yousry.de/blog

A short summary about the new vote feature.

Last Week Results

Total Votes: 623

Votes by Topic:

Pie Chart:

Why should you vote?

Because with all collected votes it will be possible to calculate better results for following matters:

• Offer new subtopics
  For example visitors are especially interested in Science/Health, Entertainment/Bollywood or Politic/War. Subtopics will be implemented in future versions of  the application.
• Forecast the period of time a news entry is relevant
  First indications are, that Boulevard-News have the longest lasting relevance.
• Estimate publisher/editor reputations
  More votes mean a higher reputation for a publisher.

Vote Guidance

You cast a vote by pressing the check-mark on the right-hand side of the news-entry.

You have ten votes in total.

Your Privace

Kungle.de will not store any personal information about your visit.

In Detail

Kungles web server like any other web server on the internet stores your IP in a log file. Independent from this logfile  Kungles application server stores your selection and votes temporarily in memory.  It is very difficult to connect these two information sources to generate an individualized user profile.

Finally the database counts the votes passed by the application server and logs theses events independent from the two other logs.

I’m not interested in individual user behavior. 

Recent events showed that you should be very careful with your personal data:

http://www.kungle.de/Trend/entry/275800

http://www.kungle.de/Trend/entry/275766

http://www.kungle.de/Trend/entry/275526

Therefore I see the necessity to inform you about Kungles information processing.

Three issues with hundreds of similar news publications blocked the front page of Kungle.de. Each publication is interesting and informative by itself  but together they are hiding other noteworthy information.

I concluded that it was about time to build a new subsystem to reduce the amount of identical information. You can still find all articles via the new “related link”.

The new Subsystem “IssueMerger“ now merges  news with similar content. The older news entries are the more likely  they are consolidated to one issue.

For this, I defined a function to calculate the proximity of two entries. (The Result is 1 if two news entries  are identical and 0 if they completely different.)

It is necessary to  build a complete “News Topology” (A Matrix with up to 1.5 million elements) which defines the proximities of all entry combinations.

The calculation for all topics requires up to 40 hours. The Algorithm itself was coded in 80 lines of scala.

You can find a calculated result here:
http://www.kungle.de/Trend/entry/220033

Update 1: In comparison this merge was hand made:

http://www.kungle.de/Trend/entry/225189

With the 73th version of the Kungle trend engine it is now possible to track a meaningful trend again.

It was difficult to rebuild a functional trend prediction after the decision to remove the search engine results from my calculations.

Cause of the decision:

The search terms got more and more insignificant. For Example on Sep. 29 (The Tsunami Day)  the highest ranked search phrase was “pink toed tarantula”.  Other examples were “who is mysterion” or “out of memory at line 130″ !

The Trend Analysis is now extremely fast. The response time is about  30 minutes after an occurrence. In contrary, searchengine results are delayed up to four hours!

I’m now using microblogs, blogs, and newsfeeds as datasource.

The Trend Score is calculated by following factors:

• Time of publication
• Frequency of occurrence
• Subject significance (by Dictionary)
• Subject insignificance (by Dictionary)
• Registration Date
• Publisher significance

Votes:

I have added a voting mechanism to compare the trend results with my readers opinions. To offer an incentive I have added a Trend bonus for every vote.

Next Steps:

Dependent on the success of Kungle.de and the related earnings:

1. Switch to bigger hardware.
2. Improve the topic identification.
3. Deep text analysis.
4. Global Impact calculation

Improved user interaction:

Kungle.de is a Scala/Lift Project based on HTML and Ajax.  Next Steps would require to build Restful Web Service and a Rich Internet Application. for a better user experience.