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I created a (non-technical) prototype of basically this exact idea a few years ago to get a better understanding of the economics. It's online if anyone wants t
by Alex3917 11y ago
I created a (non-technical) prototype of basically this exact idea a few years ago to get a better understanding of the economics. It's online if anyone wants to play with it:
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html
Basically the economics are insanely good if you're using this as an open source tool to create NYT-style articles, less so if you're Circa.
The people comparing this to the semantic web don't understand Zipf's Law, and just how slowly things actually change. E.g. we only get new data on adult literacy every 10 years. And the last data we have on antibiotic resistance for some bacteria/drugs is from the early 90s, and that's more the rule than the exception. Pretty much every single article about the U.S. is using the same set of a couple thousand facts, and most of those only get updated every ten years or so. There are a few exceptions like with federal arrest data that gets updated yearly, but that's pretty rare.
Basically if you're trying to do this using machine learning or any sort of algorithms, you're completely wasting your time and going down the wrong path. This is way easier to implement well than you think. (But again, not necessarily super profitable unless you own the NYT.)
- sparkzilla 11y agoI ran a wiki-based fact check for a while. This looks like it could be the start of something like that. However, a big problem is that the attempt to find truth is over-rated as a driver for the news market. Most people really don't care, and by the time the few that do care have found "the truth" the news cycle has passed.
- jigneshg 11y agoI do agree with you, the biggest concern for the users will be reliability of the news and sources. Rumors are widespread sometime.
- itsybitsycoder 11y agoI can tell you're not focused on styling of it (fair enough) but it might be good to slap a basic CSS reset on it or something. In my browser (Chrome) it's very hard to read, mostly because there are paragraph breaks in the bullet points but no spaces between different points, so you get weird groupings of text: http://imgur.com/ShVjXXu http://imgur.com/ShVjXXu