Ask HN: Collaborative Filtering + Interweb == Good Times?
I got a little too frustrated with my RSS subscriptions becoming unmanageable and repetitive. Sites like Techmeme and Technorati have become worthless for me. Digg and Reddit have both broken down tremendously under the extensive growth, and the quality of content as it pertains to me no longer has any value. I don't think joe-shmoe's vote on something should matter as much to me as say, a Hacker News participant reading the same things I do. Submitting URLs for public ranking just seems silly.....
So, decided to get motivated and build a collaborative filtering engine coupled with a feed aggregator that provides recommended, ranked, and categorized content based upon the reading and voting habits of users, as well as article similarities. Users can pick the specific categories of information they are interested in, or define your own.
Since I've basically eliminated the frustrations of my RSS subscriptions through traditional readers, I figured it'd be good to open it up to some users to get some feedback and utilization data for training the collaborative filtering mechanism (linear semantic indexing...).
You can subscribe to a list of fixed sources, or add your own.
Site is up at: http://news.80concepts.com
You can browse ranked and recommended content by categorization: http://news.80concepts.com/category/geekdom/
You can perform time based context queries: http://news.80concepts.com/home/?q=britney+spears&period=weekly
Or even for specific categories/keyword/time based combinations: http://news.80concepts.com/category/entertainment/alltime/?q=twitter
View popular topics via tagged content: http://ofthenow.80concepts.com/tags/
As a nice byproducts: new content source discovery happens naturally and effectively, and searching becomes actually useful for time and trend based queries without the convoluted madness when context is important.
I've also exported similarity data via 2D plot for imported articles via XML as well: http://news.80concepts.com/news-sim.xml I'm sure that could produce some neato-keen-visualization via flash or otherwise if that kind of geekery appeals to someone.
If you would like to see anything specific included, I'm all ears.
We'll take first couple hundred signups....
For those of you who know me, feel free to email me directly... For those who don't (I was, amongst other things, the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com) -- I welcome any feedback, complaints, rants, thoughts, or free beer...