AmphetaRate RSS Recommendation server / News: Recent posts

Amplified Media Inc. has generously donated server space and processing power to AmphetaRate. As of today, all the algorithms are enabled and AmphetaRate can grow as much as it can. This will certainly lead to interesting experimentations on the AmphetaRate concept... and it makes me very happy, indeed!

AmphetaRate has been working fine without my intervention for almost a year now. (Thank you for providing the feedback oh so needed while using the service.) But just when I decided to make time to work on the project (especially on the language filter), my web hoster simultaneously decided that AmphetaRate uses excessive CPU resources... Indeed, I have several scripts that "google-dance" around a lot. So please excuse the quality of the quality of the recommendations for a couple of weeks while I gather the money to switch to another server plan.

AmphetaRate now allows you to rate and receive your recommendations outside of RSSOwl. Using DHTML/Javascript or plain HTML in your recommendations feed, aggregators such as Bloglines or Feed On Feeds are supported. Try it at http://service.spoon.lunarpages.com/createuid.php ...

Success! AmphetaRate has succesfully moved to lunarpages.com, which should provide us with even better services. So, the roadmap for now looks like: test the new server, provide cache-ing (because bandwidth is limited), tune language filter, implement Dave's idea about rating links embedded in the recommendations, and some ACF filter tuning. A lot of things indeed. Oh, and I forgot UTF-8 handling... Thanks for waiting.

The sourceforge crew has notified me that the project now uses too much resources. What was a proof-of-concept seems to have grown beyond what's tolerated by our kind host. Thus, the project will be offline for a period of ~1 week, until a migration can be completed. [Update May 28: I found a host and am copying/testing the service. I think a couple of days will be sufficient to bring the service back up.]

I want to thank Gary Robinson and his essay on spam-filtering algorithms. His revision (http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454/stories/2002/09/16/spamDetection.html) to Paul Graham's formulas has now been applied to AmphetaRate's algorithms. You should feel the effects kick in very soon.

AmphetaRate is getting more and more features. Until now, the news were only discovered through new user ratings. AmphetaRate now takes a proactive approach by searching the web for similar newsitems, based on your Bayesian filter results. All without the need to explicitely type in keywords or interests. The next features planned are correlation of feeds and language screening.

The Hindu featured AmphetaRate in their Business section (http://www.hindu.com/2004/03/22/stories/2004032201131800.htm). The article nicely describes the context of collaborative filtering for newsfeeds. Thanks!

AmphetaRate respects your privacy, a crucial aspect for any personalization service. I recently got somebody anxious about how AmphetaRate uses all its data. So I cooked up a nice policy document (http://amphetarate.sf.net/policy.php). Also remember that it is open-source. Whatever you see in the CVS is what is used! No ip-logging or anything!

Bayesian filters are very popular against spam but it can also be useful for AmphetaRate: This algorithm will find the keywords that consitute your favorites news and look for other similar ones based on content. AmphetaRate now has a content-based filter and a meta-filter! I can already see the difference in my recommendation channel. Enjoy.

AmphetaRate aims to be a central recommendation server for all news aggregators.
The great cross-platform news aggregator RSSOwl ( http://rssowl.sourceforge.net ) has just released version 0.7 which integrates AmphetaRate. You can now use RSSOwl as an interface to our service; in fact, RSSOwl is now the preferred way to use AmphetaRate.
In addition, a good number of fixes and improvements on the backend are constantly and steadily made.

Amphetarate is a RSS recommendation server. Lately a new recommendation feed has been added and you can subscribe to it using the "global" option (see the api page). Also Blogdex will routinely add his opinions/ratings to relieve the cold-start/first-rater problem.

The amphetarate server now tells you what's wrong (diagnosis) when it cannot find recommendations. On top of that, the training news have been re-vamped, such that when you rate them, your rating profile will improve _drastically_ Have fun.

Alright, AmphetaRate has reached a point where it is usable. So I am officially (sic) releasing the Beta version of AmphetaRate for Windows and Linux. Hopefully there are not too many bugs and people will appreciate the concept of Collaborative Filtering for RSS feeds...