Wow - thanks for all the emails.

>Uh, that's great, but I found this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/
>hi/health/4681707.stm in Bad news, when it should be good.

Yeah - the scoring system needs to cover more topics and better. It is
very crude however the next version should be much better and faster
to extend.

>I wonder if now would be a good time to give some broad definition of what
>constitutes good and bad news.

What a philosophical question! Mood News just tries to pick up and
amplify the tone already in the story. There is no 'correct'
categorisation even if a human did it.

>good news for Mr Wright-Phillips, and for Chelsea, but not good news for
>Manchester City.

This is the tricky business of introducing domain knowledge. I'd only
want to do that for a very specialised site e.g. a supporter site
(political, sport) and even then it would be very hard.

>Wow - that's a slightly terrifying concept: the ability to filter news
>according to your personal preferences so you only get 'good' news
>delivered to you... Very 1984. *Shudder*

I have a neat idea planned for filtering but I've stayed away *just*
because of the spooky factor. Parental control might be a valid
application of this. Filtering does seem to go against some of the
idea of Mood News which is to broaden the range of stories read.

>Have you thought about running a similar 'mood detector' through video
>transcripts, or ficiton? It could be a useful addition to a
>reccomendation engine?

Interesting idea - an objective measure of how up/down beat a novel or
film is. Studios would love that esp. when going for a feelgood
factor. Did you hear about the app that performs analysis of songs to
see if they are going to be chart hits? I am sure it was on Slashdot..

>it is all relative to perspective... Good (or bad or Evil or whatever) 

Indeed, Mood News offers one perspective of the news that is hopefully
useful and interesting. Now back to my neutral Python... :-)

Thanks again,
Davy Mitchell


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