Below you can enter you del.icio.us user name to find stories that are relevant to what you've been tagging recently, or you can choose from the categories in the drop down boxes or simply click "Launch" to view all the recent stories from the BBC.
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Enter your del.icio.us user name to find stories relevant to your tags.
Screenshots
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Del.icio.us Profiles
There is a new addition to the project which aims to implement the personal relevance of stories to the user. By using the users del.icio.us user name, stories are scanned for keywords that the user has used for tags recently. This means that the more relevant stories will stand out. This can be used at the same time the categories.
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Summary of Features
Time
The content is all drawn from the numerous BBC News feeds, all supplied by BBC Backstage. The feeds are arranged around a central hub, each one pointing out at an angle, determined by it's time of release, to form a 24 hour array.
This is combined with the deterioration of the story. As each item gets older, it moves away from the centre, and gradually loses it's level of transparency, so as to fade away.
The time that the story is released also determines it's colour. If it is released at night, the story is black, if it is released during daytime hours, it is blue, and at dawn or dusk, an orangey yellow. This means that from a distance, the user can see an interesting layout of how their news is released throughout the day. It also helps with navigation, and a quicker identification of a particular stories time of release.
Relevance
The application applies two different levels of relevance; personal and geographical. In it's current state, the application fabricates this information.
The current RSS system in use by the BBC doesn't geotag all of it's feeds, but progress on this will be covered on my blog. The goegraphical relevance to the user is determined by it's position on the y axis of the spiral; local stories in the centre and distant stories at the top and bottom, in a similar shape to the physical globe.
Personal relevance will be determined by searching the users personal blog to give each feed a relevance according to keywords. This is represented in the tranparency level of the feed. Thus stories that are important to the user will stand out brightly and those that are not will fade into the background.
Categories
There is also the option on loading the application of choosing from the categories that are currently on the feeds. So if you just want to know about Cornwall's news and how the Tottenham Hotspur team are doing, the application will fade out the rest of the news and highlight the bits you want.
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