if this has already posted then just delete/ignore

http://extensions.npike.net/gcaln/index.php

/pd, do you even read this blog/forum? :-P

Blog: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-27.html#n24
Forum: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/28641.html

Sorry, I tried my best to ignore it, but couldn't... ;-)

Philipp: How about an AJAX-powered search that activates when you type in the "Title" box on the forum, searching previous posts that use similar subjects? If one exists, the user could select it and their post gets added to that thread. Not sure how it would work exactly; it's just a thought! :-)

try a little harder next time tony :)-

I'll keep that "duplicate checker" in mind Tony. I'd probably implement it like Digg does, showing similar comment threads after submission. Might not be trivial to tweak it so that it catches dupes, but doesn't become annoying for non-dupes...

You mean like Digg... I think it's pretty hard to establish the similarity of two titles.

(1) Google Calendar Notifier
(2) New Firefox Extension for Google Calendar
(3) Google Calendar Launched
(4) Google Develops Anti-phishing Firefox Extension

(1) should be considered similar to (2), but a non-AI program will probably say (1) and (3) are related. Maybe sorting the related posts by date would help.

well, the date thing may be effective for most..... but then you get people like me who post stuff three months after the rest of the world is aware! ;o)

The way to solve it in my humble opinion would be to design a "related articles" algorithm that shows what articles/posts are related to the post that you are commenting on, or based completely on an individual comment/ forum entry (much harder).

If there is one thing that I really like about Google is their ability to group together related items, whether they are in blog posts or in general news items. Something much smaller scale would do the job here.

If I want to do it really well I'd have to separate title + comment content into two steps. Because no one wants to hear "this is a duplicate" after she already typed in a two page article into the box. But I guess this might easily turn into overhead...