james cooke blog

Online news - with or without humans?

theluckystrike:

Sarah Chapman: “Welcome to the era of the algorithm as editor…”

The New York Times reported yesterday that Yahoo is to invert the traditional news model, in which editors decide what gets covered, by using popular search terms to guide their reporting on national affairs, politics and the media.

And as Yahoo! move away from the traditional editorial news model, Google have rolled editorial picks into their news service which was always “traditionally” built by algorithm. Maybe an attempt to improve how Google News handles zero day stories, and if that can be achieved, making it more of a news source, rather than a news aggregator.

Before editorial

After editorial

Is there convergence on a middle ground in online news between production and aggregation, and if so, what will that look like?

geek fix : cron locale breaking subversion client

Working on an automatic subversion cron script that called svn to run some basic add / delete / commit functions and I ran into the standard error when running from cron but not from the command line with bash:

Can’t convert string from native encoding to ‘UTF-8’

The problem is documented way back in 2006 here.

It’s due to two things : how svn uses locales and how cron defaults to POSIX locale on ubuntu.

Proposed solutions are here and here. I chose to jack the following into my bash script:

export LANG=en_GB.utf8

Probably not even 100% correct, but it works.

Welcome (back)

theluckystrike:

…And so, I’ve decided to relaunch the blog. Tumblr makes it easier for me to post and manage things that inspire me from across the web (on a daily basis)

Stay tuned and say hello!

Rakim: Guess Who’s Back