A new tool offers to create websites on any subject, allowing web surfers to sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant news stories, blog posts, maps and photos.
The website asks its users to come up with any subject they are interested in, such as a TV show, sports team or news topic, and to submit links to their five favourite news articles, blogs or photos on that subject. Working only from this data, the site then automatically creates a webpage on that topic, known as a Boxxet. The name derives from 鈥渂ox set鈥�, which refers to a complete set CDs or DVDs from the same band or TV show.
The site鈥檚 algorithm starts by reading through the web pages submitted by the user. It calculates the frequency of unique words and which words these unique words are likely to be adjacent to. It also notes the number of images and which news organisation or blogger created those pages.
Advertisement
It uses this data to filter its index of web pages and RSS feeds, depositing anything highly relevant in the Boxxet. The Boxxet is constantly updated as new stories appear, and the type of information is also modified by ratings provided by new visitors to the site.
Spread thin
Boxxet鈥檚 creator You Mon Tsang of Burlingame, California, US, says that websites reliant on user-generated content such as blogs and collaborative bookmarking sites are facing a new problem: how to sustain a continuous flow of new information as the small pool of people that actually bother to post information gets spread increasingly thinly.
The new system solves this problem by amplifying what participation it does get, while actually requiring relatively little user input, Tsang says. 鈥淲e are trying to survive on much less participation because we don鈥檛 think there is much to go around,鈥� he explains.
Tsang launched the site at the O鈥橰eilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, US, on Wednesday. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a very sweet combination of spidering and other automatic assembly of content on the fly,鈥� says Tim O鈥橰eilly, founder of the company behind the event, O鈥橰eilly Media. 鈥淭here have been a lot of approaches to making personalized pages, but none of them put all the pieces together in the way that Boxxet has.鈥�
It tool will first be available by invitation only, opening to the general public by the end of April 2006.
