Disqus - Latest Comments for plightbo

Re: Mionews proves why API’s are a must

plightbo — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:43:19 -0000

Thanks! The Twitter issue was because the Twitter API was timing out. I'd insert a "go figure" snark, except I'm sure mioNews is about to get pounded and show a bunch of errors, so who am I to judge? :)

Re: NoiseRiver: Filters are not the only next big thing!

plightbo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:41:05 -0000

Karim - definitely. There is still a lot of tuning I can do, but the
way I wrote the relevance engine makes it easy for me to modify the
algorithm on the fly and then "recalculate" the scores for topics and
people based on their like/hate actions. I'm sure it'll take some time
to get the equation just right.

I'll write something up on the mioNews approach soon!

Re: louisgray.com: New NoiseRiver App Adds Interest Filters to FriendFeed Stream

plightbo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:14:20 -0000

For an alternative implementation that is rooted in the same core beliefs that Karim had when he built NoiseRiver, check out my little side project mioNews (http://mionews.com). Instead of rating topics up/down, you rate articles and let the mioNews engine do the rest of the work for you (it works by using auto-tagging). The UI is very very different from NoiseReader - it's closer to Google Reader. I'd love to hear what people think of the two approaches. No matter what, I'm glad to see multiple efforts on solving the noise problem.

Re: NoiseRiver: the Friendfeed App That’s Your New Bicycle.

plightbo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:49:41 -0000

NoiseRiver is definitely on the right track. I just left a comment at Karim's blog, but I wanted to also share my take on how to cut through the noise: http://mionews.com. It's also based on FriendFeed, but the UI is very different. It takes a reader-style UI approach and introduces a couple of additional concepts:

* You can "hate" articles. This is instead of "hating" topics. In the background, we auto-tag articles and therefore automatically adjust the scores for various topics for you.
* You can't adjust the like/hate score for individual topics, but you can track topics and see which stories match those topics.
* Unrelated to the relevance ranking, there are some different UI things going on compared to FF and NR. Grouping friends in to folders may turn out to be a good way to keep track of close friends despite other noise-makers (ie: Scoble).

It'll be interesting to compare the output of the two different relevance techniques as time goes on.

Re: NoiseRiver: Filters are not the only next big thing!

plightbo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:33:08 -0000

Great to see other people thinking about similar problems. For the last year I've been working on a site (http://mionews.com) that attempted to cut through the noise, but as of this weekend I converted it to be 100% FriendFeed-based. The result is a similar concept, though with a different UI and a focus on "hating" individual stories rather than topics. Behind the scenes we auto-tag articles and relevance rank them.

I'll bee keeping an eye on NoiseRiver. Would love to hear what you think of mioNews!