Using AI To Filter RSS Feeds 53
holden writes "According to a blog post, AideRSS has moved from closed to open beta. I've been using AideRSS over the past few weeks to filter my RSS feeds (including Slashdot and Reddit) and I've been quite impressed. They talk a bit about how the filtering system works, which apparently tracks a mixture of things, from pick-up in other blogs, to some clustering technology."
recursion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Potentially scary side-effects already. (Score:3, Insightful)
I fail to see your reasoning. Companies have always been able to "monitor" blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds. And they aren't controlling the social aspects of the internet at all. A press release has always been a standard communication means of corporations; as long as they aren't creating fake blogs, I don't think they are trying to control any aspect of the social internet.
And personally, if a company does analyze blogs, I think it's a great thing. It means they care what normal people think about them and their products. Almost every blogger who talks about a company hopes that the company is listening to them.
As an AI student, I wish people on Slashdot weren't so afraid of "intelligent" algorithms. They really aren't meant to be evil, they are usually meant to make something that is tedious more efficient. Yes, it can be abused, but just about everything can; For example, just because airplanes are used by the military to kill people does not make airplanes inherently evil.
Personalize instead (Score:3, Insightful)
Using an AI to resort those feeds is definitely interesting from a coders point of view but trying to give some kind of objective view to a feed is probably not what the average user wants.
Why not do it the other way around and personalize them instead? Maybe it has been done before, but it would be nice if there was a reader to rerank (or even filter out) certain domains, keywords, tags and categories. It could take the given rank as the base score and then resort it according to the user's personal preference, e.g. if someone doesn't like politics he could give the keywords "Bush, Cheney, election, etc." a negative mulitplier and maybe the keyword "funny" gets a positive one. It could even consider the time of the day - politics in the morning and funny pictures during the lunchbreak or something.
Just a qick thought though, someone can perhaps come up with something better. Anyway, I am pretty sure that personalization is the better approach here.
Re:Personalize instead (Score:2, Insightful)
i also think their should just be a thumbs up/ thumbs down option which would save you typing in.