This is pretty fascinating stuff, despite the limitations and obvious bias of this article. Are there any Open Source libraries or papers which cover toy implementations of this sort of thing? (Assuming, of course, that it is not simply a bunch of if/else constructs applied to templates, which would be far less interesting.)
In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#42Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generate...
Page One [1] is a browser extension that automatically redirects you to the single-page version of articles on popular news sites, including NYT. Works great for me. [1] http://globalmoxie.com/blog/page-one-safari-chrome-extension...
But doesn't work with Firefox.
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#43I love seeing these examples of product development: begin with a very specific niche at the edge (not tackling the mainstream head-on) and "target non-consumption" - that way, you have no competition; and it's not a zero-sum game where you beat someone, but creating value that never existed before. This is possible not because it's good, but because it's cheap (and good enough): > primarily a low-cost tool ... for l…
Curious, what do you mean by "target non-consumption"?
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#44This is a recent email I got from Facebook Support team regarding a vanity url for my business. I could swear this guy is a robot or a script, and I wonder if Facebook is using the technology described in the article: ---------------- We’re sorry, but we’re unable to process your request because another entity has made a previous request concerning this username. If you are still interested in claiming the username,…
A human who had to write several dozen support answers? Naming collisions have to be a common occurrence for Facebook. It’s sufficient to write exactly one mail for such cases. There is no need to re-write or change things around, it’s always the same answer to the same question. Using a robot to write stuff like that seems wasteful – I don’t even think it would currently be possible.
It's probably a template. Someone read it, and picked "template-name-conflict-XYZ" to respond with.
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly right. Quick bit of advice for startups here: Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.…
Maybe they are so good they hope Google can tell their stories from human made. Although I wouldn't bet on it.
Google is already working to attribute authors to content, think of it as PersonRank. With verified real people (they are getting many signals for this such as android, chrome, checkout, places, voice, plus, etc) they may be able to combat spam like this by ranking news/stories based on the history of the author.
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#46If this works as advertised, it would have important (bad) consequences for SEO, right?
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#47This reminds me of what MarketBrief is doing for financial documents. Definitely less color / variance in the stories though.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/yc-funded-marketbrief-makes...
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#48I love seeing these examples of product development: begin with a very specific niche at the edge (not tackling the mainstream head-on) and "target non-consumption" - that way, you have no competition; and it's not a zero-sum game where you beat someone, but creating value that never existed before. This is possible not because it's good, but because it's cheap (and good enough): > primarily a low-cost tool ... for l…
Curious, what do you mean by "target non-consumption"?
It means target people with needs that aren't being met. Those people are not consuming (i.e. buying and using) a product or service to address their problem.
It's clearest to see when a product exists to solve a problem, but it's too expensive for some people (or some situation). In the article, the problem of reporting on local sports/financials has a solution (reporters), but the value of that news isn't worth their time: their time is too expensive. So the newspaper doesn't "consume" a solution to the problem of reporting that particular news.
By targeting this non-consumption, the startup doesn't compete against reporters (yet...), so it provokes no desperate fight for survival.
It's an term from Clayton Christensen, who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, though he doesn't use it til "The Innovator's Solution", and expands on it in "Seeing What's Next".
Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#49What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science. For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y…
This is true. I've been told by PR people that 80% of the content in a newspaper or a magazine is written by PR agencies. I have a question, though. Why don't they also create an expert system that writes PR pieces? I imagine it would be really nice tool for people in the business. You write down the variables (who, what, when)from an interview with a client in a form and you get to show him an instant first draft, y…
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Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
#50What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science. For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y…
It's not just newspapers who push PR pieces. This also applies to the web (Techcrunch and Wired comes to mind).