[jacquesm]

And, to boot is still in damage control mode, now that pretending ignorance does not work we're going for the 'unfortunate timing angle'.

Nice work on the distance calculation, I think you've just figured out a way to create a blogspam detector, if an article is linked from a newer article and there is a > X% (with X somewhere in the neighbourhood of 45%) or so similarity then it is blogspam.

[fruchtose]

Thanks, but the distance calculation is the work of Alex Martelli from Stack Overflow. It's one of the sources I cited: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3106994/algorithm-to-calc... I cited. It's simple enough that I probably could have thought of it on my own if I spent more time on it, but then again it was simple enough to find with a Google search.

[scoot]

I could have sworn it was the work of Vladimir Levenshtein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Levenshtein

[fruchtose]

The code I referenced measures the difference between strings (percentages), using Levenshtein distance--which states the number of changes between two strings. If you can find a source that states this idea of difference can be attributed to Levenshtein, then by all means I will acknowledge him. Until then, I will refer to Alex Martelli's code.

[scoot]

The code I referenced measures the difference between strings

Exactly, and the algorithm used is, as I said, attributed to Levenshtein. Expressing it as a ratio is hardly novel.

As for the implementation, Alex Martelli credit's Stavros Korokithakis[1], although Lev implementations are 2-a-penny, and this isn't a particularly good one (sorry Stavros).

[1]http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/finding-the-levenshtein-di...

[fruchtose]

> Exactly, and the algorithm used is, as I said, attributed to Levenshtein.

I cited Levenshtein by name in my original comment. I'm guessing you didn't read everything what I wrote, because I don't understand why you would think there's an issue otherwise.

> Expressing it as a ratio is hardly novel.

The whole reason I linked to Alex Martelli's post is because it's his work, not mine, novel or otherwise. I just cited the resourced I used.