Now make a Javascript implementation and I'll be forever grateful.
What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#12In what it's what he describes as the Zemanta approach not "slapping together a bunch of heuristics" ?
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#13The news aggregators use this ambiguity to their advantage -- plenty of times I've seen a innocuous headline shown with a bikini girl thumbnail because that image was a sidebar gallery preview on the source page (or sometimes even an ad!). Any guesses what effect this has on click-thrus?
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#14I wrote a ruby gem to do this: https://github.com/mmb/plumnailer
The current ranking is simple but I made it pluggable with the idea that it could be improved or there could be multiple implementations.
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#15> Goose actually writes all images to disk
What on earth for?
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#16I built fetchful.com a while ago which is an attempt at this (as well as generating preview text). After a lot of testing, and a few hundred thousand generated previews, it can be quite hard to get consistent results for thumbnail, it obviously is very simple if developers plan for this and use appropriate metadata tags for their content.
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#17For certain things, thumbnails make sense: online, articles about photography, etc. But for regular articles, instead of figuring out how to extract thumbnails, we should realize that in most cases, the article would be highly improved by a lack of thumbnail.
There's a trend lately to illustrate low-quality content with low-quality stock pictures (most likely acquired from a Google Image search without a proper license.) For an example, just look at TechCrunch or Pando. We should strive to rid the internet of this plague.
Good articles and real journalism have standards when it comes to illustration. Open up nytimes.com and look at what's illustrated with photos versus illustrations versus nothing.
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#18In what it's what he describes as the Zemanta approach not "slapping together a bunch of heuristics" ?
It is bunch of heuristics... just slightly more of them producing (in my opinion) slightly better result.
The core of the article however points at the main problem: no evaluation dataset on which we could compare these algorithms.
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#19For certain things, thumbnails make sense: online, articles about photography, etc. But for regular articles, instead of figuring out how to extract thumbnails, we should realize that in most cases, the article would be highly improved by a lack of thumbnail. There's a trend lately to illustrate low-quality content with low-quality stock pictures (most likely acquired from a Google Image search without a proper licen…
Even the best of articles need to be broken up visually otherwise they are difficult to read.
Anecdotal proof: all written publications ever.
Re: What’s the best thumbnail for this page?
#20For certain things, thumbnails make sense: online, articles about photography, etc. But for regular articles, instead of figuring out how to extract thumbnails, we should realize that in most cases, the article would be highly improved by a lack of thumbnail. There's a trend lately to illustrate low-quality content with low-quality stock pictures (most likely acquired from a Google Image search without a proper licen…
Even the best of articles need to be broken up visually otherwise they are difficult to read. Anecdotal proof: all written publications ever.
Sure, but that can be done with good layout and typography, or tasteful illustrations (à-la New Yorker). Simply using bad filler stock images is a really bad way to go about this.