Slashdot Mirror
Computers Summarize the News
oily_ants writes "I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites. That's why I like slashdot so much. Good (??) summaries of all of the stuff out there on the net. Now there is a project at Columbia University by the nlp group that attempts to generate computer summaries of all of those news articles on different web sites. The project is called Newsblaster and the summaries are excellent. You can read about the project on regular news sites like Online Journalism Review or USA Today."
news.google.com. Just released yesterday. I haven't yet played around with it enough to say whether it's cool or not, but it does look promising.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
"I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites"
So you read Slashdot, where they are happy to post the same story over and over, on different days?
I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites. That's why I like slashdot so much.
I'm sure most will agree with me when I say that this makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.
Try Google News Headlines. It automatically finds news stories on the different news sites and groups them togther. From the page you can see the most popular news topics and read several different views of the same story.
Well, there's the answer to the Ask Slashdot from a couple of days ago.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
As others have pointed out, they've also just launched a beta news summary service.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
HA! this guy must be a newbie. you could generate the same slashdot headlines with the bbsport slashdot story generator that provides the typos, misspellings and bad links that you know and love, and you wouldn't know the difference
...whether this will include the obscure stories that are actually interesting, or whether it'll be just a rehash of the major stories that we can find in ten or twelve other places.
Our company has been running a similar service for a very long time. It's free, and you canget it here. It's called NewsScape.
Sounds like a good idea, but I'm worried about the "Newsbots" objectivity. If I wanted to read a bunch of stories about the latest NVidia GeForce 4 release, 10 reasons more RAM is better, and why you should upgrade your hard drive, I'd just watch TechTV.
It hurts when I pee.
Looks like subscriptions can be axed, Slashdot won't need editors anymore!
Although, it will only be possible to replace slashdot's editors with the newsblaster program if they can implement some sort of misspelling and false information algorithm.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
I've been using my.yahoo.com for years as my start page. It gives me a good concise and highly configurable view of many news feeds and financial information (stock quotes, etc). Recently, however, it has become overwhelmed my annoying ads.
Does anyone know of an alternative? The newsfeed in the article looks prommising, but not exactly what I'm looking for.
Does anybody know how I can get access to Newsblaster so I can read a synopsis of the article to determine whether Newsblaster is something that would interest me?
http://newshub.com/
To tell you the truth, at first I thought the summaries were TOO good; I was suspicious that it wasn't really automated.
But after looking at a few more stories, it looks like it just pulls sentences out of the stories that seem to have a different point to make, and strings them together.
Sometimes you see some redundancy and some non-sequiturs, but I have to admit the illusion is pretty good.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This is a somewhat dangerous trend, IMHO. CNN Headline news gives us blurbs...soundbites...with no substance. "Israelis shot Palestinians" or vice versa on a daily basis. Little reporting of substance of negotiations; why there was a conflict in that location at that time for what reason. The great thing about the internet is that there is great reporting in depth. I like to check out the Drudge report, BBC, disinfo.com, etc on a regular basis to get a good blend of various points of view so that I can make my OWN opinion. I don't want to be served watered down sentence fragments by a corporate AOL/TimeWarner beheometh. Slashdot is one of a few exceptions to this rule, since they typically link to articles of substance and allow for dialogue and debate by (usually) intelligent users. The moderation system isn't perfect, but it helps dodge the trolls. My guess is that automated summaries will lose the flavour of good journalism/writing, and by taking an "average" will end up with a C+ "factual comprehension" review as opposed to multiple A+ "theory" and "syntehsis" editorials.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Check out this odd story about incarcerated Browns. The summarizer could apparently still use some manual supervision.
So where's the slashbox for it?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
The news. or newsblaster sites remind me of the days when the web was just starting to get going. No banners, pics, ads, frames, etc... Just lines and lines of text for one to sift through.
This is usually Copyright Infringement - Fair Use Doctrine is not applicable.
Every one of these paraphrasers lift large chunks of syntax.
I would maintain that this is still a plagiarsist or copyright violation unless it is done really well.
And it never will be done really well unless NeuralNetwork chips are common and mankind has advances in Artificial Intelligence research. Five years away at best.
I dare the commerical services to hit Enyclopedia Britannica. Or I dare them to routinely slurp New York Times and boast that they digest the New York Times..
A massive Civil Suit is awaiting some of these early adapters planning on creating a business out of this.
And they deserve it.
It is just "Word Twiddling", however useful.
If the twiddling is done live, once, per user client, then maybe its OK, but none of these business models are setup THAT way.
What are the copyright or other legal issues to republishing news stories collected from web sites? The Newsblaster site clearly states where the information comes from - like every good college student is taught to cite information sources. On the other hand, on the bottom of many of the stories is the notice: "Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed." Is collecting and condensing news stories "republishing" - does this violate copyright stuff?
www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/
although I found some of the summaries slightly shallow, they are not bad.
The problem is that it becomes an average of opinion, when you sometimes need that longer insightful article. This easily could become the news of sheep everywhere.
This could be bad when facts come in to contradict initial impressions.
oops
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Don't post the competition!!!!
I think it does an OK job for a computer, but nobody's going to accuse those summaries of being overly coherent (or well-typed).
Occasionally, the summary will juxtapose two sentences (it's just ripping examplar sentences from different stories), that when put together create screw up the meaning:
"Now that David Letterman is staying at CBS, ABC s corporate bosses took steps to mend fences with"Nightline"host Ted Koppel on Tuesday. And that ' s appealing to beer companies..."
Doh!
I think a more fruitful avenue of research is new methods of presenting information so that humans can decide what to read. Instead of using tricks to simulate a computer understanding the meaning of an article, this uses the same tricks to simply assist reading the article.
Apple's research group did some interesting work in that area in the 90's.
I suspect that U.S.A. today has been using a similar technology for years now to generate their "McNews".
I already get this in my email from other people:
Hi, I send you this news to ask for your advice!
Along with all kinds of pertinent documents...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
...500 different opinions on every headline with a little insight here and there. It's already like getting news from different sources.
As intriguing a tool as Newsblaster might appear to some it could prove be be a dangerous tool resulting in even more sloppy reporting than we see even today.
Far too many reporters and editors could be tempted to use in wrecklessly instead of doing true investigative work themselves.
We already have some excellent news monitoring services to gather news stories from around the world. Most of them have proven themselves trustworthy and also provide us with a clear picture of the sources of these stories so things can quickly be investigated when someone is in doubt about sources and facts.
The electronic age has been a boon to all types of writers including investigative reporters but let's not go overboard with every new "toy" that is thrown at us as many of us are prone to do.
There is too much sloppy, inferior reporting being done already.
Newsblaster does have potential, but if it is used at all should be approached with the same caution a soldier uses picking his way across a mine field -- or a grenade that somebody has already pulled the pin from and handed to us.
Wow, this bot's grammar is far better than the human editors at Slashdot!
This is what it said about Princess Margaret dying. For some reason, it decides half way through that Wallace Simpson is the same person!!
"Princess Margaret led a life largely on the sidelines of the royal family but she also attracted national sympathy when she surrendered love for duty. But as a twice - divorced American, she was considered unsuitable as a wife for a king, and the British government advised Edward not to marry her. Princess Margaret, 71, the younger sister of Britain ' s Queen Elizabeth II who once was adored as a fun - loving child in a fairy - tale castle but who led a romantically troubled and turbulent adult life, died Feb. 9 at a hospital in London after a stroke. Margaret died just three days after Elizabeth marked her 50th year on the throne. Princess Margaret ' s life contained one great contradiction. Her tender touch betrayed their secret, as Margaret attentively brushed fluff from the dashing officer ' s jacket. Until then, Group Captain Peter Townsend and the Princess had been forced to hide their feelings."
Your not the only one defending Linux. Your the only one defending Linux at a bunch of brainwashed lost causes.
When I compared the summarization to the original articles, I found all the original sentences (verbatim) in the articles. In other words, Newsblaster doesn't write anything, per se, it decides which sentences are most representative of the set of original articles.
I mention this only to point out that Newsblaster represents no threat to the livelihood of reporters, whatsoever. Without the reporters, there would *be* no original story.
Generating brand new sentences is much more difficult than deciding which sentences represent content common to several documents, which Newsblaster does very well.
So they grab news from the Washington Post, Reuters and the BBC (amongst others), but leave out the National Enquirer? Why can't I have all my "Space Aliens Abducted Britney Spears" stories in one place?
I don't see any concrete information on what it does to summarize stories...is it using something like Cyc? Does it just have some heuristics for picking out the important parts of paragraphs?
Also, who else thought "neuro-linguistic programming" for at least a moment when they saw "nlp"?
... that attempts to generate computer summaries of all of those news articles on different web sites. The project is called Newsblaster and the summaries are excellent Is it relly possible that a computer created an excellent summary of a news article? All the computer generated articles I've read were almost unreadable... Just look at babelfish translation. Is that really english? Hope that NewsBlaster will be much better!
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Its bold of slashdot to have an article about technology that may put them out of business. Why not go ahead and put up other articles that are just as bold? ;-)
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here is one borderline-incoherent Newsblaster summary:
Will Hollywood's 'Tomb' be a box office 'Raider?'
Summary:
After the success of last year ' s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and high expectations for Resident Evil, out Friday, studios are booting up for more. The game: Alice in Wonderland gets a twisted remake in American McGee ' s Alice, a gothic horror version of the classic tale; based on the game by Electronic Arts Studio: Dimension Status: Horror master Wes Craven directs. The game: A sunglasses-wearing all-American hero blows away bad guys with machine guns; 3D Realms Studio: Dimension Status: In limbo. Star Angelina Jolie was attached to the sequel before the original Tomb Raider opened. The game: Amateur taxi drivers take to the sidewalks and crowded streets, picking up customers and delivering them to their destinations unscathed; Sega Studio: No distributor yet. Brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber(Montana) currently are writing the screenplay.
Last night. Slashback. Jeez.
-- SlashChick
Pretty soon summaries will be one word 'catch-phrases' which convey enough meaning for us to get the gist of the story. We can then 'think' to the computer let me learn more about this. And then we will.
the future. god bless it.
Those. clowns. in. Congress. did. it. again.
What. a. bunch. of. clowns.
i check www.newslinx.com on a daily basis. very good source of all-round news.
So I need to go to several regular newsites to read the stories about a site that is supposed to make such requirements unnecessary......ok
I want to read today's news today. I can pick yesterday's paper out of the trash can. They're still speculating on how Holy Cross will make out against Kansas. (Hello, the game was last night. Kansas won.)
The O'Reilly network already has a pretty good resource for news from multiple sites in the Meerkat Wire Service
Eschew Obfuscation
1. yahoo's my start page. I get to see up to 4 possibly-relevant news articles.
2. Fark. I get my good share of the weird news, and of course NewsFlash articles, which are just links to other news sites. I'm happy.
The article in the Online Journalism Review says: "Newsblaster seems to make things somewhat generic or more conservative, especially when summarizing reports over several days. This can take away the editorial edge or nuance that a reporter or editor might use to make a lead or report powerful. Summarizing news over several days in this approach results in a certain staleness."
I noticed the "blandness" of the summaries too, but I think that's a benefit-- reading CNN stories can get really tiring after a few minutes since everything has to have as much punch as possible.
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
Here are some papers about Newsblaster and computer text summarization in general.
Reserach Papers
I'm not sure if they've done anything really novel. I skimmed through one of the more recent papers, on sentence ordering; but that seem to only operate on the same event There's research like this going one at alot of major universities like CMU and MIT. That said, it does look impressive.
Humorless sig goes here.
I assume that means you only read the stories here, and not the posts.
Compare the summary with the opening sentences of the first and last articles. Maybe we should wait a bit before speculating on the business impact of this "technology".
-- Nobody should take away Microsoft's freedom to innovate, particularly since they haven't used it yet
i wonder how long until they have a subscription plan.
someone should make line graphs.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
I do think this service would be a lot more usefull if it were done so that one didn't have to go to a seperate page for the summary.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
This new averaged, filtered, genericized "news" is exactly the kind of crap suited to a society that spawned "Judge Judy" and "A Current Affair". Sure, it's a nice piece of technical wizardry, but all things clever are not useful or worthwhile.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
local Linux users group with their own irc server. Someone help me badmouth these guys, they Windows bash constantly. im sick of being the only one to defend Windows?
Our product works by first categorizing text articles, then identifying which phrases most effectly support the categorization of the article.
subject of copyright infringement: several people have pointed out that the linked site may go beyond fair use of text on the original news sites.
I bet that the university obtained permission like I did. I sent about 10 news web sites copious documentation on what my system does, and three gave me permission to use their sites. As is usual in life, it helps to ask politely!
-Mark Watson www.markwatson.com
I have yet to figure out exactly what his point is in a story, so it would be really interesting to see software try and handle it.
Of course, it did say it summarizes NEWS stories.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There is an easy way to sort out badly-formulated articles. Just let the reades decide if the article is:
:)
a) interesting
b) well-written
c) in the right column
or similar.
So the majority of people who visit these sites wont have to worry about "bad-news"
Those articles that get downvoted get off the frontpage. This process repeats whenever an article is added and assures a high-quality.
comp.sci
open source program for summarizing text
I like Slashdot because it keenly catagorizes highly interesting tech news as well as news on movies and T.V. Its also updated casually all day long so you can keep refreshing and something new comes up.
The most important thing is user comments like these. Its an outlet for tons of intelligent people to post additional insights on the various topics that come up.
Oh and dont forget CowboyNeal, he is teh leet of them all.
*I'm not trying to take a side in that, but I've recently found American news sources *seem* to skew that kind of news a little.
No I'm not trolling.
As the summary here shows there are still a few kinks in the system.
/.
While I have to agree with some people that this isn't in-depth reporting I do think that it is pretty interesting AI. When it comes down to it the problem is not that a computer might be summarizing our news. The problem is twofold.
Firstly people are not always inclined to look beyond summaries. When faced with typical time constraints people prefer to look at summaries because they do not have time to search across a dozen sources and articles. This is why USA today became big in the first place. Nothing there is more than 1 column long. (Incidentally did anybody else find it hilarious that this system "summarizes" USA today who themselves summarize other news sources?)
Secondly much of the news is the same. News is big business and most major news media tell the stories that sell. Because they are all targeting the same markets they tell the same stories and in the same ways. Therefore there is little difference between CNN, the NY Times, etc in terms of tone and "facts". Especially since much of "their news" comes from the same wire services such as Reuters. Fox News is different but that is because they have abandoned the mantle of impartiality and become all conservative all the time.
In essence this system is perfect for the internet news style. Breif summaries of facts followed by more "in-depth" leads that we may peruse as we wish. The real question is, when will this begin drawing on sites like Indymedia, The Register and
Basically, it looks at the headlines on Yahoo/Reuters, and finds sentences that scan as 5/7/5, and uses Perl cleverness to present them as a little news haikus (or senryu, if you wanna be picky). It's great stuff:
I'm hooked :)
They have archives going back to the beginning of 2001, with only a few holes (e.g. the days after September 11), and they talk about how they are doing everything. Bonus points: you can have the haiku headlines mailed to you automagically every day. I just hope they have the bandwidth (etc) to withstand Slashdot....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
For Toronto news - try hogdex
Wrong on every count.
/. gets is news from other places and is always hours or days late with it. The worst thing you can do is get all your news from one source.
/. (And my favorite of your list "USA Today") Sometimes you get more information than contained in a story merely by seeing how different people report the story! Reading one paragraph summaries of the days news will tell you nothing at all. Maybe worse, mislead you due to there not being enough information.
Besides the fact that
Every news site has some kind of slant to it. CNN, NPR,
I read news from about 10 sources a day and if I see multiple articles that I'm not interested in they're easy to skip. If I am intersted in them I read them on all sites. You get much much more information that way.
Though you do need to pick your sites. If you look at CNN, MSNBC and Salon and all three are merely parroting Reuters then you know your not doing yourself any good.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I hope they've done some serious testing on all these news stories. My guess is the summarization of nothing is still nothing :)
- warez.google.com
- porn.google.com
- ogg.google.com
- divx.google.com
We should have a poll! Ah crap, I guess they probably won't do any of that. Instead we'll probably get:I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
This is doubly funny because last spring I took a class in computer graphics by the man behind augmented reality, which is again on the front page today because of the street sign article.
This means:
for when super-intelligent machines take over the world. Then they`ll be making the news AND reporting it. Perhaps we should build in such an interface now - perhaps they`ll be easier on us then...
www.newsnow.co.uk does similar stuff I guess, but is the summary builder the thing here?
Really, is there a need to preface every subject with "News on"? It reminds me of the Friends episode descriptions that all start "The one about"...
This example, is particularly amusing, as it conflates stories on Jim Brown and H. Rap Brown.
Check out newsseer It was written by the same people who wrote citeseer, the great research index.
What the hell does simulating a NeuralNet chip on a standard CPU have to do with your boast "do them on paper or mentally" ?!?!?!
Thats insane talk.
One cluster of Neural Chips would outperform a pentium by so much speed that the comparison is almost moot if productive work (scanning hundreds of articles an hour) is needed.
Neural Nets do indeed need to be on chips for sentient AI to paraphrase the material in a way 100% guranteed not to infringe upon Copyright.
mankind has no such AI rogramming talent at this time without a NeuralNet AI.
I am talking about sentient thought here. To prevent any "Word Twiddling" naysayers from pestering a news digesting company into court day after day until bankrupt.
YOu think you are so smart? Write a program that paraphrases the Copyrighted scores to a NBA basketball game while in play and rebroadcasts them onto the internet. NBA claims the score itself is copyrighted user experience. One solution is to hint that a team just gained couple points or is behind a certain amount since the last scaore was announced.
I know this is stretching it, but 8 measures of musical notes can be copyrighted, or a sound clip can be trademark-copyprotected such as a Harely Engine.
Paraphrasing CORRECTLY to prevent lawsuits is tricky and needs intelligence to avoid legal repercussions.
So I repeat.... What the hell does a pen-and-paper simulation of a NeuralNet have to do with the fact that REAL Nearl chips would be needed to simulate the human mind in near real time?
As expected, the content it's presenting is predominantly US-centric. I'll be giving it a miss until they start scraping from a more globally representative pool of media sources...
Now I have more info to pipe to my Betabrite sign.
Why would fair use not be applicable?
Slurping a sentence or two from an 5-25 paragraph article and quoting it with attribution is considered fair use, right?
I'm not clear on if they're quoting and attributing it sufficiently to meet a legal challenge however. IANAL. But it's not the open and shut case you make it out to be as far as I can tell.
--LP
What if we have two such automated news services and they scan each other? Wouldn't they get stuck in some sort of infinite loop where they repeatedly pass the same story back and forth, summarizing it over and over again?
http://news.google.com/
It indexes a huge array of news sites several times a day for fresh stories - enter a search term and it will bring up all the headlines it can find for that subject. Best of all, it uses an algorithm to identify alternative coverage of any one story and lists these links in a block beneath the main search results. That way you get links to several different accounts of the same story (although in practise they end up being pretty similar due to using the same news agencys) without having to hunt around for them yourselves.
They're still working on the algorithm and are requesting as much feedback as possible - read more here.
And don't forget, sometimes the slash editors like a story so much they'll post it twice so we don't miss it! Can't beat that service with a stick!
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
Their sorce pages look like verbatim copies from the other sites -- clearly a copyright issue, no?
I think this would be pretty cool if they could add some sort of a SOAP/XML-RPC type interface where you could query on sections, stories, whatever. It would be nice to allow content syncing like this.
I was writing about this in response to a post in a user's journal the other day that even better would be to make a story content P2P system where you could allow story distribution. You might place a limit and only allow the summary to drive people to your site, but it could still help with bandwidth issues. This would basically be like an enhanced RDF/RSS type system but over a P2P type network you wouldn't even really have to host your own feeds for people. Add in some sort of DB persistance and you could just say "get new headlines and summaries from site x"--the system would bring in all the new content. Anyway, that is just a dream I have and probably will never happen the way some people feel about their content.
A summary of the latest developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict:
Israeli forces penetrated the heart of the Palestinians ' most important city Wednesday as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected myriad calls for restraint and pressed ahead with his nation ' s largest military operation in three decades. Facing international criticism, Israeli officials said the army was waging a war of self-defense against a Palestinian terrorist onslaught that has killed 340 Israelis since September 2000, including about 60 this month. Israeli military sources confirmed the attack in Gaza as Israeli forces pressed on with a sweeping offensive against the Palestinians in which they have occupied the West Bank city of Ramallah, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat ' s main power base. Israeli troops took up positions in schools and homes and conducted house-to-house searches in the Al Amari refugee camp for a second day.
Does it annoy anyone else that it mentions 340 murdered Israelis but not 1180 murdered Palestinians since the start of the new intifada?
Maybe this is represtative for US media?
The original poster is correct. This is essentially automated plagiarism. Here's why.
The service claims to be a computerized summary. However, in terms of copyright, a summary is something that expresses the same idea using different words. Therefore, using exact quotes and labelling them as a summary is a textbook case of plagiarism.
Nathan
I think you are confusing plagarism, and a violation of copyright. I am primarily concerned with the legal issue of Copyright violation raised by the previous poster, not an amorphous ethical one.
As Bitlaw points out, under the Copyright Act, four factors are to be considered in order to determine whether a specific action is to be considered a "fair use." These factors are as follows:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Dang, clicked the submit button by mistake.
Attempting to apply the four factors there, while some could be argued either way, I can see that on balance, you both might be right. I could probably make a stronger case that it doesn't qualify as fair use, than that it does, based on those four factors. I think I was focusing over-much on the "amount taken" criteria and overlooking the others.
--LP
if you're looking to compile your own customized view of the day's news, you might want to check out fyuze.
it will let you select sites that you want to see news from, organize them, and filter them by time and keyword. you can also rate stories so that in the future, it will be possible to do story recommendations. it's like an uber-my.yahoo
I've been using Newshub for 2 years now, does essentially the same thing.
newshub.com
I am pretty sure that plagiarism is a de facto copyright violation. You are using another author's words without proper credit. Even if the author is cited in the "summary," the definition of a summary is that the words are the authors, not the cited person's words. If they are going to use the author's exact words, it needs to be labeled as an "auto-quote" generator, rather than a summary.
Nathan
...but rather in identifying multiple documents that appear to be talking about the same thing. Summarization is a well-researched (but not well-perfected) NLP topic, but finding inter-document similarities is quite a bit more challenging. This is easy for me and you to do when we read something, but think about what it takes to get a machine to do this. Take a look at some of the examples--you'll find that although large chunks may be verbatim from document to document (especially ones that rehash standard news feeds like Reuters and AP), most articles have a different wording or spin on each idea.
:wq
Check out the Center For Intelligent Information Retrieval (UMASS) CIIR for their project on Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT). Not only does this categorize(assign topics to) news stories as they break, but it attempts to automatically group stories together as they break. I worked for them this summer (on a different project), and these are some really brilliant guys and girls!
Actually, a lot of large corporations do this so that their employees' time is spent efficiently. They employ a few cut-n-pasters who create repositories of stories that can be browsed from either their intranet or (at IBM) VMS accounts.
It sounds like this project could bring that service to the masses.
NewsBlaster today got blasted by something which is summarized as the 0.0 divided by ... DIVISION BY NULL, core dumped.
Way back in the stone-ages (1994), IBM was trying to build a news-reader called 'infoSage'. After waffling and not doing a very good job for many months, they finally threw up their hands and said, "Can't do it".
Or rather, "Can't do it well enough to charge for it." Even now, 6 years later, I can't see this happening. The net is just too big, and natural language parsing is too obfuscated, for a computer system to do what it needs to do in this area. XML, (and self-describing data in general) looked like a step in the right direction, but it ultimately relies on a human being properly defining just what the hell the data IS.
I think that in the short term (and I'm not going to put a date on this, because I'm not THAT smart) our best connection with news content on the web is going to be Google (which would mean that you would have to know what you are looking for in the first place) and topic-specific sites like Slashdot, Meerkat, etc.
Just my two centavos.
FIRST perfect language parsing, THEN have computers try to sift through the universe for the stories. Until then, too much noise to trust a machine.
- oakbox
Not just answers, the correct questions.
while we're at it, i've got plans to take over the world, also, and i'm sure that violates all sorts of laws. Yay. Isn't the internet fun?
What do you mean when you say "OCR 'em"?
There may be a few news articles discussed here but this is no news site. This is more of a rumor mill / science forum / freak show site for the technically inclined. If you are looking a really good NEWS ONLY site I'd take a look at the Drudge Report, www.drudgereport.com. It's probably the simplest and most no frill site out there but you can always get the lastest news before anywhere else (even TV) and news you don't see anywhere else. I've made one of my regulars.
Another website that pre-dated this attempt, was Jack9.org - too bad @home went down or I could prove it with a link :(
Throughout it's 2 year lifetime it was parsing Slashdot.org, Fark.com, Clinko.com, Technocrat.net, isonews.com, techdirt.com, and kuro5hin.org.
Since the site is down (probably for a loooong time) this is not a promotion, just a fact.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Another site to look at is infobreakfast. This site summarizes the news in 10 words or less, with a nice clean interface to present it. News content is much like Wired - techie stuff with a little general and world news thrown in. Updated every hour.
Klerck says he doesn't live there anymore: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29531&cid=3176 529
You sir, are an idiot.