Roll Call of Theatre Blogs, Newsodrome

Here's a great opportunity if you are totally burned out and want to do nothing more than sit in front of the computer and dream about the theatre.

A couple of guys named Tal Lev-Ami and Itai Lahan are offering you an electronic clipping service, freebies, on a given number of topics. One of them is theatre.

You can get a daily feed of the stuff, as shown here, and get enough drama news to choke a horse.

Or you can go explore their massive list of theatre blogs. I count 251 links, as of today, including Austin Live Theatre.

Appearing on their front page today is a squib on the ALT post about the interview with Steven Dietz done by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin of the Statesman. I scrawled a red circle around it for you.

The founders comment on their aims and methodology, appropriately enough, on their own blog. This is from their post of December 11, 2008:

Newsodrome shows you the most interesting news in your areas of interest. News that matter to you. And it will do that in your familiar, uncluttered newspaper format.

Powering Newsodrome is a computerized editor. An artificial intelligence that sifts through huge amount of content, classifies it and ranks it. But the automaton's work doesn't end there... behind Newsodrome is our vision of an AI that evolves to offer you better, more interesting news over time. After showing you your newspaper, our computerized editor continues to listen to your feedbacks - articles you liked and disliked, topics you read more than others, news sources that attracted your attention - and it evolves. It learns from your experience and from the experiences of others and over time it will pick on subtle hints that even you might have missed - a writer you tend to read more than others, words and expressions that put you off, specialized topics within your topics of interest that better capture your attention. The end result? Your personalized newspaper with the best news the Internet has to offer on your areas of interest.

But... Newsodrome is at a very early stage. We chose to start small - expose only a few selected news topics with a basic AI, keeping things to a minimum and build it from there, basing our expansion decisions on your comments and feedback.

So - stop Google-ing for news. Forget about registering to dozens of blogs. Leave the days of sifting through tons of articles just to find the one article that is of interest to you. Come visit us at Newsodrome instead!

(Or you could get involved in Austin arts, instead, and rely on Austin Live Theatre for your local arts coverage!)