This is from the drudge report, has no permanent links though, so I’ll just copy the whole text.
GOOGLE FRANKENSTEIN: MACHINES TO CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
Mon Apr 12 2010 08:15:34 ET
GOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive!
News sites should use technology to PREDICT what a user wants to read by what they have already read, Schmidt told the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NEWS EDITORS, where a few humans still remained in the audience.
“We’re all in this together."
MORE
Schmidt said he doesn’t want ‘to be treated as a stranger’ when reading online, POLITICO reports.
He envisions a future where technology for news editing could help tailor advertisements for individual readers.
And he wants to be challenged through technology that 'directs readers’ to a story with an 'opposing’ view.
[An odd suggestion from the CEO of a company long accused of offering little to no conservative-leaning links on its news page, while aggressively promoting left-leaning hubs.]
Schmidt said GOOGLE is working on new ways to push adverts and content for consumers, based on what stories they’ve read.
What stories his machines have selected.
Developing…
I believe I saw a video about this once. Strangely predictive video. I think it was back in 2002 or 2003. They predicted that first google would start filtering news by what sites you tended to read, then they would ultimately write software that would stitch the stories together to produce a single story with the level of detail that the user tended to prefer. They said that the downside was that it would allow people to dumb the news down to as vapid a level as they desire, and that many people would… but it would provide an extremely detailed treasure trove of information for anyone who wanted to dig deep enough.
I think the video ended with NYT cancelling their online site, going print only, then filing for bankruptcy… heh.
Everytime I use google news, I wish it would let me ban certain news sites from appearing on my page entirely…