

Companies Who Make Money: Datapresser - agentbleu
http://thenextweb.org/2008/09/27/ep4-companies-who-make-money-datapresser/

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rantfoil
This is really really awful for the future of the Internet. Generating random
content is specifically the kind of garbage that we don't want on the web.
It's the definition of 'free-ridership' -- lets create a bunch of valueless
nonsense programmatically, and massively destroy true value (real useful
information) and then PROFIT.

Weak.

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blogimus
As general content degrades, all the more that _eventually_ we're going to see
some form of information and content delivery certification emerge, not unlike
what Underwriters Laboratories do for for product and material goods safety
and quality, or what the USDA and FDA try to do for food and drug quality.
Perhaps something akin to the movie and game content ratings, but adding fact
checking.

A voluntary certification system could help people trust content. Search
engines could apply web content providers' quality group affiliation (or lack
thereof) to search heuristics.

Maybe it will be NGO based, maybe government run, depending on where you are
in the world. I'd opt for the NGO approach myself, with a healthy number of
competing organizations, especially considering China's effective use of
content control as an extreme case.

A danger here, though, is if we move to "seals of approval" web content and
the majority of individuals and groups avoid content that does not have a
"seal of approval" then there are going to be barriers to entry, such as the
various costs that members of associations pay for services.

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Hexstream
I'm not sure whether or not it's a joke

I'm not sure whether or not I hope it's a joke.

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ojbyrne
If its true, and the datapresser site seems legit
(<http://datapresser.com/generate_unique_content>), it would explain so much.

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andyking
I've read quite a number of blog posts recently that have been written in
English that's seemed strangely clunky and unnatural, in a style very similar
to the intro text on the Datapresser home page.

I initially put it down to posts being authored by people for whom English is
a second language, but they're US-based blogs. This initially dodgy-sounding
idea starts to seem plausible.

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mattmaroon
I haven't read that blog before, but now scrolling down through some recent
entries, it's all very clunky English. On the other hand, the person writing
it is named Ernst-Jan Pfauth.

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trevelyan
There's a Philip K. Dick story that involves a machine like this that is used
to generate political speeches. Can't quite remember the title. Anyone know?

~~~
agentbleu
In his prescient 1972 speech "The Android and the Human"

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sgrove
Actually, datapresser sounds like a very interesting side-project to work on,
involving natural language processing and machine learning. I'm pretty
impressed, sounds like it could have been a side project turned into a viable
startup business.

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cvg
This reminds me of SCIgen: <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/> These guys
entered their auto-generated research paper to a conference and actually got
invited to present it at a seminar.

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mhartl
I kept looking at the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st, but this appears
to be real.

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qhoxie
Their volume of articles really does not seem implausible given their number
of writers and the abundace of information. Sure, they put out quite a few
articles a day, but if that is their mission, it is not surprising. What they
do is far from inhuman.

That said, this product seems like it could be of use for them.

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andyking
Anyway, this pales in comparison to the awesome power of the Twat-O-Tron, an
automatic comment generator for the BBC's news website:
[http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-
twat-o...](http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o-tron/)

Also works on YouTube.

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gojomo
-1 shallow TC bashing

-1 feeds unhealthy TC obsession

-1 weak attempt at humor

-1 single joke stretched out too long

-1 ungrammatical headline

-1 awkward writing in article

In the News.YC of my dreams, everyone who upvoted this article would be
disenfranchised.

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agentbleu
You get -100 "awkward writing in article" was because the machine wrote it.
Did you not read the post?

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paulgb
I'm calling BS on that claim. If the software could do anything more advanced
than replacing random words from a thesaurus, there would be a lot of
applications for it more lucrative than populating spamblogs.

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cstejerean
What about Markov text generators?

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eru
Sounds bogus.

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ryuio
It might sound surprising but CNet also uses similar techniques to generate
huge parts of their product reviews.

The technique is the biggest threat to the current crop of 'content' driven
search engines (read Google and everyone else) and has the potential to wreak
havoc with current ranking systems. Given the lucrative nature of the
automatic content generation business, this is also inevitable.

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oldgregg
Sounds like fun little subversive marketing campaign from datapresser.

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Jimega36
Using such a tool sounds like a vast lie from the companies benefiting from
it. Isn't impersonation a crime? It would be fun to sue for massive amounts
one of the fake users and then the company that generated would be liable:)))
If ever proven so through.

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jonursenbach
Well isn't that something.

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Eliezer
No.

