The Yahoo Hack Day 2008 event wrapped up this weekend and the winners have been announced. One of my favorite entries that didn’t make the cut, but is worth mentioning is SnackUpon, a Yahoo Pipes application that provides StumbleUpon-like behavior using your Delicious username as input.
The output is RSS-feed based on data gathered from what you bookmark in delicious. Simply enter a delicious username in the form and the output is a feed of random webpages found by searching yahoo and delicious for a random set of tags from the given user’s delicious account.
The output isn’t perfect – it seems like the search algorithm could use a bit of polish to return more relevant results. That said, the idea is a worthwhile, if simplified, take on the classic “agent” device that the 1990’s promised we’d have in the 2000’s. Given a list of a user’s bookmarks, the agent should be able to mine the news, blogs, links from similar people, and new bookmarks with similar classification, allow the user to consume the results at her leisure, and use the user’s feedback (new bookmarks) to refine future searches.
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