Product
How an item gets made, and why it takes so long.
Four stages, none of which can be hurried. An item that arrives in the corpus on Tuesday was probably first proposed the previous autumn. This is not a bottleneck we are working on; it is the specification.
Photograph: Japs 88 · CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Source
From the public record only: standards bodies, national meteorological offices, transit authorities, mapping agencies, museum and manufacturer catalogues. If a claim cannot be cited to a document anyone can obtain, it does not enter the corpus.
Verify
Three independent sources minimum, retained as citations on the item itself and returned with it. An item that survives on one source stays in review indefinitely. We are not in a hurry; that is the entire proposition.
Calibrate
Four scores between 0.00 and 1.00 — stakes, controversy, urgency, novelty. All four must fall under threshold. Novelty is deliberately scored downward: a feed of things nobody knew is not restful, it is a quiz.
Deliver
REST for polling, SSE for long-lived displays, a scheduled digest for email, a signed tarball for air-gapped sites, and a web component for people who would rather not think about any of the above.
Calibration
The Dullness Index in full.
Every item is scored on four axes between 0.00 and 1.00. All four must fall under threshold before it ships, and all four travel with it in the payload so you can apply your own.
| Axis | Target | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
stakes | 0.00 | Whether any reader's circumstances change as a result of knowing it. A lock cycle time changes nobody's circumstances. An interest rate does. |
controversy | 0.00 | Whether two reasonable people could hold opposing views. The boiling point of water is not controversial. Almost everything with a person's name in it is. |
urgency | 0.00 | Whether it matters that you read it now rather than in a year. If an item decays, it is news, and news is somebody else's product. |
novelty | ≤ 0.20 | Whether it surprises. The only axis with headroom. Zero novelty is a feed of things you already knew, which is not calming, it is irritating. |
Zero novelty is a feed of things you already knew, which is not calming. It is irritating.
Delivery
Five ways to get it out of our machines and onto yours.
| Method | Shape | Suited to |
|---|---|---|
REST | JSON over HTTPS, GET /v1/feed | Anything that can poll. The default, and the right answer for almost everybody. |
SSE | text/event-stream | Long-lived displays that would otherwise poll for months. One connection, items pushed on rotation. |
Digest | Scheduled email or webhook | Internal newsletters and morning boards. Fixed times, fixed item count. |
Offline pack | Signed tarball plus manifest | Air-gapped sites, ships, remote installations, and anywhere a firewall change requires a committee. |
Component | <neutral-feed> | Pages. One custom element, one attribute, degrades to plain text without a network. |
Corrections
We have issued nine corrections in eleven years.
All nine are listed on the about page with dates and what changed. Seven were unit conversions, one was a misattributed patent year, and one was a cloud genus we had spelled wrong since launch.
Put something on the screen that will still be true next year.
Ambient is free for one screen and one channel, and it does not expire. The key takes about a minute.