Now that I’ve got the blog resettled on a brand new hosting platform and things are starting to settle down around here, it’s about time to get back in the habit of posting these links on Fridays.  So here we go!

• Filtering the news
  BuzzFeed recently posted about the beta of a news “filtering” service called Persai.  The system pushes content to you based on topics that you specify (for example, you could set up a Persai feed on something like “smoked salmon,” though why anyone would want to do this is beyond me), and whenever the service comes across an article or piece of text that it thinks is relevant, it will push it out to you.  By giving the system feedback (”accepting” or “rejecting” articles), the system will in theory learn over time what is relevant to your interests and what isn’t–kind of like a baby AI-bot.  I like the concept, though I wonder, where does the content come from?  I would assume that there is a search engine involved somewhere under the hood, but then again maybe the content comes from a selection of “curated” links.
• Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle
  This is one of those “only on the Internet” memes that is truly viral–a guy whose wife is passionate about cycling recently got involved heavily in the Obama campaign. He would tease her by saying that “Barack Obama is your new bicycle,” and randomly decided to turn the joke into a fortune cookie-like website that displays one of sixty-some odd phrases following the presidential candidate’s name.  And, of course, copycat “x Is Your New Bicycle” sites have sprung up for Steve Jobs, Ron Paul and others.
• Post-strike television production calendar
  The New York Times has posted a detailed list of when favorite television shows on all of the major networks are supposed to be coming back on the air, now that the Writer’s Guild strike has been over for a couple of weeks.  All I’ll say is that the sooner that Ugly Betty is back on the air, the better.
• NBC abandons traditional TV seasons
  In other strike-related news, NBC has decided to shake things up by largely discarding the standard television season and roll out new shows year-round.  This is much more in line with the British model (though not quite), which makes far more sense to me–rather than having “seasons,” the BBC, for example, will order a “series” of 8+ episodes, which can then air just about anytime.  If the show is a success, it orders more; if it’s a failure, there’s no great loss because they’ve only paid for 8 episodes, and the show can still be put on DVD to recoup its costs somewhere out towards the end of the Long Tail.