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Collaborative newsfeed recommendation service
THIS WEEK NetSpeak introduces a new collaborative newsfeed service that automatically brings in to your newsreader new personalised newsfeeds based on your interests.
One of the hallmarks of the Net is that it facilitates techno-entrepreneurs create a wide range of products/services for helping people connect each other directly or indirectly and enable them to create more value through the emerging collaborative network. Earlier, traditional Net services such as e-mail, IM, web pages, discussion boards and the like were the main products used by netizens for this purpose.
Though these services are quite good and serve the purpose, most of them demand active intervention by the participants. For example, if you want to know something about a specific subject through news sites, you need to go through each of the links available on them.
There is no mechanism that automatically reads the postings and filters out the content according to your criteria. As far as a reader is concerned, anything that is not relevant is nothing but noise.
To save a netizen from being constantly hit by unwanted information, Net services are being created that provide filtered data. These services generally watch your behaviour on the Net (for example, the kind of sites you traverse) and use this information to provide you a customised output.
Apart from your interests, some sites memorise the interests of your friends who are also registered with it and use that information to add value to their output. The collaborative search service, Eurekster (http://www.eurekster.com/) discussed in this column a few weeks ago is one such service. Now, let us look at another product in this emerging scenario of collaborative services, the newsfeed collaboration service, AmphetaRate
AmphetaRate
Weblogs help us read appropriate web sites and avoid sites with useless content. As all weblogs publish their new content information on RSS-based newsfeeds that can be read through newsfeed aggregators, we do not even need to visit these weblogs to read the content.
Though a skilled netizen can subscribe to several weblogs related to his/her area of concern, it is likely that they will miss out many appropriate ones.
Also, other netizens with similar tastes may be aware of some of the ones they missed out. That is, a service that identifies newsfeed subscribers with similar tastes and enables them to automatically share their newsfeeds will certainly boost netizens' productivity. The personalised recommendation service, AmphetaRate, aims to deliver such a service.
A newsfeed reader with AmphetaRate support provides its users a tool for rating the articles while reading them. To rate an article and store the `rate data' on AmphetaRate, first you need to register with it. Your `rate data' is analysed by AmphetaRate which compares the data with that of other members of the service and identifies the people in your `neighbourhood.' Once your neighbours are identified, AmphetaRate will start sending articles recommended by your neighbours, and in all probability most of them will be relevant to you. So, through this collaborative mechanism you can read articles read by your peers but missed out by you.
The free newsreader RSSOwl (http://rssowl.sourceforge.net/), which has AmphetaRate support, can be used to test this technology. For more details: http://amphetarate.sourceforge.net/.
Wink: A computer-based presentation builder
While demonstrating the actual working of a product on a computer or developing a computer-based tutorial for teaching software, one needs to carefully document the features/tools with enough comments, visuals and animations.
For example, if you are demonstrating the features of a news aggregator like RSSOwl, rather than explaining it through just text comments, it will be more effective if you can show the features by actually running/using it.
Of course, this may not be possible always. One solution is to run the software on your desktop, capture each of the screen shots, insert necessary comments into each of the captured frames and then assemble them together into one demo package that can be run on your desktop or from a web page. The free program, Wink, enables you to create such a training package.
Wink allows you to capture screen shots, add comments to the frames and converts them into a Flash movie, which can be played from a web page anytime, anywhere. If you do not want to capture each frame separately, the program can be configured to continuously capture screenshots with a certain frame rate. For more details: http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Ultr@VNC: A remote
control tool
If you are on a LAN, you may need to capture the desktops of other machines for administering them from a remote location. Check out the free, open source program Ultr@VNC (http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/), which can be easily installed on a machine that has to be controlled remotely.
A weblog from an anti virus research team
There seems to be no end to the computer virus menace and almost every day a new virus surfaces, wasting the time of users and providing frustrating moments to network administrators.
If you want the latest news on this unavoidable trouble spot, have a glance at the blog, `News from the Lab' of the F-Secure antivirus research team that discusses details of the latest viruses. The weblog also features an RSS feed so that you can read the blog headlines using your news aggregator. For details: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/.
Update
Recently this column featured a few free software hosting services that can be used to conduct collaborative software development using such Net tools as Web, mailing list, bug trackers and so on. In this regard, check out the service Gna! (https://gna.org/), which is a new entrant in this crop of products. Gna! Service, created to host only free software projects, has already got around 100 projects hosted on its server.
J. Murali
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