
Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work - raghus
http://news.techmeme.com/081203/automated
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FiReaNG3L
My experience building <http://esciencenews.com> , which is automated news for
science, tells me otherwise.

About the 'instantly obsolete' news - just put the latest of the cluster at
the top. We see that a lot with shuttle missions to space : see
[http://esciencenews.com/sources/space.com/2008/11/12/space.s...](http://esciencenews.com/sources/space.com/2008/11/12/space.shuttle.endeavour.go.friday.launch)

In the cluster ('More sources from other sites') you can see the mission`s
coverage from start to finish.

As for bad grouping, just accept that you won't be able to find ALL stories
belonging to a cluster and set your cutoff to accept the minimum of false
positive while keeping the most stories belonging to a cluster.

~~~
brandnewlow
Hey FiReaNG3L, I've been scratching my head about this for a while. Over on
eScienceNews, some of your news items are full stories. Some are just
summaries. When I follow your source links below the full stories I find sites
offering summary-only RSS feeds. How are you getting the full versions of
those stories? Are you scraping the HTML from the feed item URL?

~~~
FiReaNG3L
The full versions are press releases we get from universities and the like.
The summaries with links to full stories are copyrighted (or not, as some site
editors do the same press release cut and paste as our automated service
does).

~~~
brandnewlow
What's the workflow look like on those releases? Do they e-mail them to you
and get "sucked in?" Do they have a special feed? Do they fill in a form?

~~~
FiReaNG3L
We scrape them, and the universities and other organizations are pretty happy
about it, we often get email saying thanks, links from professors and emails
asking how much views they received, etc. These would get no exposure at all
without sites like e! science news.

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waleedka
And Google's recent introduction of voting on search results tells me that
they might've reached a similar conclusion.

~~~
henning
According to grumpy SEO people, PageRank and automated algorithms play a far
smaller role. Manual human review by Google employees is often the only time a
search engine spammer gets taken out.

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thorax
Surely I'm not the only one who liked TechMeme exactly as it was and never saw
a major issue with it. I think it's actually great just as it is.

Who runs into those issues where articles are bad? If I compare it to how
Google News started out, this is lots better-- I have TechMeme bookmarked and
only visit Google News when I'm search for news.

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GavinB
On the other hand, you can get hilarious mixed messages like this set of
headlines on the front page right now: <http://i35.tinypic.com/1z3cv1h.jpg>

CNET: They're selling out? Business week: No one wants them any more? Apple
2.0: It's definitely one or the other!

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ilamont
I've been using Techmeme and other algorithmic editors for years, and I think
TM is the best of the bunch. The Google Blog search competitor that was
released a few months ago doesn't come close -- it's filled with spam and
scraped content.

I'm curious to see how the human editor improves Techmeme.

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bprater
I never realized that TechMeme was completely algorithmic. I assumed some of
it was, but I thought editors were helping out as well. Color me very
impressed!

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zena
I have been using Techmeme for quite sometime and like it a lot. Actually, I
was inspired by Techeme's success to start our site: buzzup.com. Our content
comes from three sources: users, human editor, and automatic program.

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brandnewlow
One could always set up a hot-or-not style site where people indicate if two
news items are similar or not and have that input feed in somehow.

~~~
sgibat
Or how about just automation + up and down voting?

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crsmith
I thought Techcrunch made a good point that even though it might only be a
small change in what appears as news, it's a huge change fundamentally. I
prefer Techmeme to stay fully automated.

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ig1
Counter-argument: Google News.

~~~
bprater
Sure, but when you want to know what every other techhead is looking at,
TechMeme is the only place to go.

~~~
AndrewWarner
That's why I don't read Techmeme. I don't want to know what every other
techhead is looking at. I want to know what the mainstream techhead missing.

