Using AI To Filter RSS Feeds

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."

Comments

Some filtered RSS feeds

[holdenkarau]

I'm not sure if it is bad form to comment on your own story, but here goes anyways :). You can take a look at the scored version of the slashdot RSS feed here, or del.icio.us or my (holden's) blog. There is also a really cool widget I've put on the side of my blog which lets people subscribe to only posts of a certain quality (you can look at it here).

If Only ...

[nxtr]

If only they could get the AI to do the work I'm missing out when I'm reading RSS feeds.

Potentially scary side-effects already.

[gethoht]

There are some companies out there(i.e. http://www.collectiveintellect.com/) that are using AI to mine RSS feeds and specifically the blogosphere, and selling that data to corporations for various reasons.

Lets say you're a drug company that is releasing a potentially controversial drug. You can mine the data of the blogosphere and issue press releases as a pre-emptive strike to larger media stories. This starts the real beginning of being able to effectively monitor and even potentially control some of the social aspects of the internet. I think it's a great innovation indeed, with potentially scary side-effects.

Personally it is nice to be able to filter through a billion RSS feeds to find information that I'm interested in though.

Another site using AI

[Sanity]

Thoof (disclaimer: its my website) uses Bayesian analysis (you could call it AI, so much as anything is AI) to determine what you are interested in reading, based on a variety of factors, including:

• The referring website (and what other people from that site liked)
• Your OS/Browser (and what other people with your OS/Browser liked)
• Your geographic location (and what other people close to you liked)
• What you yourself read

It also allows users to edit stories, a mechanism conceptually similar to a wiki, but with an additional voting process to help prevent abuse.

Unlike AideRSS, Thoof isn't an RSS aggregator, rather users submit stories, in a manner similar to Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

recursion

[shird]

What if the 'other blogs' they 'pick up' on, are in turn using AideRSS to determine what to blog. The whole blogging thing really does seem like one giant feedback loop with only a few people generating actual useful content.

Re:recursion

[jagdish]

So basically the situation would be unchanged.

Personalize instead

[Catil]

I think there are basically two kinds of RSS Feeds, either they show the latest news (last in first out) or they show an already sorted frontpage (e.g. "crowdsourced" like Digg); both are useful.

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.