Description
This is similar to the wiki proxy, but inside out: first it extracts people, places and things from the latest news stories, (using the Lingua::EN::NamedEntity Perl module) and then tells you which news stories refer to them - the result: which people, places and organisations are making the BBC news right now.
Lingua::EN::NamedEntity is far from perfect, and that's pretty much the major weakness in this prototype.
Images need some filtering.
Images definately need filtering, though the 'Saddam Insane' photo is quite amusing.
Andrew: Surely that's something that should be done from subscribing to search results. (Email? How very 90s. Shouldn't you be using RSS for that now?)
knc: Hey, if you can come up with an open source programmatic image filtering system, I'll happily add it.
Oh, and before I forget: if anyone else wants to try this, the Java-based ANNIE named-entities extractor (free from http://www.gate.ac.uk/) might be a better way to go.
Very nice.
A clever addition might be for users to login and enter a list of names of people/places/organisations of interest and they get emailed whenever any person in their list is mentioned in the news.