Month: November 2006

Junk food ad ban attacked

The plans were attacked from all sides, with health campaigners claiming they lacked conviction and would have little effect on children’s eating habits. Broadcasters and advertisers said they were too draconian, warning that a projected £39m advertising deficit would put the future of UK-produced children’s programming under threat.

when is the war on junk food coming to the US?

Web scraping taxonomy

In the last few years, several works in the literature have addressed the problem of data extraction from Web pages. The importance of this problem derives from the fact that, once extracted, the data can be handled in a way similar to instances of a traditional database. The approaches proposed in the literature to address the problem of Web data extraction use techniques borrowed from areas such as natural language processing, languages and grammars, machine learning, information retrieval, databases, and ontologies. As a consequence, they present very distinct features and capabilities which make a direct comparison difficult to be done. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy for characterizing Web data extraction fools, briefly survey major Web data extraction tools described in the literature, and provide a qualitative analysis of them. Hopefully, this work will stimulate other studies aimed at a more comprehensive analysis of data extraction approaches and tools for Web data.

Gather

Gather, which is a bit of a cross between Vox and Newsvine, emphasizes personal publishing and offers rewards for members of popular in-network blog posts and articles. (We’ve also written similar companies Multiply and Topix.net recently.) Gather’s substantial resources haven’t paid off with substantial popularity, especially considering the competition: 120K registered users and 700K unique visitors per month.

what do they need all that money for? to fail more spectacularly?