NerdSwipe is a personal project I’ve been working on for the last six months. It is a web application that presents users with random Wikipedia articles, book synopses, and other summaries from large corpuses. After reading a summary, the user can rate how interested he/she is in that topic.

The system incorporates these ratings into an “anti-recommendation engine” for further summaries. The goal is to recommend things that are similar to what a user likes, but different enough to surprise and engage. People tend to live in bubbles of their own design. It’s important to step outside occasionally, and give ourselves opportunities for serendipitous learning.