About

Finding out about a topic online can be time consuming. It involves visiting multiple news sites, encyclopedia entries, video repositories and other resources while discarding irrelevant information. MakeMyPage aims to speed this process by combining automatic aggregation of information with social media to build web pages with images, videos and links to important information about a topic. Automatic aggregation provides the initial content of the web pages. This content is organized by type: blogs, news, web links, images, video and a main article. MakeMyPage creates a web page by selecting a few items from each category, plus links to more resources within it. Users can vote on the links and media they like best for a given topic and, based on these votes, links are promoted to  and within the main web page. MakeMyPage can be thought of as a collection of wiki pages where people enhance automatically generated content not by editing the text in it, but by voting and suggesting new links. The system’s focus is on the organization of content that is genuinely useful and on point. To retrieve useful content, MakeMyPage continuously tracks popular search queries and maintains a database of web pages about these topics. We present a pilot study that shows how relevance grows with user feedback while still staying on topic. Future work includes making MakeMyPage web pages available to end users through search engines and improving retrieval algorithms.

Citation

Francisco Iacobelli, Kristian Hammond and Lawrence Birnbaum (2008) MakeMyPage: Social Media Meets Automatic Content Generation. To appear in the 3rd International Conference of Weblogs and Social Media.



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