Google have added a new “recommendations” feature to Google Reader. First I thought, “Oh great, they’ve stolen my idea.” But actually, it’s not even close to the goal of increasing the precision of my Google Reader inbox. Recommendations does not appear to be using any kind of classification (e.g. StumbleUpon), instead just clumping all users “likes” together in one big naive popularity contest.
The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.
Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:
It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1 (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.
To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).
To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.
Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.
What have you done?! I can understand the need for invasive TV popups on a *commercial* station which relies on advertising revenue. With the growing popularity of PVRs which have ad-skipping capability, the traditional ad-breaks will become less effective.
But there is NO excuse for this shit on a publicly funded TV station! Kill the popups, ABC or kill your reputation as Australia’s only respectable broadcaster.
Google has started to integrate it’s Google Docs PDF viewer into search results, allowing you to view PDFs right in the browser. Finally, you can uninstall that bloated Adobe Reader plugin, like you’ve always wanted to. If you’re on a Mac, you can see PDFs without waiting for Preview to open.
OK, so this is pretty old news but I hadn’t really noticed until recently as they don’t show a link for all documents. But why is this so awesome? PDF is a rich format that offers many features not really relevant to web search. Most often searchers are just looking for some information, like MSY’s latest price on that Hot New Intel CPU.
But this only affects search results. But you can install a Greasemonkey script which opens all links to PDF, PPT and DOC files using the Google Docs Viewer. We’ve had online apps for a while, but I consider Google’s step of opening up the GDocs Viewer to be THE official singularity, or “beginning of the end” for the humble desktop application. After this, there is no turning back. And I for one, want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Or as a friend of mine once said “Firefox + Internet = Operating System”.
That said, one feature that needs improvement is searching within documents. This is only enabled for some documents, presumably the one Google has had time to index the metadata or OCR. And search hits are only highlighted with no feature of iterating through them.
I kind of got carried away with this chip tunes stuff and accidentally made a track of my own. It’s called Arpeggio Boy – if there was a computer game hero who destroyed his enemies by ripping some wicked 8-bit arp action in their faces, this would be his theme.
By some serendipitous coincidence, last night I found myself listening to The Sound Lab on Triple J. Then Fenella announced there’d be Chip Tunes on and I was surprised and excited that the genre had managed to make it to mainstream radio. I guess it just goes to show what you can achieve by organising the community.
I think what’s great about this genre is that it has built-in nostalgia. Listening to a couple of tracks immediately brings back memories of the days (and nights) I spent playing games like Super Mario Bros. 2, Dexterity and Pokemon Blue. Chip tunes aren’t new, in fact it’s one of the oldest form of synth. But to think that this stuff is starting to be considered a legitimate art form worthy of airplay is just amazing!
I had the awesome privilege of watching District 9 yesterday. The above shameless photoshop is the result of a mix of fandom and procrastination but really I just wanted to show off my lame photoshop skills. Actually, the truth is it was such an epic image, I had to do something fun with it. Yes, that’s Melbourne for the keen readers among you.
Why was D9 such an awesome film? Firstly, director Neill Blomkamp does something very clever. He manages to create a powerful empathetic relationship with the alien race (derogatorily referred to as “prawns”). How? By making them refugees who we humans proceed to treat like shit because we don’t know what to do with them (well apart from barbaric scientific experiments, of course!). Turning the lead character into one of the aliens also helps. By the end of the film, the aliens are the good guys, which is what sets this film apart from the cliched ID4-type storylines.
The second reason this film appealed to me is the fairly overt references to recent computer games of a similar plot. It looks and feels unquestionably like Half-Life 2, largely due to the similar tech and weapons. The assault rifles encased in white plastic are also reminiscent of the Portal gun. The clunky physics of the mech suit Wickas uses reminds one of Dog as well. Additionally, the story happens to a regular guy just during his normal day at work.
Some interesting trivia to finish up. The title “District 9″ is a reference to “District 6″, from the apartheid (meaning ’separateness’) episode in South Africa’s history where 60,000 non-whites were forcibly relocated. Appropriate, given that’s essentially happens to the aliens.
UPDATE: (8/12/09)At the risk of alerting the wankers at Last.fm who may find this on Google, I can still use the streaming radio through the iPhone app! Suckers!
Today I received this email from Last.fm, whose personalised radio I’ve been enjoying FOR FREE since 2007.
Hi frostnova,
Your free trial to Last.fm Radio is about to end. If you’re enjoying it, why not
subscribe for only $3.00/month and continue listening to non-stop personalised
radio.
When I first joined, there was no mention of this “free trial” bollocks they’ve pulled completely out of thin air as if they are some kind of Ministry of Truth.
To be honest, I value Last.fm mostly for tracking my listening habits and haven’t used the streaming radio very much so I’m not ready to completely jump ship just yet.
What I’ve really been waiting for is for Apple to make “Genius Live” for iTunes, so you could listen to suggested tracks which aren’t in your library.
Hey for all you WordPress junkies out there who are sick of squinting at the screen when writing blog posts, here is a Stylish script to increase the font size!
