Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Botlist has competition; topix

"The answer seemed simple in 2004: aggregate news from thousands of sources, create thousands of topically driven news web pages and populate each of those pages with only news about that particular topic.

The Topix team did just that. We created artificial intelligence algorithms that continuously monitor breaking news from over 50,000 sources, 24 hours a day.

These algorithms read every story as it is released and then categorize each one into one or more of the 360,000 news pages, including pages for all 32,500 US zip codes, 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities, and many, many more. Pretty soon, millions of people were visiting the site every month.

But visitors wanted more: they wanted to tell us what they thought about the news on the site. They jammed our email and voice mail with comments about the articles and stories that mattered to them. In response, we added forums to the site in December 2005.
And then it got really interesting."

-- This is about the topix application.

Botlist is similar, but clearly doesn't have 360,000 news pages.

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