…okay, that’s a bit dramatic…the smart (and sassy?) researchers over at columbia university have been working on this program for several years called newsblaster…it’s a project from the natural language processing group, and has received moola from darpa and the nsf…oh, please do not confuse it with tools like news from elGoog, it’s much smarter…

there’s an explanation on the site, but for those of you with the attention span of a typical aim user, here’s the skinny: ” Columbia Newsblaster is a system to automatically track the day’s news. There are no human editors involved — everything you see on the main page is generated automatically, drawing on the sources listed on the left side of the screen. Every night, the system crawls a series of Web sites, downloads articles, groups them together into “clusters” about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of what the major stories of the day are, so you don’t have to visit the pages of dozens of publications”

…they’re already adding features (like the ability to search), but most interesting is this FAQ: “Can I license the code for Newsblaster or make it run on my own data?
We are currently discussing plans by which we may be able to either license Newsblaster code or run it ourselves on other people’s data. It is not yet clear when we will be able to do this.”

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