News You Can Bruise for 2005 February 6

Has anyone hypothesized that John Barth and Donald Barthelme are the same person?

The amazing Ultra Gleeper has reached 1.0. I spent the whole week making sure I could honestly say it works, and that it was actually amazing and not just a fluke. It turns out it does honestly work (now) and it is pretty amazing. It found Gold bar mystery from China, and Steven Wolfram's attempt to give every mathematical function its own web page, and a whole political analysis magazine I never even heard of.

Learn all about how it works in my new paper, "The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages", soon to be a major CodeCon presentation. Of special interest is the "Giving away the store" section, where I do what I wish other people would do and summarize all the little epiphanies that turned into the design/software/idea/whatever.

Have fun. If you start using this, or start writing your own, I'd like to hear what you think. I made an account on my installation for Sumana so hopefully I can get some user feedback from someone who's not me.

Update: I redid the web page to make it more user-level "why you need a recommendation engine" and less academic "why is this recommendation engine different from all other recommendation engines?", since the latter is now well-covered in the paper.