Ask HN: Pointers for a news recommender project?
I'm getting started with a little project to practice my nascent machine learning skills.
The idea is to have users list a few websites they like and then, based on those, suggest a few interesting news as they get posted. The news will be delivered by email. I want it to be privacy focused.
So, I already know this is not really original. This is really more a learning project than anything.
The "battle plan" so far is: 1. Build a landing page where people can subscribe and list their favorite news sources, with a few tags. Trying to "crowd source" the effort of finding content and cataloging 2. Drive traffic to the landing page somehow. I was going to check AdWords campaigns but they seem too pricey for something which is basically for fun more than profit. I'll try to rely on social discussions / comments. Any other suggestion on this would be appreciated! 3. Ship an periodic email with 5 links or such, which are supposedly interesting / have the email include links to "thumb up / down" the content, to further customize the recommending engine 4. If there's any visible interest and / or if providing it starts costing me more than I'm willing to pay, I'll attempt to monetize it. For example by adding sponsored content / or advertising maybe?
What I want to gain from this test is: 1/ Practice machine learning 2/ Form some habits that will help me shipping other side projects in the future 3/ Practice other skills such as SEO, Cloud architectures (aiming at the most serverless architecture I can imagine. Right now the landing page is hosted on S3+CloudFront, the form is a Google Form (yes, that one looks cheap))
I would love to hear your thoughts about this all. Any suggestion?
The landing page is here: http://newspulse.ai Feel free to comment on it, and to fill the form (with a fake email if you don't want to hear about it again!), that will kickstart my news source catalog.
Thanks for any help!