Josh Portway pointed out a post on the FutureOfTheBook blog, talking about a BBC prototype for a system which performs Bayesian filtering on news feeds.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for ages, and funnily enough I started implementing it last week!
The BBC prototype uses email to deliver the news. I decided to write mine as a Python CGI which effectively acts as a filter, sitting between you and a list of feeds. It’s called Feed Me.
The idea is that Feed Me will download and categorise the news items according to your Bayesian “goodness” filter, and then present you with a sorted list. It also appends little voting links to each article allowing you to tweak the filter, telling it you want items more or less like that one.
At the moment the code is very rough, and only works on my Powerbook, but unlike the BBC one I have implemented the actual Bayesian filtering (using crm114), so it is actually quite close to being useful!
I’m going to spend some more time working on this thing, cleaning it up and getting it to a stage where I can use it myself. In the meantime, I’ve made a project page which I’ll try to update as I do things.