p2pnet news | product news:- Freenet founder Ian Clarke, now domiciled in Austin, Texas, far from his usual home in Scotland, has launched a new commercial venture.

Called Thoof, it’ll offer, “interesting news articles, websites, videos, photographs, and other links from around the web,” says the about page.

Thoof works along the lines of music tasting programmes which zero in on users’ likes and dislikes.

An algorithm, “discovers a reader’s interests and tailors the stories to each reader’s individual tastes. Every Thoof reader will see a personalized page with stories he or she will find interesting,” says the site.

“Thoof is designed to solve two key problems with today’s user generated news websites,” Clarke told p2pnet.

“The first is quality and accuracy of news stories, to address this we took a page out of Wikipedia’s book, if you see something wrong, you can fix it yourself by editing a story directly.

“The second is that everyone sees the same stuff, even though everyone obviously doesn’t have the same interests. To address this we developed a novel algorithm which learns what your interests are, and tailors stories to you tastes, right from the first moment you visit the website”.

Is there deep meaning hidden behind the name Thoof?

Nope.

It’s, “really just a name, intended to be short and memorable,” Clarke told us. “It sounds a bit like ‘truth’, which is what we hope people will find on Thoof.”

Fair enough : )

Slashdot it!

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

---

rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site

---

Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Product News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

HOME

Viewed 4609 times