Recently Team Curious created a really interesting website, MDGActors that uses a mix of APIs to recognize actors for the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). This is how they describe it:

“Tackling the toughest problems facing the world today is a big job. What if we could highlight the people that are making a big difference and call out the people that aren’t? We think that it would be inspiring—Umair Haque thinks it could change the world.” Read their complete manifesto

They scan relevant articles for personal names, and classifies sentences around it with the Mood classifier (created by Mattias). They call it ‘Empathize’ and describe it as:

“If an author voices particularly strong sentiment in a sentence, an icon is added next to the sentence to indicate that feeling. Phrases with hearts are usually about people doing good, and phrases with condescending frowns usually signal more controversial topics.”

I find the idea very interesting, being able to pinpoint heroes and anti-heroes for a good cause. Great work!

Another interesting application Team Curious are providing is their Spin, where you just enter any keyword and it will tell you the sentiment of the results.

Entering George Bush came back with 14 negative and 0 positive voices.

Entering ‘Terminator Salvation‘ showed 2 negative and 11 positive voices.

Their project is a part of the Microsofts Imagine Cup Competition, I really wish you guys the best of luck!!

Before Christmas LibraryThing annouced a prize competition for uClassify integration, which I think was a brilliant idea. They wrote:

The Prize! So, LibraryThing calls on the book and library worlds to create something cool with uClassify by February 1, 2009 and post it here. The winner gets Toby Segaran’s Programming Collective Intelligence and a $100 gift certificate to Amazon or IndieBound.

Encouraged by this Kelly Vista entered the competition and submitted his contribution, a classifier that he describes in a comment on LibraryThing:

My goal was to create a classifier that would automatically “tag” any book description based on actual LibraryThing tags. For example, if you paste the book description for “Truman” into UClassify, it should return to you LibraryThing tags that suit the book. This is one step more general than one of your ideas (fiction vs. non-fiction).

The classifier has been published and can be tested here.

Where did the prize go?

I just received a comment from Kelly describing that apparently he was the only competition participant. Also Tim from LibraryThing acknowledged Kelly as the winner per e-mail. However Kevin never received the prestigious prize or even a follow up blog post. Kelly writes in the comment:

Unfortunately, the odd folks at LibraryThing decided to get all silent on me and I have not heard a peep from anyone since. In the meantime, they have found plenty of time to blog about other things. I spent 4-6 hours of my weekend time (which I could have spent with family) participating in the contest, assuming they were decent Internet citizens. And I won (as I mentioned, Tim e-mailed me so) — but then they never got back to me, not after repeated pings, and as a result, I was never awarded the prize they promised.

Tim, what happened here?

Another interesting uClassify web application has seen the light, Trve VS Emo. It tests a site if it’s “True Black Metal” or “Emotional”. The author, Albert Örwall writes

To “train” the trve-classification I’ve used lyrics by norweigan black metal bands, such as Mayhem, Burzum and Darkthrone. The emo-classification is based on lyrics by emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Fall out boy…

I tested with a hard rock blog I found randomly, Hard Rock Hideout which proved to be 81% Trve (true black metal). I then tested with this blog which turned out to be 100% Emo

Is there any need for automatic music tagging?

This is really cool, another cool thing would be a classifier that has been trained on texts from all genres (hip-hop, country, soul etc), this would not only be a fun way to test your blog it could also be used for automatic lyric tagging (hence track and album tagging). Does anyone know if there is any need for such a web service?

The last three weeks I’ve been doing some other things than working on uClassify.com. I really needed a break to regenerate some energy and inspiration. During this period I’ve been talking to Roger Karlsson about what we should develop next on uClassify.

uClassify HTML forms

We know that there are a lot of cool classifiers being built but not many of them finds their way to the public in a web application. We believe that the reason is the last barrier - using the API and to do that you need to write code. Our plan is to allow users who doesn’t have the time to learn and use the uClassify API, to simply copy and paste a HTML form snippet to any site.

We also want to publish some uClassify code libraries in different languages. One of our users, Alex Popescu, is currently implementing a Python library.

TrollGuard

In the beginning of January we released TrollGuard, a free WordPress spam filter plugin that uses uclassify.com. So far we have not had many users but recently it was featured on KillerStartups.com and since then we have an increasing number of users.

A very big thank you to Pacuraru Ovidiu who has given incredibly good feedback which led to an upgrade. We are looking forward to receive more feedback from all of you as our goal is to make the best spam filter plugin.

We’ve just implemented so that everyone with a uClassify account (free) can access public classifiers.

Once a classifier is published everyone can use it via the GUI or the web API and in return authors get a link to their website from everyone who use their classifiers. This should hopefully inspire more people to share their cool classifiers!

As an example of a published classifier check out the mood classifier by prfekt.se. Here is the list of all published classifiers.

A new site called bloggparti.se (only works for Swedish blogs/texts) using uClassify has spread through the Swedish blogosphere. The site takes a blog or text and tests it to see how it resembles to the major Swedish political parties.

Mattias Aspelund from 49lights.com created this classifier using 100 tagged blogs from each party. The site was created within 24 hours and had more than 1000 requests on the first day.

We think it’s very exciting to see how quickly people can build cool applications around uClassify. Self test sites seems to be very popular for bloggers, for example genderanalyzer.com went from 0 to Google Page Rank 6 in just three months.

I know there are more applications being built right now, looking forward to see those in action!

Me and Roger have just finished TrollGuard - an anti-spam plugin to WordPress 2.7 or later.

The plugin is in Beta and we are aware of some lacking features - however we would greatly appreciate if someone out there wanted to do some testing for us and come back with feedback!

This has been a small sideproject we did during our Christmas holidays using the uClassify API. We think it’s really cool that in less than a week we were able to setup a new Akismet service. Previous uClassify web applications have mostly been for entertainment, this plugin will acctually do something helpful - protect blogs from spam comments.

We are also confident in the accuracy of TrollGuard as similar classification technology has been used in Cactus Spam Filter since 2004.

Well now it’s up to you to test it! What isn’t working? What features are missing? Let us know!

Check TrollGuard out!

During Christmas some unfortunate events occurred - on the 26th of December Ultimahosts (who we were paying to maintain our servers) had a crash and managed to wipe out all our servers. This was very frustrating, but I expected it to be online again soon, recovered from their backups.

On the 28th they let me know that they had accidentally destroyed all backups. How is it possible for a single datacenter to screw up so much?? I don’t know.

Most classifiers are intact and users registered 17-25 can be recovered

Luckily I had taken manual backups myself - one on all the classifiers on the 25th of December and one on the user database on the 17th of December. This means that most classifiers are intact, but users who registered between 17-25 of December are gone. You guys can re-register with the same username and I will attach it to your old classifiers (send me an e-mail). I am really sorry about this and for the inconvenience it has caused.

New servers on Amazon EC2

I spent over 60 hours reinstalling and moving uclassify to Amazon EC2. This feels really good (now that it’s done). We can easily scale and we have an own good backup system using Amazon EBS + daily offsite backups.

I’m really sorry for any inconvenience,

Jon Kågström

Ps. Thanks to Google cache I was able to recover all posts for this blog…

On LibraryThing you can add your own books to a personal library. By doing this you start to get recommendations from either other users who has read the same book or automatically by the system. There are also several forums where users can discuss books - just like a really really big book club. At the time I signed up there were over 34 million books added. I added a couple of books I have recently read and to my surprise all of them already existed in the system, even the Swedish ones. After adding them I was immediately getting lots of recommendations, such as “The Satanic Verses” and “Robot : mere machine to transcendent mind”. Really cool!

Now with all these books some kind of categorization could help.

Competition

LibraryThing are encouraging their users to create something cool with uClassify. The prize is $100 Amazon gift certificate and Toby Segaran’s “Programming Collective Intelligence”. LibraryThing also presents a couple of cool ideas which you can use such as fictional vs non-fiction. The competition ends on February 1 2009 so what are you waiting for?

Yesterday we were mentioned on ReadWriteWeb which generated a lot of visits and more importantly - classifiers. 30 new classifiers were created within a time period of 10 hours, even though many are just created out of curiosity to quickly test the system - some will hopefully mature and have web applications built around it.

What’s going on techwise

As you have noticed we are continuously improving our system by carefully adding new features. The following tasks are planned for the GUI

We are soon installing a new more flexible menu system.

Users will be able to create profiles with descriptions and links. Also classifiers should be able to have a link to the web site it’s implemented.

Better information about training - right now there is no feedback on how much training has been done or is required. We want to give users an idea of how the training data performs.

What’s going on commercialwise

Everything is free on uClassify and that is how it will stay.

Our commercial idea is to offer companies the possibility to buy their own classification servers. For large databases with texts that needs to be classified it’s intractable to send every text for a roundtrip to uclassify.com. Instead companies could be interested in doing this efficiently locally. A products page with server information will appear soon.