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False Positives Adventures in Technology, SciFi and Culture from Toronto

Thursday, October 30, 2003

A Plan for Ham, Company News Done Right.

InfoWorld TechWatch: Taking RSS for granted suggests using RSS News Reader as a cheaper alternate to expensive news clipping services, combined with Blog postings.

I've been thinking of this as a possible solution for sometime, although I doubt it could remove the need to have a company news editor to build the daily news summary. Posted the resulting items to a Blog (with-in a company intranet portal or not) is a win-win on a couple of fronts : less emails in the in-box; older items are available to everyone (including the new hire) ; less clutter in email folders as people no longer have to guess which one might be important to them.

High Quality RSS news feeds are the biggest fly-in-the-ointment : does the description tag content the full text, and if not, could the text be retrieve auto-Magically from the link url (given the state of html this is hard),

Keyword filtering of incoming RSS items might help but a trained Bayesian approach, the reverse of a Spam Filter (see Paul Graham's 'A Plan for Spam', in this case a Ham Catcher , would aid finding relevant articles.


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