Digging Through Wall Street Journal Articles With RSS

John — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:06:43 +0000

A clever tip was posted on Digital Inspiration on Wednesday. Interested in reading the most popular full-text Wall Street Journal articles? Simply add this RSS feed to your newsreader and you’ll receive any article that has at least one “digg” by full subscribers. It could be interesting to track the number of articles per day and diggs per article over time to measure the acceptance of the digg concept with WSJ readers.

In this model, the paying subscribers are feeding non-paying subscribers by digging the articles. Interesting concept. On the one hand, WSJ is giving away content. On the other hand, what if there was a way for them to create a feed of other “undigged” articles to encourage non-subscribers to get the full package?

See the full tip at http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/read-wall-street-articles-from-digg-without-subscription/1788/

Cross posted at Random Thoughts

Google Game Creates Free Meta Data

John — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:04:47 +0000

This is brilliant! If you’ve ever used Google Images, you know searching is less than perfect. That’s because many images found on the net lack good meta data or are on pages that are only partially relevant to the image. So how can Google enlist the help of the masses to improve the relavancy of search results? Offer a simple “game”, award some points and pair partners up from across the word. Check out the Google ImageLabeler app. In a nutshell, partners are presented an image and each type in their own list of words related to the image. Partner’s can’t see the other person’s list until the two minute time limit is reached. The object is to eventually match on a word. When that happens, the team is awarded some points. The more you play, the more points you earn and the more relevant meta data Google has for the images. And like “Who’s line is it anyway?”, the points are pretty much meaningless…no prizes, just the satisfaction that you’ve burned the better part of the day providing free labor to Google. Simply brilliant.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Thinking Analytically » Web

Digging Through Wall Street Journal Articles With RSS

Google Game Creates Free Meta Data