improving cpunk S/N via grouplens/filtering

["Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>]

an interesting new field called "collaborative filtering" seems
to have strong potential in helping separate signal-to-noise,
and might be of interest to some cpunks here as a pet project.

Brad Miller is working on his PhD. in this area and put together
a nice system inside many news readers that allows people to
read/ratings articles and track their ratings. the system uses
the heuristic that people who agree or disagree consistently
on ratings on particular messages in the past will tend to
do so in the future, and it uses this to extrapolate ratings
on messages a person has not yet rated.

essentially he has all the technical stuff down and mostly
just needs trial users. it wouldn't
be hard to plug it all into the cpunk list to see how well it
works. its the most promising route I know of at the moment,
for solving an extremely difficult problem that pervades cyberspace.

however, B.M. has been working on the project for a long time
and at least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have
reached "critical mass" yet, which surprises me. anyway, the
URL

http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/grouplens.html

is anyone here familiar with this project? what do you think
about how effective it is?