Making my news smarter

Outside of my day job (working as a Rails consultant at the best Phoenix Ruby/Rails shop, Integrum), I’ve started plugging away on building a smart news aggregator for the handful of industries I’m heartily addicted to keep tabs on. My whole reason for building these sites was that I was the worst at following everything in my feed reader. I’d have to read so much just to keep up and after I subscribed to so many sites, trying to keep keep became flat-out impossible. 

So as I was pondering my life’s existence one day, I realized; I like the idea of techmeme, but I wish I had the same type of site for [insert industry here]. So away I began to plug. A little over a month later, I had a pretty decent prototype. My bot was crawling sites, discovering new sites and relating related content. Today (roughly two months after I started), I have a few sites up and running but their nowhere near where i’d like to take them. The groundwork is good, but there so much more that is possible!

I think I’ll post my progress here as I try to build some smart AI into these news sites and make them actually worth paying attention to. 

Oh yes, before I forget. I guess it would b a good idea to fill you in on where the sites are actually at. The two I’m using as the main proving grounds so far are tech fantastic (for the best tech/gadget news) and the Gamer Collective (for the latest video game industry news). Feel free to check them out and to bombard me with insightful input It’s always appreciated.