Yes, this post is original. I should know—I wrote it :) Of course, as any machine learning expert will tell you, the ideas I’m discussing/describing are not. People have been using non-hand-labeled features of various sorts (including text, image and sound) for learning for decades. The exact form of that learning has varied, and recommender systems are are the more recent end of that scale, but these are old ideas (even though there is no end of marketers purporting such ideas as “new” and “original”).

Jason