm. I guess maybe there's an initial period where you check until you're more-or-less confident with the choices it makes? If it works on certain strings, does it include synonyms? For example, if i mark a story about new advances in X-ray Diffraction, will it know to show me news on Crystallography, since it's the same shit? Does it work on headers/titles of stories or do RSS items come with their own universal standard meta data tags, so your software can start showing me anything evolutionary biology-related and then figure out i don't care about things that are marked "Intelligent Design" (unless it's being ridiculed - in which case, are there tags denoting sarcasm?) I can't see how this kind of thing won't run up against the same problem the aforementioned porn-filter/censorship software does, ie. that some things will slip through the cracks that shouldn't and others will be filtered when they shouldn't. It's honestly not a difficult thing to quickly scan a page of headings and figure out what you want to read and not read, and doing it manually like that ensures you never miss anything you would want, albeit it takes more time. Plus, i'm not sure many people can actually digest so much information that they have call to use something like this. One last thing: What's with the wanky name/logo? "Zero" what? Unwanted stories i'm guessing? What's with the little superscript zero at the end? Is that Zero to the power of zero, in which case you might think you'll always only ever get one result out of it? (more maths jokes!) Or is it Zero degrees, indicating the amount of latitude your awesome algorithm gives to evil unwanted stories? Or, as i actually suspect, is it completely superfluous and a good indication that that corporate image package you forked out for was a complete waste of money?http://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080328033446Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:34:46 GMTMore like FeedCock, amirite? Srsly though, Google News is all I need. tl;drhttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_betahttp://www.boredomistan.com/2008/march/feedzero_beta/#c20080318235836Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:58:36 GMT