Sometimes I curse myself for writing Serendeputy, especially when it shows me all the BPA articles that are coming out now. Apparently, I have poisoned myself and my children beyond repair. More green living. These have been bubbling up a lot as I’ve been working on my New Year’s resolutions.

The algorithm never lies. The saddest thing is that New England Patriots has dropped off my top topics list. It’s been a slow, steady slide since they lost to the Ravens. I probably shouldn’t take as much joy in the Colts loss as I did. HA HA

The state of the union is strong.

I’m pretty excited. I’ve been heads-down the past few weeks working towards the official 1.0 release of the Serendeputy application. Probably a few more weeks to go.

Serendeputy is really four applications. Each of them are in pretty good shape.

The librarian understands the world. Its role is to read all the news sites, parse them and figure out what they’re talking about and what’s relevant right now. This has been running stably for eighteen months now, but I’m most excited about something I put in a couple of months ago — the sidecar.

The sidecar allows me to attach snippets (or pages) of code to any element in the librarian system, be it a source, an author, a feed, a tree or a topic. This lets me do little things like fixing the author tags on the New York Times articles, and bigger things like programmatically disambiguating the different meanings of “windows.” This sidecar functionality is really letting me fine-tune the librarian, which makes the overall results appear much more on-target for all the users. The machine learning pieces of the librarian are tremendously helpful, but nothing’s better than being able to hand-tune when I need to perfect one particular thing.

Hooray for Ruby Metaprogramming.

The deputy understands you. The deputy is the real personalization engine that takes all the gestures you give the system and builds them into a profile. It then reads all the librarian’s indexes to find just the right articles for you. The core deputy technology has been in place for more than a year, so I’ve mostly been fine-tuning it.

I’ve been mostly focusing on timeliness boosts and sinks. If you read something on Bill Belichick, the deputy will interpret that as an interest for you and build it into your master profile. The key knob I’m twiddling now is how much should I boost it based on the fact that you’re reading it now? How long should this boost last? Should this end up swamping some of your longer-term but not recent interests? I’m having a fun time modeling all the different ways of doing this, but I’m still working on finding a reasonably optimal configuration.

The web application (at Serendeputy.com) is getting tweaked substantially over the next few weeks. I have a few interface things I’ve wanted to get at, and I’m bundling them into a big release. (Firefox + jQuery + way too many DOM nodes = sluggishness). I’m also building out the site-wide meta lists (most popular for everyone, etc.) and building out the interface for the tree navigation of the sources and topics. Ideally, these improvements will make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

The API application is almost done. This is the functionality that helps publishers take advantage of Serendeputy’s personalization engine on their own site. I’m working with several alpha/beta customers right now to get the right balance of functionality. It’s a lot of fun talking to folks back in the industry, and I’m glad that I have a decent amount of cred from my time at the Boston Globe, Abuzz and Amazon.

This will be one of the core revenue drivers of the site, so I’m excited to see it coming together. Revenue is helpful.

So, lots to do, but I think I’m making good (and fast) progress. Never underestimate the ability to understand the entire system. And make decisions quickly. Not a lot of bureaucracy here at Serendeputy world headquarters.

Mostly, I’m very excited that this thing I’ve built is started to really resemble what I had in my head.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please drop me a line!

The site is back up. Hooray.

One of the perils of cloud computing: if something goes wrong on the underlying hardware, you’re several layers of abstraction from being able to fix it. Ugh.

Anyway, one of the machines at Slicehost went down, which happened to be holding my web1 server. When the server went down ungracefully, it corrupted some of the files. So, I waited for Slicehost to rebuild the underlying machine, then I rebuilt my server. It wasn’t too bad: a little fsck goes a long way.

Thanks for your patience.

My hosting facility is having some serious issues at the moment, so the site is down. I hope to get it back up and running as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!

The creeping terrors arrive. I wonder if I’ve spent a year building a personalized news site that no one else is ever going to use or like.

Well, it is what it is. If nothing else, I’ll have a kickass personalized news site for myself.

So, right now I’m in the middle of a serious re-write of my librarian application (the piece that talks to rest of the world). It’s moving in the right direction, and it will ensure that the whole building won’t fall over on the first day, but it’s been a horrible slog.

I’ve decided to look at it this way, though: I’m building distance between me and potential competitors. I’ve been deeply involved in this enough to know that it’s something that a YCombinator kid can’t clone in a weekend. (Or, so I hope).

1000.times do
  puts “It’s important to keep going through the dip.”
end

I also need to re-read my review of The Dip.

Hello everyone!

I’ve been writing about my life and thoughts since March 2001 over on my personal blog at JPButler.com. Since my daughters came along, my blog has become overrun with posts about bottles, diapers and other topics that endlessly fascinate my sisters, but are less interesting to my colleagues and the rest of the technical world.

So, I’ve decided to create a separate blog for my thoughts about product management, technology, business, media, and other assorted geekery. That way, my mother doesn’t have to suffer through search diatribes and my colleagues aren’t subjected to the tiniest advances of the little baby. Everybody wins!

I’d like to be able to share some of what I’ve learned, and force myself to clarify some of my thinking by putting it down in writing. We’ll see how it goes. I hope to be a good web citizen, and I hope to be able to contribute something to the conversation. You can always email me at Jason at Serendeputy.

What’s Serendeputy? It’s my new startup. I hope to be able to open up the private beta within the next few months.

Cheers!
Jason