Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Auto-podcasting

One of the potential values of podcasting is drive-/walk-/run-time access to blog posts. However, a good blogger does not necessarily a good radio voice make. I've been playing with Cepstral's text to speech (tts) synthesis demo and found it to be remarkably good at speaking short blog posts. Here is an mp3 (wav) of a recent post.

This demo is of the Cepstral system with no blog specific mods of any type. Certain structures (in this case parenthetical text) could be dealt with in a slightly more listener friendly manner, but as an out of the box demo, this is really great.

Now imagine being able to listen to posts from your morning read away from the computer. Systems like Cepstral's offer multiple voices, and many configurations providing lots of potential to vary the voice per post, have quoted material spoken in a distinct voice and so on.

Note that speech is another example of an annotation stream!

Mixing and Filtering RSS Feeds

I came across FeedShake this morning:

Feedshake tool helps you to generate new feeds by merging, sorting and filtering existing online RSS feeds.

It has two modes allowing for various features including sorting, filter by keyword (inclusive and exclusive), re-titling, etc. Matt Siegler pointed me to this Lifehacker (profile) post, and Michiel Dethmers over on the backstage mailing list pointed me to another similar site: sux0r.

UPDATE: Eric Williams at backstage pointed to another mixer: aggrssive.

Feed Annotation Stream mashups already?

AJH over at Micro-info (profile) has posted some thoughts on Feed Annotation Streams that suggest a new layer for consumer applications (that is to say, consumer of annotation streams);

I wonder if there is any merit in going a step further and having an annotationMix (or annotationPatch?) (that may or may not be an annotationStream?) that:

1) contains one or more <useAnnotationStream annotationURI="URI-for-annotation-service" /> tags, and

2) defines which bits of those various annotations from each feed should be used in the final annotationMix?

This extension needn't go as far as defining an XSLT to remix the final feed, but would be useful as a config file for a mixer of several feeds, perhaps, or setting up an XSLT to generate the final annotated/mixed feed?

It will be interesting to see what other communities might pick up on RSS annotations, because I have a feeling this idea might run and run....

I'm still working on the specification and hope to get it out soon. The spec needs to be presented with some form of ping service which is going to take a bit more time to set up. I am happy for others to develop ideas based on my original proposal - which I want to keep as simple as possible to allow for maximum exploration of possible application layers.

I'm going to use the tag 'fastreams' to label postings on this topic. It is not ideal, but a check on Technorati for other candidates (fas, annotations) showed that they were taken.