

Ask HN: What do I do next? - mysteryleo

For kicks and giggles (and honestly to keep my mind sharp), I built a memetracker. It is a good mental vacation from the day job.<p>It leveraged a lot of my technical interests in algorithms and machine learning. I put the result on the web, and am watching my statcounter flat line. Well, I get some hiccups when my gf visits.<p>So I guess the internet isn't a "build it and they will come" kind of place. Reality Checks are hard.<p>I'm not sure what I should be doing next to get the word out. Is there some magic I should be doing. Any veterans out there know what I should do?<p>Advice and pointers would help.
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chipsy
The site itself doesn't have content, it has a content aggregation service.
That makes it hard to spread in a viral fashion, especially when it's an
untargeted service spread amongst many verticals. It's useful, but the "wow
check this out" factor is missing.

One improvement would be to add a comment system and rely on UGC to keep
people around. But then you have to devise a way to populate stories and make
the site look livelier than it is, which may require some kind of comment bot.

Another thing you could do is start drilling down to smaller and smaller
niches and try to become a top search result in those, and then work your way
back to the huge verticals you currently have. As it is, you are basically
competing head-to-head with Google News.

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mysteryleo
Yeah, we don't have content ourselves, our value add is the ranking and filter
service. Also, allowing you to see the conversation across the web.

UGC would be tough, because I'm at a chicken and egg state right now as you
pointed out. And crap comments would lead to more crap comments. Imagine if
Quora or Hacker News had a comment bot. Sets a bad tone for the future.

i guess there may be a flaw in my initial strategy.

when training my algorithm (and as i make iterations), I compare the results
to google news to make sure we're as good if not better. That's why a lot of
the initial top-level categories match up pretty closely.

Sports vs sports <http://sports.rawsignal.com/>
[http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&cf=all&ned=...](http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&topic=s&ict=ln)

However, once I'm more confident in the algo, I'll let it loose on something
more niche, like college football

<http://collegefb.rawsignal.com/>

that's how we can differentiate from google, but i never realized that having
too many options would paralyze people.

maybe if i release each vertical under its own domain . . .

~~~
JonathanWCurd
I think that nailing down the smaller more focused categories is the way to
go. If you can make it both more relevant and more focused it would be both
different and useful providing a real reason to give it a try.

~~~
mysteryleo
sure i can work on that next. what initial categories would rock your world?

also, should i brand each category as its own site, or is the current model
ok?

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mysteryleo
ok, i put up baseball, basketball, and football:

<http://football.rawsignal.com/> <http://basketball.rawsignal.com/>
<http://collegefb.rawsignal.com/> <http://baseball.rawsignal.com/>

had to refungle some code to speed up our analysis, but it should be working.
hope you like it.

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JonathanWCurd
First step: share a link.

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mysteryleo
what are good places to share a link?

The main vertical I'm focused on right now is tech:
<http://tech.rawsignal.com/>

although I built other verticals that seem to be working already. Not sure
where to share it that would interest people who like tech.

~~~
jjoe
Right here.

Regards

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JonathanWCurd
I'd love to be able to filter or have the system filter even further. For
example in sports, just baseball or football not all sports.

~~~
JonathanWCurd
I do see that you have something that sounds like this coming under your
coming soon section so you may already be working on this.

~~~
mysteryleo
yeah. the algorithm I built takes a little training per topic/vertical, but
after the initial training, it just starts learning.

I have a long list of potential topics that the algorithm would be good at.
pretty much any sports topic it would kick butt on.

My brother keeps telling me I need to split up sports too. Basically, the
initial verticals were to stress out the algorithm to make sure it would work
on various concepts and still keep things interesting.

Basically, you could imagine every concept <http://alltop.com/> tracks running
through my algorithms.

Thanks for the feedback though. That's the kind of information that really
helps a hacker getting started.

