improving cpunk S/N via grouplens/filtering

an interesting new field called "collaborative filtering" seems
to have strong potential in helping separate signal-to-noise,
and might be of interest to some cpunks here as a pet project.

Brad Miller is working on his PhD. in this area and put together
a nice system inside many news readers that allows people to
read/ratings articles and track their ratings. the system uses
the heuristic that people who agree or disagree consistently
on ratings on particular messages in the past will tend to
do so in the future, and it uses this to extrapolate ratings
on messages a person has not yet rated.

essentially he has all the technical stuff down and mostly
just needs trial users. it wouldn't
be hard to plug it all into the cpunk list to see how well it
works. its the most promising route I know of at the moment,
for solving an extremely difficult problem that pervades cyberspace.

however, B.M. has been working on the project for a long time
and at least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have
reached "critical mass" yet, which surprises me. anyway, the
URL

http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/grouplens.html

is anyone here familiar with this project? what do you think
about how effective it is?

>>>>> "Vladimir" == Vladimir Z Nuri <vznuri@netcom.com> writes:

 [GroupLens]

Vladimir> http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/grouplens.html

Vladimir> is anyone here familiar with this project? what do you think
Vladimir> about how effective it is?

I like the idea, but they've never covered anything other than Usenet,
and newsgroups I don't read.

The little feedback we've gotten after putting it in Gnus indicates
either that it is not useful, or that it probably hasn't reached
critical mass yet.

I proposed GroupLensing this list to Brad early this year, but he
never followed up on it.

To the luser who unsubscribed last week after complaining about his
wimpy mail program, I would add:
Gnus runs on Emacs 19.34 which fully supports Microsoft Windows and is
available as a precompiled binary, so there is no excuse for using
mail and newsreading software on that platform without threading,
sorting, kill files, etc.  Add in the mailcrypt package and an
up-to-date copy of Raph's remailer list, and you have basically point
and click access to remailer chaining and PGP.
-- 
steve@miranova.com baur
Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be billed at $250/message.
What are the last two letters of "doesn't" and "can't"?
Coincidence?  I think not.