Boxxet, a Tool for Automatic Webpage Generation

tkajstura writes "New Scientist is reporting on 'a new tool [called Boxxet that] offers to create websites on any subject, allowing web surfers to sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant news stories, blog posts, maps and photos.' It uses an algorithm based on unique word count to filter an index and integrate relevant subject information into the page, called a 'Boxxet.' The tool will first be available by invitation only, opening to the general public by the end of April 2006."

Great

[Data Link Layer (743774)]

Now that we are finally rid of geocities pages some new shit service comes along.

Re:Great

[EverDense (575518)]

Whoever modded that as "Troll" is mitigating a valid point.

Re:Y99 Dates

[commodoresloat (172735)]

Slashdot editors are still pissed off that there was no major damage from the Y2K bug. They continue using Y99 dates in protest.

Finally!

[FlyByPC (841016)]

So you say you wanna be a blogger, but you're just too darn lazy? No problem!

Re:Finally!

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

So you say you wanna be a blogger, but you're just too darn lazy? No problem!

Tired of other people's inane blather earning micro dollars while all you do is bore you co-workers? Boxxit might just be for you!

Re:Finally!

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Tired of other people's inane blather earning micro dollars while all you do is bore you co-workers? Boxxit might just be for you!

I just go through Slashdot and bore my co-workers with other people's inane blather.

Re:Finally!

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

If you ever run out be sure and read my journal [slashdot.org]: its got hours and hours of it ;-)

Re:Finally!

[slughead (592713)]

My friend is paying me to do her website on astrology. This might save me from having to read all that heinous shite.

I've been reading books for days and I still think a "house" is a building.

Re:Finally!

[by Anonymous Coward]

This looks like one more giant leap toward underwhelming mediocrity on the internet. Why generate your own content when someone else will do it for you? Why verify a story when it can just take up space on your website? How lame...

AC

Re:Finally!

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

To be fair, the article wasn't clear on whether this was a matter of generating websites or personal portals. The latter is a lot less fluffy, and could be a useful way to organize the information you want to absorb every day.

So the question is, has anyone tried Boxxet? If so, can you provide more details?

Re:Finally!

[drgonzo59 (747139)]

When it is not clear, you are free to assume the worse. Whatever you assume about it, blame the ambiguous market speak of Boxxet...

Re:Finally!

[egomaniac (105476)]

[-(friend^2)]^(1/2)

*Sigh*. You know, when you start laughing out loud at mathematical formulas, some sort of line has been crossed. The Line of Ultimate Geekiness, perhaps. I must reluctantly admit to being on the wrong side of that line.

beta seen here!

[busman (136696)]

explains slashdot articles!

Hope the got that dupe bug fixed

Interesting idea.

[parasonic (699907)]

I'd be interested to hear from users how well this thing works. Is it powerful enough to be useful? If so, cool!

Any experiences here?

Hurry!

[gardyloo (512791)]

Subscribers can see the random crap early!

Ambiguous

[XanC (644172)]

Are you talking about Boxxet or Slashdot?

Example result?

[NitroWolf (72977)]

Does anyone have an example page that is a result of this alogrithm? The article is a little sparse on details or functionality, and you can't see anything if you go to the website.

From what I've read, I've tried to come up with stuff that I'd put in the first 5 links to give to the site, and I'm having trouble. I don't necessarily like to view the same things or same types of things from day to day, so I'm not sure how useful that'd be...

More junk websites with adverts

[zubernerd (518077)]

I can just see this program being used to "create" content to push more advertising. Just what we need more of, websites that have recycled content put online for ad revenue.

Re:More junk websites with adverts

[AlterTick (665659)]

I can just see this program being used to "create" content to push more advertising. Just what we need more of, websites that have recycled content put online for ad revenue.

I think you're right on the money there. 9 out of 10 websites generated with this "tool" will simply be haphazard conglomerations of useless crap skimmed from other useless crap websites. In fact, I bet we'll end up with a flood of pointless drivel that makes those scads of fake search results pages that keep showing up high in google

Google?

[DoninIN (115418)]

Isn't that what a search engine does? You type in a phrase and it finds things like that and sends you a web page?

Re:Google?

[dR.fuZZo (187666)]

This is completely different. It rearranges search results in a pretty manner and it takes so long that you have to wait for the page to load. Completely different!

That's right...

[danpsmith (922127)]

...I only read the best webpages generated by algorithms which suggest what I might find interesting...

This is an affiliate persons wet dream

[CitznFish (222446)]

and a nightmare for search engines. Hopefully there will be a way to detect boxxet pages and purge them, or at least show them seperately from relative content. Going from a search result link to another link full of partial information will be frustrating for many users and only benefits those who are makign aliving off of google ads, affiliates, etc.

Re:This is an affiliate persons wet dream

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

Going from a search result link to another link full of partial information will be frustrating for many users and only benefits those who are makign aliving off of google ads, affiliates, etc.

Welcome to the Internet. We hope you enjoy your stay.

Re:This is an affiliate persons wet dream

[That's Unpossible! (722232)]

This shouldn't be a problem unless high value sites start linking to boxxet pages.

Behold the power of pagerank.

Unique word count algorithm?

[nganju (821034)]

How long until someone (i.e. everyone) figures out how to fool the algorithm and exploit the system so that their blog posts show up every single day on the front page of the "Boxxet"? Unique word count has got to be the most naive algorithm out there. Remember in the nineties when every web page had a list of three thousand keywords at the very bottom of the page to fool the search engines of the time?

Re:Unique word count algorithm?

[Crayon Kid (700279)]

Remember in the nineties when every web page had a list of three thousand keywords at the very bottom of the page to fool the search engines of the time?

What nineties, I see it today all the time. Check out this dumb sucker [graphican.com].

KBBL DJ 3000

[PretzelWagon (770175)]

KBBL Boss: This is the DJ 3000. It plays CDs automatically, and it has three distinct varieties of inane chatter.

[presses a button]

DJ 3000: Hey, hey. How about that weather out there?
Woah! _That_ was the caller from hell.
Well, hot dog! We have a weiner.
Bill: Man, that thing's great!
Marty: _Don't_ praise the machine!
KBBL Boss: If you don't get that kid an elephant by tomorrow, the DJ 3000 gets your job.

[Marty punches it]

DJ 3000: Those clowns in congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.
Bill: [laughs] How does it keep up with the news like that?

Re:KBBL DJ 3000

[generic-man (33649)]

The frightening thing is that thanks to Bob FM [wikipedia.org] and Jack FM [wikipedia.org], we actually have automated radio stations with no DJs and pre-programmed chatter.

A perfect companion to /.

[MrNougat (927651)]

Boxxet will create the page for me, and then /. will read it for me. I don't need to get online at all!

Just great

[BertieBaggio (944287)]

This kind of tool might be nice for those people that are to lazy to either blog themselves or do some honest-to-god surfing, but can you really see publishers being thrilled that their content is going to be diluted and published on some Joe Q Random's Boxxet page?

Now, some bloggers and others might be happy to be republished verbatim outwith their control. That's fine. But most professional webmasters have a name for bots that go around taking content and putting it on other sites without permission*. The are called scrapers . The Boxxet bot and others like it are and will be banned by many webmasters (including myself) because the potential for abuse is too high.

There is also a name for such sites automatically produced by scrapers -- made for AdSense

* Note: There is no problem with sites that take headlines, write a summary/teaser and link back (like a certain site we are all very familiar with). These sites are doing a Good Thing(TM) for the content creators -- sending them an interested [ie targeted] audience. The problem for both the publishers and the search engines is the scraping. Only time will tell whether Boxxet is one of the troublemakers (cause the article and the site sure don't give many clues).

Need automated browsing

[andy314159pi (787550)]

As the volume of recycled content goes up, the noise ratio will eventually be too much for anything too put up with. That's why I'm working on an automated web surfer so that this the recycled content can find some readership.

I only hope...

[Audacious (611811)]

I only hope that they took into consideration hackers trying to break into websites. I've been getting lately:

Drupal: Someone trying to see if I am running Drupal.
Mambo: Someone trying to see if I am running Mambo.
phpmyadmin: Same as above.
xmlrpc.php: Used (or it used to be used) by both Drupal and Mambo.
index.php and index2.php: Used by both Drupal and Mambo.
cmd.gif: Four different sites configured to help hackers deface your site.

and lots of others. So my input would be to run a test site annonymously as Boxxet and see if the hackers can breach the site before releasing it for people to use. Otherwise - it looks like it might be a nice kind of program to use.

PS to whoever is running Slashdot: The "Sections" area is doing some strange things and gave me an error once about SectionPrefs(???).

Already been done by cybersquatter sites

[rubberbando (784342)]

Its the same bull that you get when you type in a domain name in your browser to see if its taken and find a cybersquatted site with search engine material on it to appear that the page actually has some original content.

I also see this sort of thing everytime I do a search on a search engine like Google or Yahoo. I will get a result with the descriptor blurb appearing to have info that I am looking for. When I click on the link, I get sent to some cybersquatted 3rd party search results page that is full of ads that have my search term (which the ads usually aren't relevant to) highlighted in their descriptions.

Now, automated link farming!

[Animats (122034)]

Just what we needed, a way for search engine "optimizers" to generate giant automated link farms. Even with manual blogging, there's an annoying tendency for blogs to link to blogs, and, eventually, to spam-type press releases. You know, stuff like this: We'd like to give a high five to our research team. Our portfolio is up 70% so far in 2006 and looking stronger every day! We hope our members have been keeping up with these incredible picks. Let's take a look at this next winner. (From a real spam.)

Now we'll have thousands of phony "news sources" like that, all linking to each other.

So now each search engine will have to develop an automated tool to find and ignore this dreck.

Word Count

[PhYrE2k2 (806396)]

PORN porn porn XXX xxx xxx TITTIES titties tittes NAKED naked naked SLUTS sluts sluts

Wow- this workd count filter rocks!

Of course!

[BumpyCarrot (775949)]

1. Automatically create awesome webpage.
2. Add Adwords.
3. ?
4. Profit!

Re:Of course!

[Suppafly (179830)]

Thats the first thing I thought of when I read about boxxet.

Re:Of course!

[hyfe (641811)]

Urg, how many times have you read that meme? .. and you still didn't get the gist of it?!

The point is to supply two premises which does does not lead the conclusion 4, and leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure 3.. you know, as a horrible, horrible business plan.

In your point however, premise 1 and premise 2 certainly leads to conclusion 4, leaving step 3 totally f*cking uneccesary.. and as a plan it thus actually makes sense (although it may or may not be doable, but that's for the feasibility analysis to discover :))

So, this is simply...

[Zadaz (950521)]

Taking something like

news.google.com -> Personalize -> Save Page as...

Except automated?

I guess sometimes the simple ideas are the best one.

Except when they're just dumb.

Copyright issues?

[zubinjdalal (816389)]

It would be interesting to see how much information Boxxet pulls off other sites and how it represents this as useful information without broaching copyrights.

Automatic /. comment generation

[Expert Determination (950523)]

Do you like this comment generated by my automatic slashdot comment generator? Do you like this comment? Viagra only 4.00 from here. Do you like this automatically generated comment. It can be filled up with any kind of content, hairy lobsters, automatic content. Do you like my automatic content generation. Bugs to smooth out. Beta version. Automatic slashdot comment generation. Only 4.00 with viagra. Well do you? Please come again.

Huh?

[Bellum Aeternus (891584)]

Gathering content for you to puruse based on a string text... isn't that what Google does? better? Sheesh, and with Google I'm stuck searching for same crap day in and day out. Everyday can be completely new crap.

What we are trying to do...

[youmon (959893)]

Sorry I haven't jumped in earlier but here goes.

The New Scientist article didn't describe it as well as I would have liked. Think about a place like Slashdot, which is a great destination for tech information. We think that there ought to be similar places for many other subjects, whether it is a sports team, school, hobby, etc.

The problem with trying to support many subjects is that most subjects cannot produce a community as active as Slashdot. So Boxxet is trying to using automation to augment the user submissions and preferences.

Who knows, this thing may be totally not useful, but we're going to give it a shot.

We expect to open up invitations starting next week. We did not expect to get on Slashdot so our queue is higher than expected.

We will try not to disappoint.

You Mon Tsang

Labor-saving devices

[isomeme (177414)]

Now if we can just develop some sort of automated tool that obsessively scans a list of webpages for updates, leaving inane comments when it encounters a new piece of content, we can all finally leave behind the drudgery of the web and enjoy more free time.

Just wait...

[mikael (484)]

... until people start maintaining blogs based on 'boxxet' news stories....

this should be an interesting infinite loop.

Is it good search engine?

[triso (67491)]

So, I guess the real question is, Is Boxxet based on a good search engine? If not, I can see Grandma setting one up to gather topics related to caning and getting entries like Naughty Linda likes to have her big bottom turned red with a hairbrush. Do you want to help? If that doesn't induce a heart attack I'll eat a bug.

Re:invitation only

[mmkkbb (816035)]

Did you forget to read the summary? It says invite-only in the last sentence. That goes for whoever modded you up, too.

Re:invitation only

[tcopeland (32225)]

"invitation only" makes a lot of sense... it helps you throttle the initial flood of folks until you've sorted out what people like and dislike.

We're using it for indi [getindi.com] (built with Rails, w00t!) and the waiting list [getindi.com] keeps growing, good times...

Re:Dubious Phlisophy

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

No the number of posters is growing very quickly, but the number posting new information grows very slowly. So they get gradually drowned out by the ever rising tide of cliches, plagiarism, tedious restatements of conventional wisdom with no original additions and total batshit bugfuck crazy gibberish.

I can't believe you could read /. regularly and find it a hard concept.