zeitgeist

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Zeitgeist - An intelligent RSS news aggregator (C) Copyright 2009-2013 Daniel W. Dyer

SYNOPSIS

Zeitgeist is a Java library for identifying common topics among a set of news articles downloaded from RSS feeds. It groups and ranks related articles. It is loosely based on the non-negative matrix factorisation example presented in chapter 10 of Toby Segaran's Programming Collective Intelligence book.

LICENCE

Zeitgeist is licensed under the terms of the Apache Software Licence version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt).

BUILDING FROM SOURCE

Zeitgeist is built using Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org). Version 1.7.1 or later is required. To rebuild from scratch run the following command from the project root directory:

  ant clean dist

GENERATING HTML OUTPUT

Zeitgeist includes a basic HTML publisher for generating a page of news headlines, complete with relevant images extracted from the feed articles. This application can be run as follows:

  java -jar zeitgeist-publisher-1.2.jar

By default this will look for a file called zeitgeist.properties in the working directory. Alternatively, you can specify the path to some other properties file as a command line argument.

To get good results you should aim to have at least 20 different feeds that cover the same broad topics.