"leverages advanced semantic technology to make Web publishing and community engagement easier than ever"

September 14, 2010 9:13 AM

"If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds." Launching this week at the DEMO Conference, Primal addresses "a core problem with the Internet: our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to easily manage and consume it."

For instance, do you like the Doctor Who? Here's Primal's auto-generated page about Sarah Jane Smith. What about rugby, or ADHD, or content farms?

posted by jbickers (18 comments total)

perhaps not ironically, it kinda implodes on that last one.
posted by jbickers at 9:13 AM on September 14, 2010

Googlebots were already "reading" web pages. Now these programs are creating them. All we have to do now is get computers to call each other assholes in the comments and we can take ourselves out of the equation entirely.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:19 AM on September 14, 2010 [31 favorites]

It's true. Donkey love is a fairly accurate cross-section of my mind.
posted by tapesonthefloor at 9:24 AM on September 14, 2010

So, it's is' like cuil's hilarious cpedia?

The results seem to make a little more sense though, for example the page for metafilter vs. metafilter.

But really this kind of thing just seems like research on a giant spam-bot. And Wikipedia already has a page on Sarah Jane Smith written by actual humans.
posted by delmoi at 9:26 AM on September 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

So it's trying to be Wikipedia, except the results suck?
posted by reductiondesign at 9:33 AM on September 14, 2010

Been tried before, and although I'm intrigued by the concept, I still don't see it being very interesting unless it can do better in either breadth or depth than Wikipedia — which with the mess the deletionists are making of its breadth, really ought not be that hard. But none of the autogenerated sites, at least that I've seen, have hit Wikipedia parity.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:33 AM on September 14, 2010

poop
posted by redbeard at 9:37 AM on September 14, 2010

"the page for metafilter"

This does seem to collect more far afield info than Wikipedia or random googling.

For instance, what the shit are these?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:39 AM on September 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

Couldn't they have designed it to look a little less like autogenerated SEO assholery?

You'd think that they'd care a lot about that distinction.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:40 AM on September 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

> For instance, what the shit are these?

Wow. I'd love to get my hands on those CSS (+image) files.
posted by bjrn at 9:46 AM on September 14, 2010

For instance, what the shit are these?

There used to be semi-regular discussion of a mefi redesign - in some cases contests were held or proposals accepted.
posted by davey_darling at 10:06 AM on September 14, 2010

We worked with owner Matthew Haughey to create a new visual aesthetic that not only provided better readability, enhanced navigation and a simpler structure, but one that stuck to the original “indie” feel of the site.

I prefer its early work. Before it sold out and became all about the $5.
posted by Joe Beese at 10:21 AM on September 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

This is how it ends.
posted by run"monty at 10:56 AM on September 14, 2010

This is how it ends
posted by stbalbach at 11:19 AM on September 14, 2010

"a core problem with the Internet: our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to easily manage and consume it."

tl;dr
posted by Skeptic at 11:29 AM on September 14, 2010

The new design has not yet been launched, but it will likely be launched soon

I will be over here holding my breath until I turn a very unprofessional blue color.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:41 AM on September 14, 2010

Last time I checked, this is what people do with domain squatting these days. They serve up a page of skimmed content, to make their squatting portal look more legitimate than it really is, in hopes the ad clicks will go up.
posted by davejay at 4:37 PM on September 14, 2010

davejay - that or affiliate marketers. [sigh] its really going to piss me off when I see something I've written on one of these pages. I have enough trouble beating off affiliate marketers who scrape and reuse original content to have it be pushed into this kind of simple to use tool.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:21 PM on September 14, 2010