A quiet March

March has been a quiet month for Majorana Informatics and Feed Distiller. As a UK company we have to write a company report and accounts every year, and this takes time, more so for a small company. We managed one trip out to meet up with bloggers in London, and came back with a few ideas for future services. Our ad revenue is up, and we made a move that reduces our cash drain, so much that we need not worry for a long time to come (thats important in these times of recession). We also sparing some time to look pure Information Retrieval research. Information Retrieval is (very roughly) the science of search engines, and finding 'stuff' via computers. Despite all the money Google has made IR is a rather sleepy science, measured at least, by the number of research papers on the ArXiv and CiteSeer. More that likely most of the Research goes on under closed doors nowdays. It takes years of trial and error to find out what works well with users, but if published and not patented it wouldn't take to long for another company to take the idea and build a application with it.

We so looking to the future, that our director Dr Adams has also just started a blog about the Future of Internet where he looks how the internet might develop into the far future, and what it might mean for humanity in general.

Blog Feeds as a Widget

FeedDistiller is proud to announce our new Feed as a widget service. From any
feed page, you can click the 'get feed as widget' button, you'll be delivered to our widget styling page where you control the colors, sizes and fonts, to fit in to your web page. Just cut and paste the produced HTML into any of your Web pages, to deliver the latest news on your chosen subject to users anywhere.

Accepting Blog Submissions

We've decide to accept blog feeds from any blogger, subject to approval. If your a writer, enter your blog URL at our submission center. Your need to pass a Captcha test, (to block scripts), we'll then list the 5 categories your items best match, and the blog will be checked for on topic content by the human owner of the feed, after that you should be getting your articles listed on our feeds.

Now more accurate, More way to choose items

We haven't been standing still at Feed Distiller. Categorizing blog items is
our game, and we're going to do it well. We've just added a second way to control which articles get included. All you have to do, is go through a list of items and mark each one as too accept or reject. Next time Feed Distiller will use the similarity between new items to all the marked items to find out weather to include the blog feed output. For a good sized set of items this should be even more accurate than our reference page comparison. We've keeping both types and giving you the choose, over what method to use.

Categories and Search

Merry Christmas everybody. We've been busy at feed distiller but only now our the fruits of a labour visible. Firstly we've added a powerful search engine that picks out individual blog items. Secondly we've automatically categorized every blog feed create on FD into one of 10 categories. (Estimated 90% accurate and will improve with time). So now from either BlogKnox or the our Feed page of FD you'll be-able to find any blog very quickly. We had to add these feature as FD is starting to get big, too many feeds to fit comfortably on one page. We've targetting 1000 feeds by june. But with the search and the categories it shouldn't be any harder, to find the one you want.

Feed Distiller: Your feeds are now skinnable.

A big embarrassment was that our style sheets weren't working on Internet Explorer 7. We've fixed that. And at the same time given feed makers a choice of skin colours for there pages. So now you theme your pages design to match it's content.

Just Launched BlogKnox

Less than two months after the launch of Feed Distiller, we've have enough public blog feeds to make it worth, launching a new site to display all that wonderful, and possible useful information.

Called BlogKnox, our fifth try to find a name that wasn't already used. It is indeed a a gold mine of information, even if, with a thrice daily rollover of items, its not exactly a storage center.

Meanwhile, we've improved are blogging engine, adding pictures to the items, where we can find them, and got system relatively stable. Plenty more bug fixing to do as we have to deal with RSS and ATOM feeds that often don't fit with there W3C designed rules. Soon to come will be a major revision of the AI engine which will give everyone the chance to improve its accuracy, many times over. Stay tuned.