Boxxet, a Tool for Automatic Webpage Generation 109
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:2)
Re:Y99 Dates (Score:5, Funny)
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:3)
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
I've been reading books for days and I still think a "house" is a building.
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
Re:Finally! (Score:1)
Re:Finally! (Score:1)
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
If you are too lazy or too ignorant to understand why you need to give your developer the copy, you end up paying someone else to do it.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Interesting)
AC
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
So the question is, has anyone tried Boxxet? If so, can you provide more details?
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
To be more fair, I would hope it would mimic the personalized google page, with other useful features added. I can't imagine how they can actually place useful content on the 'virtual space' without scraping it from other websites, which is not going to fly very long in the internet community. FGoogle's already catching some heat for it with their news feature
Re:Finally! (Score: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.
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
If a blogger posts and nobody reads it, did they really blog?
RTFA (Score:1, Informative)
Re:invitation only (Score:2)
Re:invitation only (Score:3, Insightful)
We're using it for indi [getindi.com] (built with Rails, w00t!) and the waiting list [getindi.com] keeps growing, good times...
beta seen here! (Score:4, Funny)
Hope the got that dupe bug fixed
Re:beta seen here! (Score:1)
Hope they got that dube bug fixed
Invite (Score:1)
Re:Invite (Score:1)
Re:Invite (Score:1)
Wireless in brothels next, maybe...?
Interesting idea. (Score:3)
Any experiences here?
Hurry! (Score:4, Funny)
Ambiguous (Score:4, Funny)
Example result? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More junk websites with adverts (Score:1)
Re:More junk websites with adverts (Score:1)
Stop the insanity (Score:1, Interesting)
PLEASE - no more of this crap!
Re:Stop the insanity (Score:1)
If you pay me money, I won't release it.
Re:More junk websites with adverts (Score:2)
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
Re:More junk websites with adverts (Score:2)
Then again, that might just be how true AI comes about... (evolution of the `most fit' memes that other sites pickup up and re-generate in their content)---and whole Internet becoming a neural-like net that passes around these (and other random mutations) memes (wow, that's a bit out of topic).
Re:More junk websites with adverts (Score:2)
Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Re:Google? (Score:2)
Anyway, I could think of a shell script calling curl or lynx that could do this, but watch them lord it out as the Next Great Thing to those who don't know better
That's right... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an affiliate persons wet dream (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is an affiliate persons wet dream (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to the Internet. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Re:This is an affiliate persons wet dream (Score:2)
Behold the power of pagerank.
Unique word count algorithm? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
What nineties, I see it today all the time. Check out this dumb sucker [graphican.com].
Re:Unique word count algorithm? (Score:2)
I don't think this guy has really thought about how easy it is to break these types of things.
KBBL DJ 3000 (Score:5, Funny)
[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 (Score:3, Informative)
A perfect companion to /. (Score:3, Funny)
Just great (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Need automated browsing (Score:1)
Re:Need automated browsing (Score:2)
I only hope... (Score:3, Insightful)
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(???).
Re:I only hope... (Score:1)
Re:I only hope... (Score:2)
Already been done by cybersquatter sites (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Already been done by cybersquatter sites (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Already been done by cybersquatter sites (Score:2)
Re:Already been done by cybersquatter sites (Score:2)
Now, automated link farming! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Wow- this workd count filter rocks!
Of course! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Of course! (Score:2)
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 :))
Re:Of course! (Score:1)
Re:Of course! (Score:1)
Adsense = YOU GETTING PAID for advertising (clicks). Sounds like a better idea.
So, this is simply... (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dissociated Press (Score:1, Interesting)
Automatic /. comment generation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dubious Phlisophy (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't believe you could read
Huh? (Score:2)
Sorry . . .why? (Score:1)
Re:Sorry . . .why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sorry . . .why? (Score:1)
What we are trying to do... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:What we are trying to do... (Score:2)
What I think would be helpful is if you, either just replying to me here or on the main Boxxet page, provided some examples. Something like "Typing in '[some words]' might get you a page like THIS(LINK)' THat would give readers a better idea of what to expect, so we're not just talking out of our ass.
Not that Slashdot isn't a good place for talking out of your ass. *grin*
-Trillian
Labor-saving devices (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
this should be an interesting infinite loop.
RSS? (Score:2)
I haven't RTFA but do they mention how they do it? Is it just a simple RSS aggregator with a few thousand feeds and then it filters the results? Something like that can be done in a day.
Another blood sucking RSS utility written by me: cribot.com [cribot.com] (cut it some slack, this was done in a day or two.
Is it good search engine? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Is it good search engine? (Score:1)
Re:Is it good search engine? (Score:1)
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.
Grandma, using a bleeding-edge service like this? Not likely. Most people never bother changing the default search engine in IE from msn.com.
Apologies (Score:2)
When will boxxet finally put Zonk out of a job? Surely /. could get better stories with an advanced computer program.
*tongue in cheek*
Did someone else missread the headline??? (Score:2)