Putting the (Tin)finger on the famous

Stephen Withers
Monday, 14 January 2008 10:09

Your IT - Home IT

Tinfinger - a new web site for fans of famous people - launches today.

The goal is to become the primary source of information about famous people by combining user-written profile pages and articles with a news and blog aggregator based on names rather than links.

The content is organised into categories including entertainment, sport, politics, science, and technology, and the primary criterion for inclusion is that the person should be mentioned in news sources. It thus steers a middle course between 'notability' tests (as used by Wikipedia) and a free-for-all, explained co-founder Paul Montgomery.

The site has been seeded with entries (mostly stubs) for over 400,000 people found in dbpedia and IMDB, and organised into 650 hierarchical categories.

Profiles are limited to around 150 words, and the intention is that they are written from a neutral point of view and restricted to the "incontrovertible facts", said Montgomery. The profiles will be published under a Creative Commons licence.

Once a person is profiled, users may contribute various types of articles including news stories, opinion pieces, descriptions of personal encounters, and comparisons with other famous people.

"We're hoping to host a lot of conversations about people's lives," said Montgomery.

The news aggregator will in some ways resemble Google News, but the selection algorithm (tinscore) is publicly disclosed and emphasises the occurrence of people's names rather than hyperlinks.
Tinfinger also includes social networking software to provide more opportunities for user interaction, including feedback, groups and blogging.

Unlike the bulk of sites that deliver user-generated content and then keep any revenue for themselves, Tinfinger will reward contributors - but in a novel way.