Internet News

Google News Search

Google News Brings Back Search The Web Option, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Dec 22)

Google News restored option to search Web but you have to look carefully for it.

Google News drops author:

Google Removes Author: Search From Google News, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 19)

Change your cheatsheets for Google News - it removed the author: search operator. Instead we are supposed to rely on the new "author" tag which is to connect to an author's page. It all depends on the author setting up a profile. It's not searching on a piece of metadata that should exist for all news stories. This is another case of Google losing its sense of what is important in search.

Business News Studies

Those who manage access to news sources in organizaions will be interested in a report prepared by Robin Neidorf - the Freepint Research Report: Survey on News Needs and Preferences 2011 just published.

"Business news drives business decisions. Any environmental change – marketplace, competitive, financial or other – has the potential to create change in a business. Organisations access news through a wide range of paid-for and free sources, and information managers face an enormous challenge in understanding the full portfolio of news sources so that they can manage them efficiently and cost-effectively.

Over the past 4 years, FreePint Research has undertaken a survey to understand the decision-making process and priorities of information managers in reviewing, acquiring and managing the many sources of news that enter their organisations."

There is a relatively modest license fee.

Freepint is also offering a Buyer's Guide On Business News Information at no cost. Request your copy here.

Sort by date at Google News

Google News Sort By Date Gone, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable (Dec 2)

There are reports that Google removed sorted-by-date in Google News search in the new design. I'm still seeing the old design - black bar on top - and sorted-by-date is still an option in the bottom left. I certainly hope we're not going to lose yet another search feature.

Google News Advanced Search

Google News Moves Advanced Options To Search Bar; A Sign Of Things To Come?, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 21)

In Google News dvanced search functions have been moved into the search bar rather than sit on a separate page. Look for the small triange.

"Other properties, like Google Image Search, Google Calendar and Google.com web search continue to have advanced search options on a separate page. But it’s not a stretch to imagine similar functionality rolling out across all Google properties, especially considering their summer announcement of plans to update the overall Google user experience with a “consistent visual experience.”"

How much filtering does Google News do?

Is Google really filtering my news?, Mary Ellen Bates, Librarian of Fortune (Sep 2)

Mary Ellen Bates follows up on Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You with her own tests on the effects of personalization at Google News. They are significant - in her test most people saw the first two stories, but there was huge variety and little overlap in the remainder

Comments to the post are valuable for tips on how to decustomize.

Google News Ranking Factors

This mix of factors in the algorithms for ranking news stores has a few points in common with search results ranking.

There are two lists.

Top 10 Most Important Google News Ranking Factors

Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors

For positive factors, expertise, authority, uniqueness, social sharing, quality, keywords in headlines, and citation rank.

There is more detail on negative ranking in Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors, Search Engine Land (OCt 3)

EVRI for news

Former Search Tool Evri Joins Crowded iPad News Club, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Sep 26)

If you have an iPad, you might like the new EVRI for delivering news you want to read to your iPad. If you don't have the iPad, just set it up for your desktop. There are many topics drawing from many excellent sources.

"Evri claims that what differentiates it is its “topic-based” approach and that users can dynamically create and follow news about any issue or topic, dynamically generated from a search query or keyword. Like other newsreaders Evri will capture content coming from social feeds (i.e., Twitter and Facebook). But it also indexes roughly “2.3 million topics from over 15K of the Web’s best sources.”"

Getting local news

Pew Internet: Diving Into How We Access Local News, Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Sep 26)

PEW Internet surveys show that "top sources for local news and information vary by age".

People 18 to 39 use the Internet more, and those over 40 tend to turn to newpapers. Study looked at sources for weather, restaurants, politics and community events.

For politics, 34% of the over-40 used newsparpers and only 12% used newspapers. For under 40, the numbers were switched - 16% used the newspaper and 26% relied on the Internet.

"Younger age groups were less reliant on newspapers and less concerned about their potential demise. The study found that “among adults under age 40, the internet is already the top source for local political information and news — 26% of adults in this age group name the internet as their top source for this topic, while 19% name local TV news."

Results don't bode well for newspapers - and probably don't bode well for an informed citizenry.

Interesting link to an article about Seattle's online local and neighbourhood news ecosystem - Seattle: A New Media Case Study

Thoora - new content curation

Thoora has relaunched as a topic-based update news service for people who like to curate content for themselves and others.

From the email announcement:

"What's different with Thoora? Well, it used to be that we served up the daily news based on what the world was talking about. Now, we're harnessing the science behind that concept and giving you the power to choose what content you want based on the topics you create. We bring you a continuous stream of fresh, relevant content on your topics, and our engine learns from your behavior, so your content stream is personalized to you."

You may set up topics described through keywords and key phrases. Thoora may offer some suggestions. Results are a page of items from sites, blogs, news wires. You'll need to spend time identifying the ones you like and those you don't (not relevant, spam, don't like source). This could take a long time to do - and I find that kind of exercise a lot like swatting at flies.

Some topics may not suit the sources. My topic for e-learning did not judging from the product announcements, spam, and trivial blogs.

Sources are international - and you can learn some very interesting bits if you have time. Such as - "India is on a tear to educate its children. Shantanu Prakash's Educomp is cashing in by bringing computers to the classroom. "

However, good topics can be created. Thoora has some you can explore - such as this one on social media.

Thoora will hound you to connect your Twitter account. FAQ page tells us what it does - "We give you the ability to tell us who are the interesting people tweeting about your topics, and then we filter their tweets so that only the relevant ones are displayed. You might have a topic on “Content Farming,” for example, and you might want to see what Matt Cutts has to say about it, but when he tweets about Pinkberry, you don’t need to clutter your topic with it. "

There is a search function to help you find topics others have created.

Bottom line: has possibilities as a way to follow topics you can define precisely.

Getting a lot more from Linked In Today

The Ultimate Guide To “LinkedIn Today” & How To Optimize Your Presence On It, Greg Finn, Search Engine Land (Aug 17)

LinkedIn isn't just your network and their interests - there is a LinkedIn Today of most shared news - very interesting.

Much more in personalization by which you benefit from what gets shared - "Today then matches content to like-minded people by showing top news across industries that you follow and are a part of. The specific industry of the user sharing the story is taken into account as well. If a LinkedIn member is listed as a member of the advertising industry, that information is factored in when an article is shared or liked and will help to boost the articles presence within the “marketing & advertising” industry. "

Votes figure into the ranking too.

Much more - read the guide.

World News Network has global coverage

Local newspapers and television stations are notoriously poor at reporting on world affairs and events - and the online aggregators at Google and Yahoo often customize to your location as well. World News Network aggregates news in 49 languages from sources around the world.

There is a strong taxonomy to support topical groupings for entertainment, science (which has subtopics environment and pollution), technology, sport, and business. There is a particularly excellent view by industry at WNIndustry.

The source is shown for each article along with the indexing providing readers a way to get a quick view of main topics and to find more.

Through Worldwide, you can drill down to a country. The Canada page is diappointing - with content drawn mainly from non-Canadian sources - such as a report on the end to the Canadian postal strike from the New York Times. But with some digging you'll also see Canada Newswire, CBC, Canoe. And it may be the one place to get a view of Canada as others see it.

The Advanced Search has several aids - auto-complete for suggested searches, time range choices, search query options for matches. A search on quebec sovereignty did pull in articles from as far back as 1999.

World News Network was a selected site in The Information Advisor's BestBizWeb Enewsletter for June 2011. Subscription is free.

Good News

Lemonade without the Lemons: New Search Engine Looks for Uplifting News, Daniel Stone, Scientific American (Jun 16)

It's about time we got some good news, and semantic search technology might deliver it to us as it spots optimism in news articles. Odewire is in beta testing but already the news looks less dire and hopeless: economy grows, someone is protecting sharks (marine ones), everyone can be a great leader. This is a keeper - Odewire - bookmark it.

Semantic search technology aimed at a positive slant advances with a system that can spot optimism in news articles

Online news for mobile readers

13 Alternative Ways to Consume Your News, Jennifer Van Grove, mashable (May 18)

Calling all iPad, iPhone and Android users - here are 13 ways you can get news from the sources you want. Some will work on desktops and laptops.

Highbeam Business Blog

HighBeam Business Launches New Business Blog, Newsbreaks (Jun 20)

"HighBeam Business, part of Cengage Learning, announced the launch of its new business blog, “Arrive Prepared,” which features a steady stream of dialog on news coverage of the latest industry trends, Fortune 100 companies, business articles, and how-to guides. It aims to be the one-stop blog for sales, marketing, finance, and legal professions who need breaking insights to effectively communicate with their clients."

Newspaper Mashup

Newspaper Map finds newspapers from around the world - current and historical - in any language. Search for a specific paper, filter by language, or go to a place.

Balloons on the map mark the newspapers. In Iqaluit there is the Nunatsiq News. Click through to the site, or, for sites not in your language, use Google's translation service.

There is a zoom feature to make it easier to pick out the small local papers - such as Swan Valley Star and TImes in Manitoba.

This would be a good, and certainly interesting, starting point for finding regional papers.

Thanks to Tony for the lead.

Huffington Post comes to Canada

Huffington Post launches in Canada, Globe and Mail (May 26)

Huffington Post is going international - UK, Brazil, and Canada. 1.5 million Canadians read the US version - already a large reading population. Heather Reisman, head of Indigo Books and Music, will be "editor at large". Huffington Post has teamed up with AOL Canada for the new site - Huffington Post Canada.

But will Canadians read it for Canadian news? A survey last year showed that 70% of Canadians use the online version of "traditional" media sources - CBC, local newspaper.

Of interest: " Editors were brought in from New York to flesh out the Canadian team and support the launch. The publication will hire two or three more people for the Canadian team, and evaluate other staffing needs as operations continue." Really - editors from New York when we have our own.

Also - in the UK Huffington hired 130 journalists, and this article suggests that a handful at best were hired in Canada.

Great - but what's at Huffington Post Canada today (May 26)? At least 50% of the stories are from the US and the take up more than 50% of the page due to the photos. You really have to examine the page closely to find the Canadian ones.

End of Google News Archiving

“Google Archive Decision ‘Astonishing’” Says Founder of ColdNorthWind and PaperofRecord.com , Gary Price, Infodocket (May 25)

Google has disappointed many in its decision to end its newspaper archiving project, and especially Bob Huggins, the founder of the company Google bought to do the project.

Personal newspapers for your ipad

The race to build the ‘Daily Me’, David Ebner, Globe and Mail (May 24)

iPad owners may be interested in constructing their own newspaper through Zite, a new “personalized magazine” that will learn what you like by the choices you make. (People have started to call this - "personal curation".) Zite pulls the content from the web - it was getting the content by scrapping web sites - something that the publishers stopped, and it now links directly to the stories. Zite is a Vancouver-based company.

Flipboard, in the US, is the competitor - it sells itself as a "social magazine".

"Flipboard’s app – an attractively designed “social magazine” – was a fast winner when it launched in 2010. Apple Inc. named it the iPad app of the year. It has focused on quality of presentation and doesn’t rely on algorithms, instead delivering a person content connected to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as from mainstream publishers that pay to be featured. "

Also about Zite and Flipboard --

A Digital 'Magazine' With One Subscriber , Wall Street Journal (Mar 9)

"It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don't), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine."

Introducing Zite, the iPad’s Smartest Magazine Yet, Chris Taylor, Mashable (Mar 9)

Google stops scanning newspaper archives

Google scraps newspaper-scanning project. Stephen Shankland, DeepTech (May 20)

Google's archive of scanned newspapers has been very valuable to me for historical research. Unfortunately, Google has called it quits. Canadian papers I came upone included Toronto Daily Star, the Financial Post, and Windsor Star.

""Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at http://news.google.com/archivesearchbut we don't plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing," Google told Search Engine Land in a story published today.

Also - Google Shuts Down Ambitious Newspaper Scanning Project, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land

Searching Topix

Topix and Blekko Search, Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search (May 17)

Topix.com, a news aggregator that will deliver local news by city in North America , gets its search results now through Blekko. Arnold has noticed that there is a serious lag in currency of stories - sometimes by days. Blekko, he concludes, is not indexing content fast enough.

Ironically, until that gets fixed, it's faster to get the content from Topix by using Google and entering site:topix.com .

I noticed that not everything in Topix has been indexed by Blekko regardless of date. This shows in a search at Topix for "ontario nature" - no results, whereas Google has 11.

No big deal - Topix is probably not the news tool you want to use for exhaustive search. It is best at presenting news for a locality. But for sweep, Google News does much better - at least on finding stories involving "Ontario Nature".

Google News Settings for News Sources

Look Out Blogs: Google News Gains Options To Drop Blogs & Press Releases, Danny SUllivan, Search Engine Land (May 16)

Click on the Google News Setting page to adjust the news you see - more from a source, less from another, fewer blogs and press releases.

Google Blog Search, btw, is really Google Feed Search - Google picks up the RSS feeds.

Danny Sullivan sees Google's treatment of blogs as lower class news sources troubling - especially when there are many blogs that are news sources - Search Engine Land among them.

Google News has new features

Google News Adds Expandable Clusters, Story Labels, & More To Home Page, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 16)

There are a few new features in Google News to watch for. Even if you can't spot all the ones listed in this article, a review of the new mix of text and video, organization by category, and the new dropdown menu for related articles will be worth a few moments of your time.

"Google announced some new features that are being rolled out to Google News users. The features include expandable and collapsable news clusters, story labels displaying diversity information, more multiple media content, more personalized news stories and changing the default view from a two column view to a one column view."

Canadians use online news sites

Online Canadians trust information from media more than other sources: report , CP via Globe and Mail (May 12)

"The latest report from the Canadian Media Research Consortium states that about 90 per cent of wired Canadians consider the information they get from newspapers, television, radio and online news sites to be reliable. The percentages were a few points lower among those aged 18 to 34."

Power of Humans at Topix

Blekko To Power Topix Search, Press Release (May 4)

"Human Curated Slashtags Enhance Local News Search Experience" at Topix. This is an well established news aggregating service that has been organizing news stories topically for several years. Mostly it is very good for showing news in your area (by zip code) but would also "automatically" categorize stories.

Was auto-categorization not working? Blekko will now power Topix search with categorization developed by human editors.

"Blekko will now power Topix search on more than 360,000 edited news pages consisting of content from more than 50,000 sources that include newspapers, blogs, radio and TV stations, government, magazines and corporate information sites. "

News snippets in Google web search results

New: Google Showing Recent Stories From News Sites With News Snippet, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 5)

This little item is more significant than it first seems.

"Search for [news] or [new york times] or [fox news] or other queries that would bring up a popular news site and you will see a new search snippet displayed within the search results for these news sites."

Try it on globe and mail - see the home page for the Globe followed by 7 main sections with a news item.

But if you really want the news from the Globe or CBC or other source, it's still better to go to the site or personalize your Google News page.

New York Times and the Paywall

The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How “Google Limits” Led To “Search Engine Limits”, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Mar 22)

Danny Sullivan should get a journalism award for this dissection of the efforts, mostly laughable, of the New York Times to have a paywall but not have a paywall. Of course - it's a newspaper - it need revenue - and it wants some people to pay for it. But it does seem confused about providing that while also benefiting from hits and related advertising potential.

It's a long tale - but New York Times says that people clicking through to NYT articles from search results at Google or Bing (and any search engine) will be allowed 5 free views a day. There seems to be no limit on anything else - links in Twitter, on blogs, Facebook etc. Except - Danny's investigation shows that Google and Bing can't act as gate keepers - so you'll get more than 5 from there. Who pays? - the people who go directly to the NYT site and want to use it.

Apparently the paywall was launched first in Canada. Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Lab mentions it in - That was quick: Four lines of code is all it takes for The New York Times’ paywall to come tumbling down

Bing News + Twitter

Bing News Adds Tweets To News Results, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Mar 23)

"Bing has added tweets from Twitter on the Bing News search results pages. The tweets are public updates from the Twitter stream related to the news query."

The print conundrum

The State of the News Media 2011: Americans Shifting to Online News, Still Only Paying for Print, Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Mar 14)

Such a conundrum for newspapers - online is cheaper to deliver - people do use but don't want to pay - newspapers to get paid subscribers online have to price low - but that would cannibalize print, where newspapers do make money - for now - or until the older readers die off.

"Looking more closely, perhaps part of why only 5% of are paying for online news access is that we’re willing to pay up to $5, while the cost is $8. The Seattle Times could drop the online price to $5 see if that encouraged more sign up, but they understandably may be concerned about cannibalizing print revenue (which they need to keep the online version afloat). But they need to transition into an online revenue model at some point because print will continue to dry up in any case. It’s a conundrum."

Maybe the iPad will be the break for online newspapers that Kindle was for e-books - maybe.

LInkedIn Today for Sharing News Stories

LinkedIn Lauches a Social News Site, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Mar 10)

LinkedIn has been adding many features - Groups, Twitter integration, and now LinkedIn Today - "LinkedIn Today has the capacity to dramatically increase usage and create a new daily (or more frequent) news habit."

Also - LinkedIn launches social news productAlexei Oreskovic, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Mar 10)

"The new service, called LinkedIn Today, displays excerpts of the most popular articles in various industries, in a move that the company hopes will spur users to interact more on its website."

"LinkedIn users will be able to create separate news pages for the various industries they follow, such as the Internet, cleantech and healthcare. Articles will appear in LinkedIn Today based upon how often they have been shared by members of LinkedIn, as well as by members of Twitter, with which LinkedIn has a pre-existing partnership"

Digg vs Reddit

Reddit surges to 1 billion monthly page views, Don Reisinger, The Digital Home (Feb 3)

Social news action has moved from Digg to Reddit.

"The Conde Nast-owned social news site announced yesterday that, for the first time, its monthly traffic exceeded 1 billion page views in January, according to statistics from Google Analytics that Reddit offered in a blog post. It is now among the 100 sites on the Web with that much traffic, according to Reddit."

Digg users didn't like site revision version 4. Maybe that is was about policy, because judging by appearance, navigation, and content I'd choose Digg. Just compare the two for Worldnews entries. But, Reddit does seem more favoured by Canadians - a story about Canadian CRTC ruling had 2750 submitters.

Newswise Channels

Newswise Has Launched News Alert Feeds By Topic, Research Buzz (Jan 12)

Nice description of Newswise - "It’s kind of a press wire for universities, research institutions, non-profit organizations, and other groups that release what Newswise calls “knowledge-based news.” "

It provides RSS feeds by topic - http://www.newswise.com/channels/

Personalize Google News

Google News Adds “Follow News” Button, Easy Way To Customize Home Page, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Dec 16)

"Google News has quietly added a new button that allows you to easily bookmark frequent searches and create custom sections within your personalized Google News home page."

Google Vetting News Sources

Google News Dropping Sites, Reviewing Inclusion Standards, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 3)

Google News has always vetted sources used in Google News. Now it has reviewed and found some wanting.

"Google News has recently dropped “a number” of websites that it says were not meeting the company’s quality guidelines. At the same time, the company says it’s also reviewing its policies governing what sites are included as sources in Google News."

Google News adding shared count

Google News Testing More Social Features With “Most Shared” Box, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Dec 1)

Some have reported that Google News has a "most shared" box now - to show number of times a story was shared in the social world of Google Reader, GMail, Google Buss and maybe Facebook. I don't see it.

New metatags in Google News

Google Creates “Source” Meta Tags To Help ID Original News Sources, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 16)

New metatags supported by Google might make more precise searching of news possible.

1. Syndication source - "the tag will be used by both the site that syndicates its content, as well as the site that receives and publishes the syndicated content from another source"

2. Original source - "can be used by publishers wanting to claim their article as the original version"

Also see Google News trying to allow for proper credit, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Nov 16)

"Two new metatags are available for news publishers to use on their Web pages when they want to highlight two specific types of content: stories that are shared with syndication partners and scoops or stories that are completely original works."

There are a few hurdles to make this work - agreement by publishers, and some way to control misuse and spam.

Google Trends

A day seen through Google searches, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Nov 2)

Google trends? How good, how useful?

"Google has recently started to promote this list more prominently than in the past, with a weekly Google Beat YouTube series and frequent references to trending topics on its official blog. But how does something become a trend on Google? We spent yesterday monitoring the U.S. version of Google Trends, several major network television shows, and the discussion boards of the day to try to figure out what sparks a trend big enough for Google to notice."

Moreover has a Newsdesk

Moreover Technologies Releases All-New Newsdesk 4, Newsbreaks (Oct 25)

Moreover is still in the news aggregating business. The new product Newsdesk 4 illustrates the importance today of having tabs on real time news (Twitter and blogs) and social media generally.

"Media aggregator Moreover Technologies announced the release of its all-new Newsdesk 4 real-time news and social media discovery, refinement, and sharing service. Newsdesk 4 gives users unified portal access to millions of daily news articles and social media posts, and ability to refine results immediately using comprehensive cutting-edge faceted search and filtering tools."

From Moreover - "Mine and find relevant business intelligence from 1.7 million+ far-reaching global news, social media and industry sources."

Google News going on nine

Google News turns 8 amid news industry in flux, by Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Sept 22)

Krishna Bharat, founder and engineering head of Google News, reflected on the past 8 years and on the future.

One piece of online news reading is friends - ""The future of Google News is better personalization and better social input," he said, implying a future (some might argue it's already here) where the most relevant and authoritative content is that recommended by friends and tied to one's preferences."

More important (in my opinion) are the changes in online news environment.

1. "rise in "news spam," SEO-bait articles often written by low-paid freelancers that are designed mostly to surface within Google, rather than inform, educate, or entertain readers with coherent writing."
2. "providing news from different points of view."

Changing face of getting news

News Consumption, RSS Readers, and New Business Models , Bob Reynolds, The Xplanation (Sept 14)

This Daily Research Update looks at "news consumption, RSS readers, and new business models."

This summary from PEW Internet on how people get news shows traditional print, web search, and RSS and blogs.

* More people say they mostly get news “from time to time” rather than at “regular times.” The percentage of socalled news grazers as increased nine points (from 48% to 57%) since 2006. * Search engines are playing a substantially larger role in people’s news gathering habits – 33% regularly use search engines to get news on topics of interest, up from 19% in 2008. * 10 percent regularly use customized webpages or RSS readers; 9 percent read blogs about politics or current events; 12 percent get news by e-mail; 8 percent by cellphone or smartphone; 1 percent through iPad or tablets. * 44 percent of cellphone users with internet access have downloaded an app for news access. * 27 percent go to news blogs regularly for the latest news and headlines compared with 30 percent for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times; 29 percent for views and opinions, compared with 11 percent each for the two papers. At least one third said they regularly go to the two papers for in-depth reporting.

But where's Twitter and Social networking.: people are also turning to their friends for news.

Article also refers to Search takes a Social Turn, Jenna Wortham, New York Times (Sept 12)

"Turning to friends is the new rage in the Web world, extending far beyond established social networking sites and setting off a rush among Web companies looking for ways to help people capitalize on the wisdom of their social circles — and to make some money in the process. ‘"

Google's Personalized News

New Google News design emphasizes choice, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results, CNet (Jun 30)

"Google has given Google News a serious makeover, adding more personalization options and organizing everything in a single row of topic headlines."

When you first log in you'll be asked to customize. Apparently it doesn't remember from the last customization I did. And having done that, why does Canada not show first? Ah - click on the default US Edition, and change to Canada.

Globe and Mail wins at EPpy

Globeandmail.com wins two EPpys , Globe and Mail (Jun 18)

The Editor and Publisher honours media for their delivery through websites and blogs onlines ( 2010 EPpy winners ). This year the Globe and Mail received two awards.

"The Globe and Mail’s website nabbed the title of the Best Newspaper-Affiliated Web Site with more than one million unique monthly visitors, besting top American news engines NYdailynews.com, DenverPost.com and the San Jose Mercury’s MercuryNews.com.

Behind The Veil, The Globe’s in-depth multimedia series on the plight of women in Kandahar, claimed the category of Best Web Special Feature – Enterprise, with more than million unique monthly visitors. "

Globe and Mail has been online for 10 years. For the anniversary it gives us a review of stories over these years and a view of the progress of digital journalism -- 10 Years of The Globe and Mail website..

Of note, Mathew Ingram's comments on Internet Journalism: Is it still what we want it to be?
"In my inaugural column for the website, I wrote that the Internet was the best thing to happen to journalism since the typewriter. I still believe that today. It may get lost amid all the teeth-gnashing over the future of newspapers (and magazines, and books, and movies, and too many other things to name) but I firmly believe that when it comes to journalism and the media, the Internet is far more of a force for good than it is the opposite."

Watch Google News for layout changes

Google Testing New Google News Home Page (With Sharing Options), Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 10)

Google News is experimenting with a new look of narrow columns left and right with wider middle.

"The “News for you” section in the middle offers customization options, including the choice to view news stories in raw list format or in sections, which groups together stories based on categories (Business, World, Sports, etc.). Story snippets and clusters are only shown by default on the three top stories, but those appear when your mouse hovers over stories that are further down the page."

There is some categorizing into topics.

Using without attribution - not good

How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit, by Danny Sullivan, Daggle (June 1) via ResearchBuzz

Remember the story about the woman in Utah suing Google over walking instructions in Google Maps? Danny Sullivan broke that story after a tip from Gary Price - and hardly anyone credited him and Search Engine Land as the source. It seems to be a clear case of mainstream drawing on blogs (or alternative stream) without giving credit. Was probably an accident or oversight - but Sullivan is asking everyone to be more careful. It makes a difference to the writer and traffic to the blog.

Inside Google News Ranking

SEO for Google News – Ranking Factors and Recommendations, by Barry Adams, Search Engine People (May 17)

Through experience and conversations, Barry Adams has deduced the major factors he feels figure it Google News ranking algorithms. Among these are:

+ original content
+ timeliness
+ relevancy to a cluster on a topic
+ publisher reputation
+ clickthrough - popularity matters
+ personalization - may be operating with a recommender engine that matches up patterns in readers.

Yahoo add Associated Content

Yahoo! to Acquire Associated Content, Business Wire (May 18)

Yahoo bought Associated Content, a company that pays writers for articles based on page views. Yahoo will use the content (described as - "rich and varied content on a broad array of passion points") to create (in the words of CEO Carol Bartz) - "more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network."

What does this mean?

Yahoo’s Buy of Associated Content Makes It a Publisher, Syndicator, Wire, Ad Rep…and More , Ken Doctor, Newsonomics (May 18)

Ken Doctor thinks it turns the traditional model upside down. It used to be that writers, reporters, and editors came up with the ideas of what mattered and would interest readers, and the advertising department found the advertisers. The Associated Content is the opposite - writers will write to find the ad dollars. It's about monetizing content.

What Yahoo’s deal for Associated Content means for writers, by Michelle Rafter, Word Count.

Michelle Rafter, a reporter and editor, says "The deal’s about advertising pure and simple."

I suppose we can figure there will be more stories on the very popular topics - travel, technology - but will it be quality content that has been checked and edited? And who will write about the important topics that are less popular?

Yahoo News - photos find results

Yahoo turns news photos into searches, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (May 10)

Lots has happened in Yahoo News (US version - not Canada) since I last looked. It has many more videos and slideshows, as a start. But now, clicking on a photo is interpreted as interest in the story, and Yahoo News will bring up related search results. Clicking through the slideshow of photos will do the same thing.

Newser for Users

Newser Launches Newser By Users Service, eContent magazine (Mar 18)

"News aggregation service Newser announce the launch of Newser By Users, a new service that gives readers the tools to find, summarize, and post stories that reflect their specific interests. The Newser home page now offers a second grid that is wholly created by user contributions, giving users access to an open free-to-all of news and information."

Pew Report on the Economics of Online News

Google, Yahoo & Portals Are Top Online News Sources: Study, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Mar 15)

New study from Pew Internet shows --

"Major news portals — like Yahoo News, Google News, AOL, and Topix — are the most commonly used online news sources, beating out the web sites of major news outlets like CNN, CBS, and the New York Times. "

Study is The economics of online news

Excerpt from the report shows that making news pay is a very difficult problem - we read online because it's free - and most won't pay - not even pennies. Therefore, look forward to more ads.

"About 71% of internet users, or 53% of all American adults, get news online today, a number that has held relatively steady in recent years.

Most of these online news consumers graze across multiple sites without having a primary one that they rely on. Only 35% of online news consumers have a favorite site.

To put it another way, 65% of online news consumers do not have a site that is so important to them that it stands out in their minds above all other sites they visit.

The users who do have a favorite site are pretty faithful. Some 65% of them check in with that favorite site at least once a day.

Yet even among these most loyal news consumers, only a minority (19%) said they would be willing to pay for news online, including those who already do so and those who would be willing to if asked.

Instead, a large majority – 82% – of those with a favorite site said they would find somewhere else to get the news.

Because so few online news consumers even have a favorite site this translates to only 7% of all people who get news online having a favorite online news source that they say they would pay for. "

News Ecosystem

The new news is the news, by Iain Marlow, Globe and Mail (Mar 1)

Today's news reading person has an iphone.

"This is the news ecosystem of 2010, where the Internet now ranks as No. 3 to TV's local and national news shows, a far cry from the days when a man came home from work, dropped a cube of ice into his scotch, and picked up the local metropolitan daily newspaper as his sole, authoritative window upon the outside world. "

Information is drawn from the Pew report on online news to which the writer added his knitting together of the findings in engaging prose, to conclue -

"Everything may be fragmenting, but in that fragmentation many people are finding empowerment. And that’s great. "

PEW Internet - Online News

Americans Prefer Online News After TV, Report Finds, Ian Paul, PCWorld (Mar 1)

New study from Pew Internet shows that news consumers "are not loyal to one news organization and consume information from a myriad of platforms".

But the Internet is now the third most popular news platform, after local television news and national television news.

People go online for weather, national events, health or medicine, business finance or the economy and international events.

Report is Understanding the Participatory News Consumer by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, Kenny Olmstead.

From that report:

In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:

* Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
* Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
* Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Of interest - from the PCWorld recap -

People are interested in local news, but the favored platform for local information is television, with 78 percent of Americans preferring to get news from a local TV station.

I wonder what is meant by local news. My impression of local news on TV in the US is that is mainly concerned with crime and weather disasters. Local news is harder to find online, and the US, local newspapers are in decline.

Personalizing Google News.

Google News Allows You To “Star” News Stories by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 2)

Google News allows user to "star" stories and from that get alerts on that story.

The Economist

It's time to take another look at the Economist's online offerings. The Economist's "Publisher Newsletter" announced a new web site design with horizontal navigation and less clutter. More is promised.

"We will continue to roll out our new horizontal navigation with our Channels across the rest of the site during the coming months. We are also preparing to launch richer features on the channel pages soon. We've included a site index in the navigation too, to help you get to where you want to go".

Also noteworthy are the nine blogs by Economist journalists. They cover politics and culture in the UK, the US, Europe, and Asia, as well as financial markets and the economy. Business travellers will enjoy Gulliver which aims to "inform and entertain business travellers with news, views and reviews that help them make the most of life on the road."

Follow the blogs through RSS or Twitter. Twitter feed is at http://twitter.com/Econdebates. The other Economist Twitter feeds are listed on that page.

Digg Extensions

Digg reworks its browser extensions, Boxee app, Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Jan 19)

Fans of Digg for news will enjoy new browser extensions.

"Social news site Digg relaunched its Firefox extension on Tuesday, adding a small number of iterative improvements. The company also launched an extension for Google's Chrome browser, which lets users see if a story has been submitted to Digg, as well as vote on it--all without leaving the page."

Thoora for Monitoring Social Media

Relevance ranking in the social media age., Michael Lee, Altsearchengines (Jan

Michael Lee, CEO of Thoora, opens by telling us there are 133 million blogs. Thoora can help in dealing with that number with its media search engine that provides aggregation and ranking algorithms that look for authority.

"At Thoora, we remove the risk of human bias by looking at implicit actions, as opposed to votes or link analysis. We incorporate people’s every day actions — such as comments, tweets, and forwards — into our ranking algorithm to determine which stories are generating the most buzz with minimal distortion."

Currently in beta - http://beta.thoora.com/

Worth a look - there is a Politics > Canada section.

Google's Living Stories

An In-depth Look at the News by Mary Ellen Bates (Jan 2010)

Reviews Google's new Living Stories way of presenting the news.

Idea of thematic treatment of stories is good but it's mainly for the US audience.

Where People Get Their News

Yahoo Top News Site, Google Second; People Spending More Time With Fewer Sites by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Dec 24)

Whether Comscore or Nielsen, Yahoo News is top of the list globally for news. Google News is number two according to Comscore, but well down the list according to others. Newspaper or network sites still seem strong.

Google's Living Stories

Can ‘Living Stories’ Bring Newspapers Into the 21st Century? by Nancy Herther, Newsbreaks (Dec 14)

Will Google's new Living Stories breath new life into the news? It organizes stories thematically for easier reading and updates. (Presume editors pick the stories.)

Three key design concepts drove the development. First, a news story should be connected in a single webpage location rather than be scattered across the web connected by URLs. This allows users to either quickly scan the news or to easily drill down to get the level of detail that they need.

The second concept was ease of exploration. Each story in Living Stories has "an evolving summary of current developments as well as an interactive timeline of critical events. Stories can be explored by themes, significant participants or multimedia."

Lastly, Google wanted a system that would support "smarter reading." If you log into the system, updates to key stories will be highlighted every time you return, and older news will be summarized to save space and time. They are still linked to the page, but they are not given the priority placement and space that they had in previous user visits to the site.

It's a matter of repackaging. This model might work for others - or at least show to others that new models are needed.

Real time in Yahoo News

Yahoo Brings ‘Real Time’ Updates To News Shortcut by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Nov 19)

"Yahoo has enhanced its News shortcut with real-time feeds and updates. The idea is to make the News Shortcut more current and more social with Twitter content in the form of videos, photos and tweets."

Al Jazeera English

Two items today persuaded me to start reading Al Jazerra English.

Walrus Magazine had an article in the September 2009 issue - The Most Hated Name in News by Deborah Campbell -- Can Al Jazeera English cure what ails North American journalism?

It could do. Tony Burman, the former news chief of CBC Television, is managing director of Al Jazeera English, and Avi Lewis, former CBC host and Stephen Lewis' son, is co-host of Fault Lines.

While North American networks and newspapers cut back on foreign correspondents, Al Jazeera is adding.

"“The mainstream American networks have cut their bureaus to the bone,” says Burman. “They’re basically only in London now. Even CNN has pulled back. I remember in the ’80s when I covered these events, there would be a truckload of American journalists and crews and editors, and now Al Jazeera outnumbers them all.” The channel plans to open ten new bureaus in the coming year, including one in Canada. “At the risk of sounding incredibly self serving,” Burman says, “that’s where, in the absence of alternatives, Al Jazeera English can fill a vacuum, simply because we’re going in the opposite direction.”"

Where can we in Canada view and read? Online of course at http://english.aljazeera.net/.There is almost too much to take in: articles, videos, podcasts as well as a blog site.

Al Jazeera English launches new blog site, Journalism.co.uk (Oct 12)

The AJ blogs are written by the correspondents from around the world and are licensed under Creative Commons. AJ uses OpenCalais technology from Thomson Reuters to semantically tag the posts according to names, places, topics, and other entities that the OC technology can identify.

Readers can comment on posts through Facebook, Twitter or OpenID.

Custom News at Google

Build Your Own Google News Home Page With Custom Sections by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 4)

Google News provides another way to customize news - this time by topics - pick from the packaged ones or create your own.

"Google News has made it easier to customize its home page with the creation of a Custom Sections Directory that includes material created both by Google and by Google News users."

It's fantastic, though I think it would be hard to follow more than one topic at a time.

Search Results at Google News

Inside the Google News algorithm by SHaron Machlis, Computerworld (Oct 5)

Notes from a session in which Krishna Bharat at Google talked about ranking of articles at Google News.

"Generally, he said, articles are ranked based on originality, freshness, quality, expertise of source and whether a lot of other sources around the Web are pointing to a particular article. "

...

"Google News search results (as opposed to what shows up on the hone page) are based on several factors, he said: relevance to the user's query, "editorial interest" (i.e. how many editors consider certain stories containing the term more important than others), page placement (have editors put a story on a site's home page or just buried it somewhere deep inside the site?), freshness and -- not sure this is a word, sorry -- localness to the user."

Of Interest: Google News has a Spotlight category (look in left side panel) where it exposes lesser linked by interesting articles.

Thoora for millions of voices

Thoora – Discover what the world is talking about., Altsearchengines (Oct 3)

Thoora is a new service - currently in beta - for picking up news and buzz from blogosphere, twittersphere, and (it claims) nearly 5,000 traditional media sources. It says it reports by "listening to the millions of voices from the social Web". Company is based in Toronto, Canada

From the article: "In real-time, Thoora identifies the most interesting stories from the entire blogosphere, Twitter and all traditional media sources, providing users with access to the most unique perspectives and voices. Thoora uses a proprietary and cutting-edge filtering, clustering, and ranking algorithm to identify the stories with the strongest ’signals’ (i.e. the most activity, comments, posts, updates, etc.). Thoora then ranks the stories based on the size of the reaction they generate."

Google's Fast Flip way of reading news

Google Gives Users a Fast Flip to the News, Nancy Herther, Newsbreaks (Sept 28)

Google Fast Flip is a new way to view news online - mainly a visual approach of flipping through pages. Article provides details about the features and news sources. Try it at -- http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Aggregating News

TC50: Two new ways to get the news by Josh Lowensohn, WebWare (Sept 15)

These are two news services that you might want to watch for when they come out of private trial.

"Thoora is a new tool that clusters and aggregates news. It offers people a way to track the latest headlines with a simple ranking tool, ordering incoming stories by "Web reaction." It uses a mix of sources, including Twitter messages, blog posts, and breaking stories from more traditional news outlets. These stories are then filtered and pushed to a front page as well as Thoora's category pages."

"Insttant, on the other hand, cuts out traditional news sources entirely and uses Twitter's public stream instead. It takes these tweets and turns them into an interactive news page that covers people, places, and companies, including a way to track trending topics and user sentiment. All of this goes on a front page, which can be reordered and personalized with topics the user wants to see. "

Google Fast Flip

How much do you want to page through screens as if they were on a microfilm reader? Try Google Fast Flip.

Google Fast Flip: The platypus of news readers by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Sept 14)

"Google on Monday released an experimental new content browser called Fast Flip that makes it possible to see a curated set of content sites using a physical "turn the pages" metaphor. Fast Flip pages are cached by Google and load very quickly, which is cool. And if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it'll feel natural to use."

Google testing Fast Flip for Google News by Tom Krazit, Webware (Sep 14)

"Google is testing a service that will let newshounds read Web pages of magazines and newspapers like they were flipping through an old-fashioned paper copy."

Walk-through: Google Fast Flip Brings 'Magazine' Metaphor to News Browsing bt Mark Sullivan, PC WOrld (Sep 15)

"Google's news reader uses static page images to display news articles instantly. Whether it's really a faster way to read news is open to debate. Here's a short guided tour of the new approach. "

Google Fast Flip – Google’s Newspaper & Magazine Reader Goes Live by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land

Interesting --

"Google is banking that an improved user experience will mean lots of traffic and page views. Google says that revenue generated from ads on the site will be split with publishers. (This could potentially be a goldmine of display inventory for Google if it expands the content from news into a broad range of magazines.)

If it’s a hit, this probably becomes the successor to Google News. And it may be the testing ground for the potential “micropayments platform” that Google is developing for content publishers — it’s all coming together now. I’m only partly kidding with that remark."

Micro-Payments for News

Google technology to aid charging for online content James Wuinn, Telegraph.co.uk (Sep 10)

Micro-payments for reading news articles may become part of the Google payment system.

"The search engine, which has revolutionised the way consumers access news through its ranked news searches on the internet, is working on new software that will allow newspapers to charge users for certain online content using a system of micro-payments. "

Payment would be through Google Checkout.

Also - Tech giants offer ideas on charging readers online, AP via Globe and Mail (Sep 10)

"IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and even Google respond to request by Newspaper Association of America for proposals on ways to easily, unobtrusively charge for news on the Web"

Twitter for Social News

Twitter takes a step closer to RSS by Douglas MacMillan, Business Week (Sept 2)

This might give new life to RSS - Twitter hired FeedBurner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo as its Chief Operating Officer.

Twitter seems to be gaining popularity as source on online news (though I don't see it - too much noise.)

Douglas MacMillan is looking to Twitter to become a better "social news site". He suggests: "The “trending topics” feature added earlier this year was one great way for users to stay on top of chit-chat across the entire site, but how about a feature that highlights the words and phrases my network is tweeting about? And couldn’t Twitter take all those great links being posted to stories around the Web, and sort them for me based on my interests and what’s popular among my friends?"

Google News Suggests

Suggest on Google News, Google News Blog (Aug 31)

Suggestions as you search at Google News will help in constructing a query - narrowing it immediately. Gives a good profile at the same time. Try a term like xstrata (the mining company).

"Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible."

Google News Archive

Google News Increases Its News Archive, ResearchBuzz (Aug 10)

Google News announced that it "quadrupled" the number of articles in its News Archives but didn't say to what. Tara Calishain ran some searches to estimate. No reliable figures but there does appear to be a lot that is free, and there are some attractive features: the timeline, links to related news articles, and Google Alert.

Can access News Archive search from Google News - direct link is http://news.google.com/archivesearch/

Online Newspapers moving to for-fee

Murdoch to Charge for All Newspaper Sites by
Ian Paul, PCWorld (Aug 6)

Robert Murdoch announced that News Corp newspaper properties would have a paywall modelled after the Wall Street Journal site.

"The paywall at WSJ.com is often seen as the most successful model of its kind in the news business. The online version of the WSJ features a mix of freely available content, with certain premium articles--mostly financial news--available only to paid subscribers. Since News Corp owns many popular newspapers around the world, it's likely Murdoch's decision will have a ripple effect across the newspaper industry. The News Corp media empire contains some of the biggest newspaper properties in the world including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, as well as the U.K.-based papers The Times and News of the World. "

There is a loophole through Google News.

"When you want to read something on WSJ.com that's behind its paywall, all you have to do is copy the headline, plug it into Google and follow Google's link to read the complete article for free. The WSJ allows this loophole so it can grow its readership, and the paper probably hopes some of those free readers will subscribe in the future."

Will people pay?

Serious gaps in online news archives

Where Have All the Archives Gone? by Barbara Quint , Information Today (Jul/Aug)

A major hole in newspaper archives has developed over the past few years as print declined and use of digital increased. Web materials at newspapers were not saved, and the new online editions of newspapers haven't been captured by processes geared to microfilming and scanning print.

Barbara Quint's closing question - "How long will this continue? How long before content owners and licensors solve the problems involved? Both build their businesses boasting of the importance and quality of their content. How important can it be if even its owners and carriers forget to save it?"

Create RSS Feed for Google News Search

Why did Google Make this Harder by David Warlick, 2 Cents Worth (July 16)

Google removed its RSS subscribe link from its news search. Have to manually create the url by adding &output=rss.

News 2.0 Impact

News 2.0: The Future of News in an Age of Social Media, Ira Basen, CBC News (June 30)

CBC ran an excellent 2 hour program on News 2.0 - direction of the News business in the Web 2.0 age of citizen journalism and social media.

"There is much to celebrate about this democratization of the media, but there are also reasons to be concerned about the loss of an independent, professional journalistic filter at a time when everyone can be their own media. Can online communities of "citizen journalists" be counted on to help us make informed choices as citizens and consumers? What's lost, and what's gained when "News 1.0" gives way to "News 2.0?""

Ira Basen interviewed Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen, Paul Sullivan, Matthew Ingram, Paul Gillin, Kirk Lapointe. Web site has links to transcripts of interviews and resources.

Responding to big events

Michael Jackson’s Death: An Inside Look At How Google, Yahoo, & Bing Handled An Extraordinary Day In Search, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 27)

A big news story puts pressure on Google, Yahoo and Bing to respond. Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and some others were also having huge spikes in traffic.

"Below, a look not only at the extreme traffic spikes that took place, but also an insider’s look at what happened as each search engine — and Wikipedia — grappled with the demands of a nearly unprecedented surge of interest in the day’s breaking news."

Of interest:

+ Yahoo sent reporters to Los Angeles and called in staff to write and manage.

+ Bing treated this as a "news go big" event in order to adjust the ranking to fit the situation.

Author Search in Google News

Search by Author on Google News, Google News Blog (June 21)

Get more information about an author in Google News by clicking on the name or using Advanced Search.

Can also use the syntax - eg author:"Martin Mittelstaedt"

Wikipedia a news source

Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site , Noam Cohen, New York Times (June 21)

Wikipedia is now treated as a news source by Google News. Today a Wikipedia page on Michael Jackson is listed as a source - and the page has new section on the singer's death and links to Wikinews.

Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, is quoted - “Google is recognizing that Wikipedia is becoming a source for very up-to-date information" .. although “it is an encyclopedia at the end of the day".

News from Tweets

Gonzo information on the Internet by Ivor Tossell, Globe and Mail (Jun 25)

Thoughtful article on the nature and implications of tweets as a news source. there is no verification, no editing, no filtering.

"But the fashionable idea for 2009 is that everything must be short, and everything must happen in real-time. That concision does a job on accuracy, since there's not always space to restate a rumour and link back to a credible source. When passing along Twitter rumours, users might cite one or two people before them in the chain of whispers, but the “news” itself often goes unsourced, and it always arrives stripped of context."

Twitter Power

Iran: the Twitter revolution? - Globe and Mail discussion on June 17.

"Iran's biggest mass protest since 1979 has become a global cyber-movement, fought on and fuelled by the Web and social-media tools like Twitter. Matt Hartley, Omar El Akkad and Mathew Ingram discuss the implications of that phenomenon."

Analysis, examples, comment - rich discussion on people's use of Twitter to report on events as they unfold.

Referred to - Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran - a TED event.

"He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. "

Twitter is on the Scene

'#CNNFail': Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence by Daniel Terdiman, Webware (June 14)

Years ago in 1991 reports on the attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin reached the world through online bulletin boards. Today reports on the demonstrations in Tehran in protest of the election results came through Twitter. Moreover, they were only known through Twitter - major news networks were very slow to pick up the stories.

"As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran--thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest their anger at perceived electoral irregularities--an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: "CNNFail."

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East. "

Changes in Google News

Google News spotlights YouTube, suffers outage, by Stephen Shankland, Webware (May 14)

Google News has been revamping its display.

+ news videos from YouTube.
+ "photos and images on the section pages devoted to topics such as Sci/Tech, World, and Business"
+ more information for a cluster - "images, excerpted quotations, sections that organize headlines by geography, and a section for blog headlines. "

Google News Clusters

Google News Improves Story Display: Cites News, Blogs, Quotes & More, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 11)

Important changes at Google News: for a news cluster you may see across the top links for “Full Coverage of articles, blogs, local sources, images, quotes and videos.”

To see this click on the count of news articles for a story - such as this one at the US Google News (news.google.com) about ObamaCare .

This does not happen at Google News Canada. However, you will see for many clusters a graph on the right of the Timeline of Articles and key articles. An example is this cluster of stories about Sri Lanka troops.

Google links to stories on Twitter

Google News Automatically Tweeting Stories @GoogleNews by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 29)

"The Google News Blog announced they have joined Twitter to automatically post links to top stories on Twitter via @GoogleNews. Many news sites automatically post stories to Twitter as well, but Google News recently started to do this as well. "

Newsy for Video Snaps

Newsy.com Wants to Make You Smarter, Faster by Theresa Cramer, Newsbreaks (Apr 27)

Get news through video clips at Newsy.

" Newsy.com-which officially debuted on April 8 - aims to sort through the information overload, digest stories from across the spectrum, and then feed it all back to you in short, easy-to-swallow videos.

"Global access to multiple perspectives helps you tell what the real story is," says Newsy president and co-founder, Jim Spencer, of the basic premise behind his brainchild. He says the idea for the website came to him after observing the way people watch television and use the internet. When people are looking for coverage of big news stories, they channel surf from CNN to MSNBC to FOX, and maybe even to the BBC. They do the same thing on the internet; only on the web, there are thousands-if not millions-of sites to choose from rather than a handful of television networks."

Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline Offers Powerful Search Options, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 20)

"Google has also announced the addition of Google News Timeline as a Google Labs experimental service." It has had a timeline for a while, but now there are images - not just dates you had to click on and there are more user controls.

Postscript: Google News Timeline: A Glorious, Intriguing Time Sink, by Edward N. Albro, PCWorld (Apr 20)

"This new Google Labs feature, which organizes news stories and other information by date, looks to be the biggest, funnest time waster since we all spent hours exploring the globe with Google Earth."

Google and Yahoo - Relations with Newspapers

Is Yahoo a Better Friend to Newspapers Than Google? By Miguel Helft, New York Times (Apr 8)

Yahoo does seem to lead in friendlier relations with newspapers.

"In contrast, Yahoo has formed a much deeper relationship with members of the consortium, which now includes more than 800 dailies. Many of them are already using Yahoo’s behaviorally focused ads, and as I reported recently, some of them are getting good results. Yahoo also licenses content from consortium members and The A.P. for display on Yahoo News and other sites. "

And Google, in spite of claims of doing good, has a reputation of not sharing the revenues fairly.

"Google and Google News drive more users to newspaper sites than Yahoo, though newspapers have mixed feelings about the traffic. Many say that Google is unfairly making money off their content."

Search Engine Land looked at the controversy over news search and news papers -- News Media Bites The Search That Feeds It: Hitwise Data by Matt McGee (Apr 9)

The charge: "traditional media (Associated Press, newspapers, etc.) are accusing Internet sites (search engines, news aggregators, etc.) of diverting traffic that should be going to news web sites, profiting off news content in violation of copyright law, and essentially sending newspapers into the financial crisis that many are in today."

The truth according to Hitwise: "(Google, Yahoo, etc.) and other News & Media sites (including Yahoo News and Google News) are easily the top two traffic sources for news and media web sites."

Hitwise released figures on how much traffic Google and Yahoo actually send.

Google News Timeline

Timeline of Articles from a Google News Cluster, Google Operating System (APr 7)

"Google News enhanced the presentation for the clusters of related articles: after showing options to filter the articles, a search option and feeds, Google News added a graph that shows the number of sources covering the story. There's also a timeline that lets you understand how the story developed."

Google Local Suggest and News

Google Expands Google Suggest & Local News by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 2)

Two announcements:

+ "Google Suggest has been launched internationally, and with it the search suggestions have been localized for local and cultural factors. " In google.ca poutine comes up just as you type pout; on google.com it never comes up.

+ Google Local News has been expanded to India, UK, and Canada. If you used Google personalization features, this change won't be noticeable, though there is a drop down to select Top Stories for Canada English or Canada Francais.

Newspaper vs Aggregator

Guardian wants Government to look at Google News , PCPro (Mar 31)

Is Google News good for newspapers? Possibly not.

"The newspaper group [Guardian in the UK] argues that traffic generated by search engines doesn't compensate for the cost involved in producing content: "The argument has traditionally been that search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content, and this is enough to make the relationship symbiotic and equal," the submission claims.

"However, there is a vast over-supply in the market of advertising inventory, and yields have come under severe downward pressure. As a result, the value of the traffic generated by search engines and aggregators has reduced significantly."

New International Herald Tribune website

International Herald Tribune unveils redesign, DesignWeek (Mar 30)

The International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times, has a new website - http://global.nytimes.com. This was done in conjunction with a redesign of the print papter.

"IHT global edition editor Martin Gottlieb says, ‘Redesigning the newspaper and reconfiguring our global online presence at the same time created significant opportunities for us, journalistically. ... ‘By consolidating Web operations and improving design processes, we are freeing up editorial energies to focus on delivering the accurate reporting, thought-provoking writing and sharp analysis that our international readers need now more than ever.’"

Google StreetView coming to Canada

Google gets ready to film Canada's streets by Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail (Mar 26)

Google will be taking street views in Canada over the next few weeks.

"Over the next few weeks, Google employees will be snapping pictures of 11 of Canada's biggest cities, including Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg and Calgary. The search giant had previously collected some Canadian street data, which it plans to make public soon. There's no word yet on when data from this coming round will be released."

Watch for the van with the camera - you might find yourself in a street view.

"Images of people's faces and licence plates are automatically blurred out, and users can request any offensive images be removed."

Faceted News

New FT Search Engine Lets Business Users Sift for News by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Mac 23)

Newssift, a new news search engine from FT Search, encourages users to build the query from a choice of refinements.

"Semantic technologies have been increasingly featured in the news in the past year, promising to provide the contextual relationships and meaning that traditional keyword search engines lack. FT Search, Inc., an independent entity within The Financial Times Group, has just launched a beta of Newssift (www.newssift.com), a new business search engine that uses semantic algorithms to provide meaning-based results. Employing facets (information categories) and Guided Navigation search technology from Endeca (www.endeca.com), Newssift lets users refine, expand, and explore. Newssift enables users to search thousands of editorially selected global business news sources, including but not limited to the Financial Times. It then offers meaning-based results that contextualize the trends, opinions, and qualitative events that shape business decisions and impact corporate reputations. It is designed to cut out the "commercial clutter" found in traditional keyword search tools."

Newssift for Business News

Financial Times Launches Newssift, A Business News Search Engine by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Mar 18)

Newssift - a new business news engine in test that uses semantic technologies.

"Currently indexing thousands of news sources worldwide, and with millions of articles in its database, Newssift aims to bring context and meaning that its creators say is missing from traditional keyword-based business news search engines."

Very faceted: "Users can refine queries across multiple search options, such as Topic, Organization, Place, Person, and Theme/Keyword (see the gray area at top). Below the suggestions, Newssift’s search results include additional context, such as the ability to refine results by Sentiment and/or Article Sources (see pie charts on left)."

Eg sentiment meter for American International Group

Personalized News in MeeHive

Kosmix Launches MeeHive Personalized News by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Mar 11)

Short review of "MeeHive, a personalized service that scans more than 5,000 news sources and 5 million blogs to bring you fresh news and information based on your interests, launches today."

I don't think we ever get tired of the idea of personalized news, but we might get tired of setting it up. MeeHive is relatively painless - think of some keywords, and click on some interests. Of course it assumes that everyone does Twitter and will be interested in US top headlines (with American Idol and the Obama family). It's social - share with friends. It doesn't reveal its sources, and will reveal your profile unless you select otherwise.

Saving Newspapers

Five Things Google Could Do For Newspapers, by Chris Synder, Wired (Jan 9)

Google News needs the content of print newspapers What will happen if the host it feeds on dies? But it's not the only reason newspapers are against the wall.

"“[The news] has changed permanently, Google is part of that change, Craigslist is part of that change, Facebook is part if that change,” said Jeff Jarvis, media blogger and author of the new book What Would Google Do. “That doesn’t mean they’re responsible for those who don’t adapt to that change. They’re not."

Article names 5 things Google could do to help the newspaper industry.

Plight of Newspapers

Newspapers, Google And The “Devaluation” Of Content by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 13)

"Plight of the newspapers and the role of the internet" - there is a connection between failing newspapers in the United States (and many other countries), user generated content on the Web, and news search engines that "flattens news".

"It’s also important to point out that it’s not simply the flattening of news or the way that news is presented online that has negatively impacted newspapers and the value of their brands. It’s also the emergence of myriad alternative online content sources and tools that deliver what newspapers used to deliver almost exclusively — such as restaurant reviews or event and entertainment listings. And then there’s the more efficient delivery of advertising online. Before Google became the juggernaut it is today online jobs, autos and real estate destinations were already starting to capture traditional newspaper advertising."

We are on the edge of major change that will have wide ramifications for democracy - how well informed the citizenry is. whether there can be balanced discourse, whether there will be investigative journalism.

News Sites in Google News

NewsKnife has been watching Google News since 2004 and has counted 9614 news sites. It lists them in alphabetical order, though it also says that some of these may no longer be available. There are many radio stations such as 940News.com in Montreal - but there is no news there. Not much at some of the sites mentioned for Toronto, although there are a few good ones: Toronto Life, Toronto Pulse 24. All in all, though, I think we can stick with Google's figure of having 4,500 news sources.

Building Google News Press Release Alerts

Information Trapping: Follow 17 Press Release Wires with Google News, Research Buzz (Jan 26)

Tara Calashain identifies the source names for 17 press release services that Google picks up and shows how to build information traps on topics and receive them in an RSS feed.

Live Search News Email Alerts

Live Search News Adds Email Alerts by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jan 19)

You can set up email alerts at Live Search News but that suggests you would choose this over Yahoo or Google or even MSNBC.

Can Google Help Newspapers?

Google news - CEO Eric Schmidt wishes he could rescue newspapers. by Adam Lashinsky, Fortune (Jan 7)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt shows he cares about the newspaper industry, even though services like Google News are serving the readers who have moved to the web for getting their daily news. What can Google do to help? It is trying as we see from this excerpt.

"We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn't take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free. We've tried to get newspapers to have more tightly integrated products with ours. We'd like to help them better monetize their customer base. We have tools that make that easier. I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don't. These little things help, but they don't fundamentally solve the problem."

Use of the Web by US Newspapers

The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers (2008 Edition), The Bivings Report,
Posted on December 18th, 2008

The Bivings Group annually studies the web features of largest newspapers in the United States. In this report for 2008 they evaluated the top 100 newspaper sites. Key findings show much more user engagement - added content, comments, most popular items - along with social networking and social bookmarking. All offered RSS feeds, and most no longer require registration to view articles.

No comment on the business model in the highlights (declining revenues from print and some advertising revenue from the web), but the authors do note that, "Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side."

XooxleAnswers - Research Resource

XooxleAnswers has an annotated directory (or link list) to free newspaper archives starting with a description of Google News Archives. This is an extensive list that covers the US, some international including Canada, college newspapers, and magazines. It received a strong recommendation from The Information Advisor's BestBizWeb's enewsletter.

XooxleAnswers (zooks-il answers) is the home website for David Sarokin, a researcher who offers for-fee services. He used to research for Google Answers, and also writes articles for eHow.com about research, computers, investing and much else.

He has created several useful guides to resources for legal and business, and links to articles he has written on a variety of topics.

For example, see David's article on Find Old Newspaper Articles and Archives Online for Free (Nov 2008)

In total, this is an excellent resource to help one go well beyond Google for specialty searches, and as a for-fee service to be helped on the really tough questions.

Independent News Sources

Project Censored is a media research program at Sonoma State University that "conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media."

The site lists the 25 censored stories for each year. These are strangely numbered - 2009 is for stories in 2008.

There is also a list of independent news sources.

Top Sources at Google News

Newsknife Announces Top News Sites Of 2008 by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Dec 15)

Newsknife has named the twelve most important news sites on Google news for 2008. Don't be surprised to see New York Times, AP, and Reuters in top 3. Others that aren't quite so obvious: Voice of America, BBC (because it is # 9 rather than in the top 3), and Christian Science Monitor.

Twitter for News

Yes, Twitter is a news source, Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Nov 27)

Mathew Ingram concludes, "But as I have tried to argue before, Twitter reports are a valuable "first draft of history," and that is a pretty good definition of the news."

Ingram also mentions a variety of Web tools he is using for getting news on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai such as blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, You Tube and Twitter.

Will newspapers survive?

The Christian Science Monitor Moves to a Web-Based Model—Is This the Future of News? by Nancy Herther, Newsbreaks (Nov 10)

The Christian Science Monitor is dropping its daily print edition and relying only on daily web.

"Barrie Gunter, author of the book News and the Net (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003) and journalism professor at the University of Leicester, believes that print newspapers will cease to be published in coming years. "There is no doubt that hard copy circulation figures have generally fallen despite occasional format changes designed as cosmetic revamps and that more and more people are going online to get news content from an increasingly diverse array of news suppliers.""

Yahoo News # 1

Yahoo Leads the Way in Election-Frenzied News Category: Hitwise , Traffick.com (Nov 5)

Yahoo! - "According to day-by-day traffic numbers being circulated by Hitwise, Yahoo News is the #1 source for news these days, especially in the days leading up to, and during, the election. In fact, Yahoo News's market share for news visits is triple Google News', the #4 player in a near dead heat with Fox News at #5. MSNBC is #3; CNN.com is #2."

Silobreaker fun

October 2008 InfoTip: Silobreaker by Mary Ellen Bates.

Features Silobreaker, a online news portal with some dazzling data visualization displays. Bates describes how the researcher can make good use of this site.

I don't find it easy to search, but it is fascinating to browse and try. Today there is a media trend box that lists Stephen Harper, Jack Layton, and Malcolm Gladwell - there's a trio - for media attention in articles mentioning Canada. As it turned out Gladwell had a minimal presence - didn't register on the chart. But this is the kind of tool you can play with for ages - add Bob Rae, compare him to Michael Ignatieff (neither are being mentioned much), check Jim Flaherty (soaring).

It's a rich site and requires time to explore and exploit.

Google Quotes - Revealing

Five Years of Quotes in Google News, Official Google Blog (Oct 27)

Google News has a quote extraction feature for finding what political leaders have said- and now the index goes back 5 years.

Google Inquotes has four editions: US, UK, Canada, and India, with two leading figures features. In Canada, they are Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion. However, the drop down box lists 3 others - Gilles Duceppe, Jack Layton, Peter MacKay (what - no Elizabeth May? she's much more quotable). As an example, you can see what they have had to say about carbon tax.

Custom edition lets you choose from a list - which you don't see until you start typing in the Select box. There are very few Canadians - probably just the 5 mentioned.

Quotes also show up in Google News on instances when you search on a name for which quotes have been collected. For example - Hillary Rodham Clinton , or Dalton McGuinty. For Premier McGuinty, you can get quotes on 'autos' back to 2006. Quotes are said to be "Auto-generated from over 25000 news sources".

New Yahoo News

Yahoo News Tests New Look, Targets Social Media Users, Search Engine Land (Oct 3)

Yahoo News is inviting comments from users on new design and content features. Look for “Try the new Yahoo! News” link at the top of the page.

Alltop for News by Topic

Alltop picks up feeds by topic and organizes them - saving you the trouble of doing this for yourself.

It has recently redesigned its site to make searching and browsing easier and more appealing. Users can discover topics by pre-set categories, alphabetically, or keyword search.

This type of service can work out quite well if they have hit your particular set of interests. I thought there was a reasonably good balance of mindless entertainment (television), and more professional pursuits - technology (including content management), personal finance, medical, as well as lifehacks (all the top lifehack news) and even history.

Collections like this can point you to sources you didn't know about before. You can choose to build your own based on what Alltop offers (probably go to NetVibes for that), or take the easy way out and stick with scanning Alltop. The page is somewhat customizable - you can hide sources you don't want.

There is some Canadian content. Canada is also a topic under Geos. It has a mix of good news sources, French and English sources, and some flaky stuffy that tells us that not everything picked is high quality.

There is a credit at the bottom to say it was "inspired by popurls".

Alltop was reviewed in Alltop Launches Redesign To Cover More Topics With Less Clutter by Don Reisinger, Tech Crunch (Sept 22)

Google News Dates Off

Google News & Indexing Old Stories As New, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sept 16)

"Michael Gray noticed that Google News is continuously indexing old stories on some sites as new stories. Yes, this is the exact issue that influenced United Airlines stock price drop just a week ago. "

Digitization at Google News Archive

Google Digitization Initiative to Expand Google News Archive by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Sept 15)

Details on Google's to expand Google News Archive with digitization of more newspapers .

Google "has offered free digitization to any newspaper publisher willing to put all or any part of its archives onto the web for access through Google News Archive". ProQuest and Heritage Microfilm are responding to this initiative by offering up microfilmed titles.

Will this be a threat to commercial databases (although ProQuest doesn't seem worried), or will the entire industry benefit? One thing is clear - the consumer will have much more choice.

New Yahoo News Page

Yahoo! News - Try their New Design, digital inspiration (Sep 8)

Yahoo News is redesigning the display of its stories. This posting compares the designs and shows how you can see for yourself by making a small change to the url. (Change s to story). Frankly, both designs have far too much on the page. The new design forces you to click on a second link to read the whole story - a practice I detest.

Doesn't apply at Yahoo News Canada - yet.

The Google News Archive

Google Launches Newspaper Digitization Project by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Sep 8)

Google News Archive will soon have digitized copies of printed newspapers.

"Google, in partnership with a number of North American newspapers, ProQuest and Heritage, has begun digitizing printed newspapers, making them both searchable and browsable exactly as they appeared in print, including photographs, headlines, articles and advertisements."

Postscript: Google expands historical search, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Sep 8)

More about the newspapers that Google is digitizing - "“Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed – photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all,” Google product manager Punit Soni said in the blog post.

The new papers range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “the first newspaper West of the Alleghenies” (the Allegheny Mountains), to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting paper."

Yahoo News as a news organization

Yahoo mixes old and new in Internet-age news service by Glenn Chapman, Yahoo News (Aug 21)

Yahoo goes beyond aggregating news - it wants to have its own news service with reporters that get scoops. Good.

"Unlike websites that just aggregate news stories plucked from the Internet, Yahoo is cutting content deals with wire services and other "traditional" outlets as well as investing in a bullpen of its own reporters."

Getting News

Pew Report on Changing News Habits by Amy Gahran, Poynter Online (Aug 20)

Summarizes the report from the Pew Research Center on Audience Segments in a Changing News Environment. Among the main interesting points is the growing use of search engines to get news - "Nearly a third of online news users (31%) deploy search engines to look for news stories at least three days a week, up from 24 percent two years ago and 19 percent in 2004.""

Analysing News

Stevesie.com - "News with a Brain"

Seems to be a sudden uptick in interest in news search engines that do new groupings and analysis. Here's one from an undergraduate at Cornell University, but it still needs work. Nonetheless, try it out - could lead somewhere in time.

Here's the press release --

Cornell Undergrad Launches Stevesie.com Intelligent News Search Engine

Tired of drudging through headline after headline to stay informed? Stevesie News makes it easy to stay up-to-date with the world. Created by Cornell Undergraduate student Steve Spagnola, Stevesie finds live news from hundreds of sources across the web. Next, an artificial brain comprehends the most recent headlines to decide what's important and how different news stories relate to one another.

Stevesie's artificial brain mimics how our brains store and retrieve memories, constructing an associative network of news and keyword relations. The result of all this complicated-sounding work is a great way to experience the news.

How Stevesie Works - Stevesie effectively presents the news through buzzwords, pictures, and related topics, not just the headlines. Command your news experience with the instant search feature; just start typing to see
what's going on in the world. Surf through the news by related topics to see the trends unfold.

Stevesie also presents a superior variety of headlines for each topic by not just concentrating on breaking stories.

Said Spagnola, "Stevesie News is based on a new form of artificial intelligence that models biological behavior in our brains. I personally wrote everything during my spare time at an internship in Silicon Valley this summer. I hope folks enjoy Stevesie and look forward to feedback for how to improve it.

I'm afraid I'm not finding good relevance on my queries

-US cycling team olympics - a great mix and nothing about cycling
- tailpipe emissions - was about embassies - was not about anything on the second try.
- presidential election - energy comes up -that's a good thing; and also John McCain as a topic - but not Barack Obama.

Could be asking too much of the sources - which are not stated.

News Headlines

Newsflashr.com aggregates the aggregators By Dan Farber, Webware (Aug 6)

Newsflashr - aggregates headlines from other aggregator. - but it also views by topic and time.

"In the category of yet-another-news-tracker, Newsflashr.com added search engine to its news aggregation service, which was launched in February this year. It searches across feeds from popular news-oriented sites, such as Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, MSNBC and even Twitter, delivering results by source."

Interesting how much coverage the "Tim McLean" story in Canada got across US and British sources.

For headline search, iNewsflashr is ho-hum, but the tag cloud of stories and ranking of topics is engaging. On August 6 the two hottest stories are about a coup happening in Mauritania, and events in Beijing.

Google News Clustering

Power Searching Google News With Cluster Filtering by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 28)

"Ionut Alex Chitu noticed a new feature in Google News that allows you to filter news clusters by three options. The three options include, "All Sources," "Blogs," and local news options. Let me walk you through this step by step."

New Social page to NYT

'New York Times' goes social with TimesPeople By Caroline McCarthy, Webware (June 18)

Readers of the New York Times can get to know each other -- "TimesPeople users can build up friends lists and can see a "news feed" of which stories their friends are recommending, sharing, and commenting on. Times online readers have been able to comment on stories, as well as rate reviewed restaurants and movies, for some time now, but recommending is new."

Only with Firefox, you say? "TimesPeople is currently available only as a Firefox browser plug-in, but software engineers told CNET News.com that it would eventually be more widely available and without a download required."

Would like to see this with The Walrus in Canada.

Rocketinfo Feed Reader

Rocketinfo Launches New Version of Online RSS Reader Newsbreaks (Jun 16)

Rocketinfo offers two ways of viewing the news:

1) Rocketnews.com - a web page of headlines, popular topics, and most recent stories.

2) Rocket Reader - where you can set up feeds from blogs and news sources AND search queries you have constructed at Rocketinfo that you'd like to watch.

Unfortunately the syntax is not robust for doing much more than keyword searches. Appears to accept - to exclude and sometimes works with OR and sometimes crashes.

AP Copyright

It's AP newswire vs. the Internet Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (June 13)

"Associated Press has apparently filed several DMCA takedown requests against a site called Drudge Retort, alleging that several items excerpted on the site constitute an infringement of copyright and "a misappropriation of 'hot news' under New York State law.""

Commentary

Your Friday reads by
Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (June 13)

Good tour of sources for comment on the United States as well as being fun to read -- "Jack Kapica searches the Web and offers a selection of the week's interesting stories: a post-mortem on Hillary; a retort to Ann Coulter's defence of G.W. and lots of stupid Americans".

NY Times at Newser

Newser Launches “NY Times in 60 Seconds,” Local Coverage for 86 Markets Business Wire (June 12)

Newser digests the news in New York Times on its own page. For a given story can also follow leads to others that are editor recommended and see related news. Will also show related threads.

"Newser (www.newser.com), the online news synthesizer that distills the best stories from a hundred news sources into lively summaries, believes you need an independent pro to do the job.

Starting today, Newser reads the Times for you, culling the "must-read" stories people are going to be talking about and giving you a crisp summary of each, housed in a dedicated NY Times grid you can scan in 60 seconds. "

Google News with Related Searches

Google News shows a list of related searches at the bottom of the results page.
So - for great lakes we see invasive species, lake michigan, snow - not bad - but I think we should also see global warming because of the number of articles that discuss the falling lake levels because of warmer temperatures.

News Video for US Viewers

Searching The Web For News Video by Eric Papczun, Search Engine Land (May 29)

Comscore data shows that "73.7% of the US Internet population is now watching video online". It's not all cat and dog videos. Many are seeking out news. But how do they find the news.

"DoubleClick Performics, in partnership with ROI Research, recently conducted the Searching for Video News Study to gain some insight into how consumers are using search to find news, as well as if they're getting what they're looking for."

CNN is the main source for US viewers (57%). "A higher percentage of consumers searching for news video used CNN.com than Google.com, which came in second at 53%. After that, MSNBC.com (41%) ranked above Yahoo.com (40%), MSN.com (31%), and FOXnews.com (25%)."

"YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and MSN Video came in towards the bottom of Web sites used for news video search, at 22%, 14%, 13%, and 11% respectively."

No mention of Blinkx.tv as a news video source.

MeFeedia News Video for the US

Mefeedia introduces news video search by Harrison Hoffman, Webware (May 28)

Mefeedia, just launched in March for finding videos, has added news videos and claims to have more than 500 news sources.

Stories on Mefeedia News are by broad category, world, or US. Channels will show networks (eg ABC, CBS, BBC, Comedy) - much like the television. No CBC or other Canadian content that I can see.

Google Earth - Google News Mashup

Mashup alert: Google Earth gets Google News By Stephen Shankland, WebWare (May 20)

"Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that shows Google News related to the area shown on the screen."

"The Internet has made global news a reality, but there are several efforts under way to meet the demand for local news, too. Google News can be customized to show headlines from a given city, state, or ZIP code, and MetaCarta overlays links to local news on a Google map."

Addict-o-matic is addictive

Addict-o-matic Angles for Web 2.0 Metasearch Turf by Woody Evans, Newsbreaks (May 12)

Addict-o-matic -- "This search engine pulls from the "best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images." Some of these live sites include major blogging houses (WordPress, Bloglines, and Twitter) and blog search engines, video and vlogging sites (YouTube and Truveo), and all the likely suspects for major folksonomic searching (Digg, Technorati, and even Flickr, plus 15 other sites and engines)."

This really is meta search for news. News items from the 22 sources appear in squares. These can be moved around according to need. Browsing is very easy.

Would be nice to be able to select the sources and do own mix-and-match.

Free online newspapers but ..

Future of newspapers is free: survey by KATE HOLTON , Reuters via Globe and Mail (May 6)

"Newspapers seeking to compete with the Internet are likely to become free and place greater emphasis on comment and opinion in the future, a survey of the world's editors showed on Tuesday."

Globe and Mail is moving in this direction. It announced in May that it was going to retire the Globe Insider subscription service and make content from columnists free for 30 days. However, they are also introducing a for-fee Globe Plus service for financial / investment information, electronic version of the daily print paper, and access to archives back to Jan 2000. ($15.95 / month starting May 31, 2008)

MSNBC Newsware

Playing games with news: MSNBC NewsWare By Rafe Needleman, Webware (May 5)

"MSNBC is launching some new toys for its news service that let you scan headlines in creative (and goofy) ways, and even play games with them. They're all part of the MSNBC NewsWare service."

Newsware -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23781733/

Quotations through Google News

Google News adds quotations By Elinor Mills, CNet via Webware (Apr 17)

"Google is extracting quotations for politicians and celebrities from news sources and featuring them at the top of the Google News results page for certain searches.

For instance, a search on "Barack Obama" brings up a quotation by the Democratic presidential hopeful, and clicking on his name under the quote takes you to more pages of his quotations. You can then search within just the quotations from there."

This isn't just for finding out what American politicians said. You can get quotes by Stephen Harper too.

News and Reporting Changing

Presidential race magnifies Internet's growing role in media by JOHN IBBITSON, Globe and Mail (Apr 17)

Dramatic changes are occuring in news reporting and news reading, and these are most evident in the United States during the ongoing leadership contests and election campaign. John Ibbitson wrote, "What many haven't noticed is that the drama of the race is accelerating a shift: from the morning newspaper to news.com; from the news as something that lands each morning on your doorstep to news as a stream."

The shift to the Internet is as significant as any that came before.

"The 1970s presidential elections revealed the growing power of television networks in shaping elections; the 1980s marked the emergence of stories aggressively delving into the private lives of public figures; the 1990s was the decade of talk radio and cable news. And 2004 heralded the emergence of the Internet as a fundraising and recruitment tool, especially in the campaign of Democratic hopeful Howard Dean.'

Newspapers are suffering - lower readership, lower ad revenues, cut backs in staff. This will surely impact the nature of reporting and likely the quality.

"As readers migrate from the broadsheet to the Internet, the news cycle is being transformed. Just as the arrival of cable news turned broadcast journalism from a nightly event into a constant stream of images, reports and opinions, so too the Web has streamed print journalism, as everyone from the Miami Herald to a guy named Harold constantly update their pages.

And readers are increasingly acting like journalists. They are Googling their queries, surfing the sites, checking the headlines on Yahoo, scanning databases, chatting, posting comments and blogging themselves. "
Today, the role of the Internet in shaping election campaigns is exponentially greater. Ninety per cent of the money Illinois Senator Barack Obama is raising consists of online donations of $100 or less. "

Live Search News

Microsoft hits back at Google with Live Search News by Harrison Hoffman, Cnet (Apr 15)

Microsoft has finally improved Live Search News.

"As a part of its Rome release, Microsoft's Live Search team has launched a new Live Search News, a direct competitor to Google News.

At this time, Live Search News looks like a simplified version of Google News. The layout and design are aesthetically pleasing and will be familiar to Techmeme readers. "

There seems to be a local component to show news from the US city and state you're in. There are videos and news images. There is also an option to refine results by location and category.

All the World news items come from US sources.

Has the usual groupings: Top Stories, World, US, Local, Business, Politics, Entertainment, Sports, Sci/Tech, and Health.

To say that this is a "simplified version of Google News" is an understatement. This is a simplified view of news period. At this stage there is no information about number of sources, and no features for alerts or personalization. These things come with time, but the market already has several good news search engines (Yahoo, Google, Rocketnews and many more).

RocketNews Re-Launch

Rocketinfo Launches New Version of News Search Engine Prime Newswire via Yahoo News (Mar 27)

RocketNews is back looking very spiffy with topics, popular subjects, RSS feeds, and basic search.

From the press release

"ROCKETinfo, Inc., a pioneer in news monitoring, analysis and search technology, today announced the release of a new version of its flagship online news search engine and portal, Rocketnews.com. Rocketinfo addresses the core challenge in the news search business: relevant news, provided in a timely manner. The just-launched Rocketnews.com aims to set a new standard amongst Internet news providers by answering the question: In this era of too much news, how do you find exactly what you need?"

+ can create user-defined feeds
+ has a database of over 60,000 sources
+ does "contextual search"
+ has a "Topic Discovery Engine" - "expands a contextual search to include blog posts, photos, video clips and research data, besides an abundance of updated and historical news."

"The Topic Discovery Engine examines all 60,000 news sources; it collects, analyzes and categorizes news stories; and then updates category pages, topic pages and related RSS feeds. Topic pages, a new feature at Rocketnews.com, highlight popular news topics by displaying related news stories, blog posts, photos and noteworthy quotes."

Geographic Search Engine for News

MetaCarta Introduces GeoSearch News Newsbreaks (Mar 27)

GeoSearch News is an exciting new way to peruse headlines from news sources around the world by working with a map and some text. Use the left panel to view headlines (all or by category), and on the right view the Google map dotted with markers for the stories. When you click into the story, there is another map to show places mentioned.

There is a search facility that will show in IE6 (and above one presumes), but NOT Firefox 2. Generally, GeoSearch works better in IE than Firefox.

GeoSearch is a good way to get an overview of what is going on in the world. However it is still US centric (headquarters is in Cambridge Mass) - there are categories for US and World; and there isn't a category for Environment - just Science and Technology.

"MetaCarta, Inc. (www.metacarta.com), a provider of geographic search and referencing solutions, announced GeoSearch News (http://geosearch.metacarta.com), a geographic search engine that displays current news on a map. GeoSearch News indexes a collection of more than 1,400 national, international, and local news sources every hour in addition to direct feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters."

"GeoSearch News lets users specify their place of interest by entering a place name in a text box or panning/zooming a map to a desired place or region. Users can refine their search by simply repositioning the map. Search results are presented in order of relevance as determined by a combination of keyword(s) and the specified geography."

EU Feeds

EUFeeds - "over 300 newspapers updated every 20 minutes" Headlines by source are on the front page. Pick your country (Europe only) by the flag. Most will be in the language of the country - no translation feature.

From the European Journalism Center.

News through Facebook

Ellyn Angelotti, a journalist at Poynter Online, is examining the use of social networking, Facebook specifically, in news - either researching or disseminating.

A New Tool in the Box: Social Networks (Mar 18)

Has advice for journalists in using Facebook, MySpace or other social networking sites to tap into communities to get information or leads. Mainly - be aware that another person could be acting as agent as is the case for Ira Glass on NPR - he has a "web manager". Also tips for users about privacy.

Facebook and the Viral Marketing of News

The Chicago Tribune sends out news alerts as Facebook updates.
Poynter Online does this too -- Facebook updates.

Poynter Online is one of several with a Facebook profile . Others include New York Times, NPR, The Economist, The Onion, Channel 4 News in the UK.

[CBC has a page too and over 8,000 fans but doesn't keep it as fresh (last update was Feb 28) or as interesting. It's not a vibrant meeting place for CBC fans. ]

Ellyn Angelotti writes, "News organizations are catching on that Facebook is becoming a major part of young users' Internet habits. They are meeting young readers -- a traditionally low-readership demographic-- on our virtual stomping grounds. And it's paying off; I'm starting to find myself getting more and more of my news via Facebook."

There is a distinction between Facebook Group - only members can view, and Facebook Pages - anyone can view but "fans" get the updates.

"Many Pages are simply virtual meeting spots for users who "like" an organization. They usually don't have much content or customization. But, Page creators, usually an editor or producer from the online staff, can post videos, photos, text stories, updates and applications to the Page. "

There is a fair amount that a news organization can do through having a page. For some readers this could be a rich and convenient way to get news. Certainly, we can see potential here and a possibly a new model for engagement.

Digg and other Social News sites

Google, Microsoft and 2 'media companies' sniffing at Digg? Dwight Silverman, Tech Blog (Mar 7)

Digg is up for sale and it seems that both Google and Microsoft will bid, as might two media/news companies. This posting is interesting for its comments about Digg's poorer performance when compared to others for technology news, and on the need for human editors to improve the quality.

"I also am of the opinion that more input from editors improves the quality of sites like this. For example, look at what's been done with Sk*rt, which has been called a "Digg for women". Its owners -- including Houston's Laura Mayes -- have added a column in which human editors call out what they think are the best stories. While the design is a little crowded, it's ultimately the best of both worlds -- the wisdom of the crowd and of the editor."

Yahoo News Gets Buzz

Yahoo Buzz Launches: Popular Stories To Go On Yahoo Homepage - Michael Arrington, TechCrunch (Feb 25)

New feature at Yahoo News - Yahoo Buzz - a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page." Yahoo will also be using search engine logs, emails and some other factors to identify hot stories.

Posting has screenshots - and you can click on the Buzz button to see the effect.

This is picking up on the social news trend best known through Digg (Ask recently changed its news to BigNews with scored stories. ) However, Mathew Ingram notes a couple key differences from Yahoo Buzz and Digg - "One is that the most Buzzed-about items will feed into Yahoo's main news page, with several of the top ranked items being added to the news from Associated Press, etc."

Yahoo gets social with its news - Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Feb 26)

Categories for buzz are entertainment and sports in first two slots followed by World, and under more - health, business, sci/tech, US news, lifestyle, politics and travel - illustrating once more a reading preference for the popular and self-indulgent.

Nonetheless, looks like an interesting enhancement for viewing news stories - especially so when the buzz starts showing up at Yahoo News.

Yahoo NewsGlobe

NewsGlobe: See where on earth big news is breaking, from Yahoo Next (Feb 12)

NewsGlobe - a way of browsing Yahoo news stories in a visual way through Flash.

"The NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Y! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information off to the Yahoo! Maps service to find a matching location, and return latitude and longitude coordinates for it."

Yahoo Canada News - What others have to say is spam

Nearly every news site today invites its readers to rate articles, and a few very will invite responses to articles. The ratings raise the articles in a popularity-recommended index, and the comments can promote discussion and add value.

But for comments to be successful, the site must monitor the postings for quality and suitability. Otherwise it opens the door to the dark side of the participatory web of spam, graffiti, and foolishness. This is exactly what has happened at Yahoo Canada News.

I don't use Yahoo Canada News, but Jeremy M. does. He wrote,

"I use Yahoo.ca ... and there seems to be a significant amount of spam [porn related] posted in the "What others have to say about this news story"... So far Yahoo seems to be doing little about this......not to mention that this forum is really nothing else than a hangout for a [seemed] group of misinformed people....."

Take any story at Yahoo News Canada - comments in 'What others have to say' are loaded with spam and silliness. It's hard work to find any that involve thoughtful comment.

On the story - The end is near... well, in 7.6 billion years (Feb 21, 2008) there was this comment - one that turns up on many others.

=================================
Why are there always some people killed every day?.Peace the world.. I hate gun though i am a police woman.. i like to take pictures and also upload them to internet.. surely no uniform.. you may want to see how nice and even #^# they are under the name offuniformbaby on ····· SeekingUniform.com ·.···
=================================

Such postings raise the popular ranking, making it an unreliable gauge as well. Using Yahoo's 'report abuse' is like the 'close door' button in an elevator - there to make you feel good but doesn't change anything.

Yahoo News, interestingly, doesn't allow comments. It has a rating system for recommendations, and for popularity purposes keeps track of frequency a story is emailed. Yahoo News is a widely respected news portal and it's one area where Yahoo hasn't done the 'social thing'.

Globe and Mail has two levels of moderation: semi where the posting is filtered for inappropriate language and "other issues"; and full, in which a moderator reviews for compliance to policy and suitability. Not all discussion at the Globe and Mail is courteous, informed, or necessarily intelligent, but there is no spam and no porn. Reading the comments is worthwhile for getting a sense of what people are thinking and sometimes for new aspects not covered in the article.

The Toronto Star has a very controlled process for adding comments called Speak Out. The Join the Discussion page lists specific stories for commenting upon. This is similar to a "letter to the editor" where you might be contacted by staff on the subject matter. Not all responses are posted.

What Newspapers Are Tracking:

CBC News - tracks most viewed, most emailed, most blogged.
Globe and Mail - most viewed, most emailed, most discussed
Toronto Star - most read, most emailed
National Post - most read, most emailed
New York Times - most emailed, most blogged, most searched

Linking to blog comments might be the safest and easiest. CBC readers can link to Technorati to see posts that refered to an article. Chances are that readers will find more thoughtful comment.

Yahoo News Canada can learn from all of these. If it wants reader participation it must monitor postings or risk alienating and turning away people who actually read news. Otherwise, it should discontinue comments and do as the parent does, just track viewed and recommended.

For anyone looking for a Canadian news portal, Google News Canada is much superior for sources and personalization features.

Bottom line: No service should allow comments unless it can can block spam and inappropriate responses.

Newspond - AI news engine

Newspond Lauches News Aggregation Site That Uses A "Tireless Electronic Brain" Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Feb 20)

Interested in tech, games, or science (space, health, or nature)? "Newspond may appeal to you.

"Newspond is a news aggregation site that boasts "No editors. No voting. Just an AI news engine." Presumably, the lack of voting distinguishes it from sites like Digg and the lack of editing from the Mahalo-like and maybe Slashdot? Does this mean it's like Ask's recent news aggregation entry BigNews but with fewer categories? Or maybe it's like Google News? Or Techmeme?"

Ask BigNews Hurts

Ask BigNews Takes Advantage of Content 2.0 by Tara Calishain, Newsbreaks (Feb 19)

Ask BigNews gets a fairly warm review from Tara Calishain though she doesn't say that she will switch from Yahoo News.

It has more than 10,000 sources from news and blogs, and a variety of media typesl. It does have scores to indicate importance of story - if you accept the scoring system. (Calishain lists some factors.) She described it as "loud" - it is, and points out that it has few filters.

The filters, such as they are, are not immediately obvious. You must run a search first to see search refinements where you may be able to narrow by Category (business, entertainment, health, world - 8 in total), News Source which is continental - Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Oceania - no North America. Where's Ask's technology for refining based on words and phrases when we need it?

For me - I'm not a fan. The social media aspect of including Digg makes the site less useful to me - I don't want the most popular. And the "exuberant" display, as Calishain puts it, is an assault on the eyes - there is too much to take in.

How Canadians can personalize Google News

Google News has several features for creating a personal news page. These go well beyond layout of Google's standard sections.

The newest features are to add a section for news in your city, and to get recommendations. But the options for both of these appear only to US users. Canadians have to fool the system to add these to their personal news page.

Firstly go to the US Google News at news.google.com/news. If you are using Google's personalized search account, you will need to sign out so that Google doesn't keep you in Google News Canada.

Now you can see the two new options and can set up a personalized news page.

1. Add a local news section based on city name or zip code. Look for the box.

It will recognize Canadian city names. (I tested Toronto and Montreal). Once you have this you can add it to a personal page.

But wait - Google can recommend stories based on your search history. Use the box to select that option.

Save these changes to a personal page. You'll be invited to create a personalized-news page.

Rearrange the page for the sections you want. Click on a box to edit it - changing the edition from US to Canada (or other country) and selecting the category, or to remove it. Not all combinations work - there is no Canada > Entertainment. Unfortunately environment is not a choice.

There are four options:

1. Add a standard section: will ask for edition (US, Canada etc) and section (Business, Sci/Tech, Health etc)
2. Add a custom section: very useful for setting up alerts - see below
3. Add a local section: can add more cities
4. Add a recommended section

The last two do not show on the Google News Canada personal page, but you can arrange this US version to have all the Canadian news you want.

The custom search lets you add a section that is just one newspaper and/or develop a custom search on your search terms.

To set the page to get news from a single source. Click the link at the bottom of the search results that says "add a custom section to your personalized Google News page." and use the site operator to identify the source
For example: site:[theglobeandmail.com] or site:[thestar.com] for the Toronto Star. Use the Advanced Search to label this section.

You can add keywords to restrict news selected in a particular topic. Work with the search in a separate window until results look relevant. Syntax will work such as intitle:, and it will be important to use OR.

In the end I settled for this personal view of the news.

More information about personalizing news in About Google News.

BigNews at Ask

It's BigNews at Ask.com with its new news service. Get top stories, select by image, see popularity ranking according Ask's own "big factor" assessment and to diggs at Digg, and save stories to "mynews". Includes a news search with Ask.com's search aids to narrow by category or news-source filter. Not bad as a start. Needs more sources. Seems US-centric and is weak on Canada at this time.

Ask Launches BigNews Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Feb 6)

"Ask has just launched a new search service called BigNews, similar to Google News with a side of Digg. It uses something called "BigFactor" to rank stories (using signals like freshness, impact, quantity of multimedia, and amount of related discussion), provides category clusters, and lets you browse by top Diggs and no Diggs (as Mashable asks, why?)."

If You Like Digg, You'll Love Ask's Big News by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land -- describes the "big factor" score. Concludes - "The bottom line is that Big News is an attractive news aggregator with some nice features."

Silobreaker - fantastic

News junkies will love Silobreaker. The graphics alone are worth a chunk of time.

+ a map of world showing hot spots that can be explored,
+ trend lines for media attention to topics you query,
+ networks of entities from news now (select from a list of topics).

As well there is a taxonomy for exploring topics and a wealth of healdinles with popup detail, and a section called "in focus".

Get a cross-section of news about Canada - enter Canada to the 360 degree search box.

Silobreaker is extraordinarily rich. Allow time to explore and get to love.

From Silobreaker Brings a Graphical View to News Research Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Feb 7)

"While news might be a readily available commodity in our internet world, a small U.K.-based company thinks there’s a better way to present it to users—with relational analysis and explanatory graphics that provide users with contextual insight. Silobreaker (www.silobreaker.com) has officially launched its new search service for news and current events. Its goal is to provide meaning, context, and insight to content using easily understood graphical tools. Silobreaker pulls current content from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research, and multimedia sources. It then automatically and on-the-fly extracts and tags people, companies, topics, places, and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow; and puts them in a visual context for the user. The free service is aimed at anyone wanting an in-depth perspective on current news for personal or business use, but it should prove especially appealing to journalists, researchers, scientists, consultants, marketing professionals, and industry analysts."

Online Newspaper Sites

Newspaper Web sites draw record viewers By Paul Thomasch, Reuters (Jan 25)

More people are using online newspaper sites - but will it make money for the newspapers?

" A record number of readers visited U.S. online newspaper sites last year, according to figures released on Thursday, confirming the Web as one of the few bright spots for the struggling newspaper industry."

"It [Newspaper Association of America] said that during the fourth quarter, 39% of all active Web users visited newspaper Web sites, with visits averaging 44 minutes a month."

Advanced Google News Search

New Options for Advanced Google News Search Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz (Jan 1)

+ "advanced searching and operator searches work for all versions of Google News now"
+ "suggested sources has been implemented for the advanced search page"
+ "source search is not limited to the exact name of the source."

Good tips - get examples from the posting.

Economist Audio / Video

The Economist is offering a free download of its Christmas audio CD with selections of articles from 2007. These cover "topics as diverse as Swiss cheese, lap dancing, and Dolly Parton"

Economist also has an Audio Video Centre with news analysis taken from Economist publications. Current selection from the Christmas issues includes an analysis of Asia and the growing strength of China, Europe after the Cold War, American spirituality and several others, along with a forward look to 2008.

You can subscribe to the Audio / Video and search the A/V clips for mention of keywords.

Subscribers to the magazine may download the audio edition for the weekly edition. Also available for a fee.

NewsNow from the UK

One of the Best Getting Better: NewsNow Beta Testing New Features and Design ResourceShelf (Dec 7)

"One of our favorite news sites has tweaked it’s look and continues to increase the number of sources it provides access to (nearing 31,000). However, that’s not all. A NewsNow beta is available."

Gary Price names NewsNow.co.uk as one of his two favourite news sites.

Book Review: Consider the Source

"Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to the 100 Most Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web" Written by James F. Broderick & Darren W. Miller
Reviewed by Graham Stewart; Reviewed by Graham Stewart, FreePint, Dec 20, 2007.

"Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to the 100 Most Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web" reviews 100 sites in 450 pages.

"Each of the 100 sites gets about four pages of analysis, divided according to a straightforward template. After an overview that introduces the company behind the site, we get a description of the site's contents ('What You'll Find There'), reasons you might want to use the site ('Why You Should Visit'), a brief look at any hidden - or explicit - bias or agenda ('Keep This in Mind'), and a final judgment and rating."

There is an associated website at TheReportersWell.com with reviews of the book. Amazon (click on image) provides search-inside capability.

The list of the 100 sites (but without the ratings) is in The Newshole.

The authors said this about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - "A model of thoughtful, meat-and-potatoes journalism, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) offers a wealth of information about the goings-on in that enigmatic country". CBC received a rating of 3 out of 5 "newspapers" and generally positive comments as a "foreign-based" news service, although calling hockey a "national religion" in Canada indicates the writing is a tad glib. BBC with its much richer offerings in content received 5 "newspapers".

Online Newspapers Expand

Newspapers hope for online growth AP via Globe and Mail (Dec 3)

"Newspaper publishers, entering 2008 with some of the worst economic conditions in years, said Wednesday they hope to bring even more readers — and ad spending — to their websites with expanded offerings of news, advertising and video."

Free WSJ Coming

Murdoch Intends to Drop WSJ.com Fee, AP via New York Times (Nov 13)

Hard to believe. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, thinks that advertising on a free Wall Street Journal will bring in more revenue than the $50 million a year in subscription fees.

"Mr. Murdoch said he believed that a free model, with increased readership for wsj.com, will attract “large numbers” of big-spending advertisers."

Means we can look forward to a free online Wall Street Journal sometime in 2008. Guess he's not worried about a downturn in the US and world economies.

Daily Me Returns

DailyMe Personal News Aggregator Josh Catone, Read/Write Web (Nov 2)

Flash from the past - a new Daily Me for personalized news picks.

"Florida-based DailyMe is a personalized news aggregation service that creates a daily online newspaper that can be delivered at set times via email or browsed from the web. The site aggregates news in a wide variety of topic areas from over 3,000 mainstream and blog sources, including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Engadget, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek."

The Fabulous Newser

Newser — an Online News Service from HighBeam Research and Michael Wolff — Debuts Today Business Wire via Google News (Oct 30)

Newser a fabulous online news service is out of beta and nearly at full operation. "On a 24-7 basis, Newser locates and links to the best and most up-to-date news stories, video, audio and photos from vast news resources across the Web — and supplies concise, punchy summaries."

Newser was good in beta and is better now due to some new features:

+ news filters - slider bar to adjust from hard to soft news.
+ story summaries
+ audio and video links
+ topic threads - later users will be able to create their own threads. See all current topics on the thread index page.
+ widgets - "Widgets for iGoogle, RSS feeds, and alerts, plus tools allow users to post Newser news to Facebook, del.icio.us, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, etc."
+ access to HighBeam archives

When you first visit Newser, adjust the sliders to the kind of news you want to see - hard news (serious) or soft (entertainment or personal), number of stories on the front page.

If you register you'll be able to save your customized settings and also create your own Thread pages when it becomes available.

Next find the threads you want to follow - for example, Going Green under Business or In Vino Veritas under Science and Health. There are 9 broad topical areas with sub-topics or threads. You can subscribe to feeds for these threads adding them to whatever feed reader you use - iGoogle, my Yahoo page, Google Reader, Bloglines etc.

Newser lists its top 100 sources. Globe and Mail is the only Canadian source on the list. There are several from the UK (Independent, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Economist) and one from Germany (Der Speigel)

People in the US can set their city by zip code.

Doris Lessing

Sometimes a news alert can bring good news. Today, from the New York Times breaking headlines service, came the clip --

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy said that the 87-year-old British author "has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny" with "skepticism, fire and visionary power."

New York Times points to a Featured Author page on Doris Lessing with new and reviews from the archives of the NY Times. There are audio clips as well.

The New York Times recently opened its archives for free access. Registered members can get:

+ Articles from 1981 to present - free access
+ Articles from 1853 to 1980 - free access to articles in public domain
+ breaking news alerts
+ daily headlines from a section
+ a choice of newsletters (travel, movies, money etc)

The change in policy to make more content free is described in Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site (Sept 18, 2007)

The Times Online Fiction section had Comment: a fitting gift for Doris Lessing (Oct 11) also offering a quick overview of her writings. A search for doris lessing at the Times will find more.

MSNBC Newsvine

Msnbc.com buys social news site Newsvine, MSNBC (Oct 8)

Microsoft's MSNBC bought the "participatory journalism" site, Newsvine. Good for them.

"Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com’s newsroom, “is just a great fit.”"

They also said that "Newsvine would continue to run as an independent site."

Yahoo! News Strong

The Big News About Yahoo! by Rachel Rosmarin, Forbes (OCt 5)

Yahoo is the "No. 1 provider of general, financial and sports news on the Internet. Two out of every five people who use Yahoo! look at its news, finance and sports sites--50 million people every month, according to Internet tracking firm ComScore. "

Of interest:

+ "Yahoo! News has broadened its sources of content". Now has "video and other content from outlets including 60 Minutes, CBS Local News, ABC News, CNN, Reuters, the BBC, the Weather Channel, and even a few blogs such as the Huffington Post."

+ Yahoo is "snatching snippets of content from around the Web and linking those back to a headline. "

+ This helps users - "boon to users, who can now finely tune the news settings on a Yahoo! page to pull together familiar sources, such as local news headlines, together with other Yahoo!-provided content."

NY Times Archives

Fun With the New York Times Archives, ResearchBuzz (Sept 21)

Tara Calishain did some digging into the older part of the New York Times Archives that are now open to the public.

Digg Filters

News site Digg adds filtering options, AP via Canoe (Sept )

More features for filtering news at Digg - "Users can add others to their friends list and see at a glance what stories they've been recommending or commenting on - ... Later this year, Digg will introduce additional ways to help find stories of interest, including the triggering of e-mail alerts for items that meet the user's criteria and tools for recommending stories based on the user's past activities and friends. "

Google Trends more current

That's how fast moving things are today - Google Trends is being updated hourly and you can subscribe to the feed or put it on your iGoogle page.

Google Trends shows search volume over time, and news references. It's interesting for what it can show of one term against another. For example - Dalton McGuinty vs John Tory - contenders in the Ontario election 2007. Tory, for a time in September, was getting more attention than McGuinty. Add a third -Howard Hampton - many were searching for him, but McGuinty (as Premier) was the man in the news. The weakness is that Google doesn't pick up a lot of Canadian news - most of the stories are from Canada Newswire.

Here's the search for dalton mcguinty, john tory, howard hampton.

Google Trends Now Updated Hourly, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sep 24)

Free Online Access to Newspapers

A pay wall falls, and the Web is watching by GRANT ROBERTSON, Globe and Mail (Sept 24, 2007)

New York Times dropped its for-fee subscription model last week -"deciding it could make more money by making all of its content available free of charge online - including its vast digital archive that users have paid to access in the past." The Los Angeles Times had already done the same. And now News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has talked about doing the same with the Wall Street Journal, the one paper that has been enormously successful with paid subscriptions.

These newspapers feel they can make more money from advertising if they open up the content to the search engines and increase traffic.

"Search engines and portals like Google and Yahoo act as key conduits that link readers with news outlets, rather than Internet users typing in the Web address of a specific publication. Having noticed this trend, the Times is trying to open the gates as wide as possible so that those audiences aren't inadvertently turned away by the subscription wall."

This will rock the newspapers that continue to have online subscription models - such as the Globe and Mail itself.

Canadians read news online

More Canadians getting their newspaper fix online by RICHARD BLACKWELL, Globe and Mail (Sept 20)

Surveys done in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa in fall 2006 and spring 2007 by Newspaper Audience Databank Inc showed increased readership of online versions of newspapers in all cities. Print is doing fairly well too - "47 per cent of Canadians read a newspaper every day, and almost three-quarters look at one at least once a week"

More figures at NADBank - 2006-2007 Readership Study for Selected Markets Press Release

The Online News People Read

The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts, Journalism.org (Sept 12, 2007)

What people read and prefer online can be much different than what the news media delivers judging from this study by Project for Excellence in Journalism. Part of what people actually read is influenced by what bloggers cover.

"The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.

In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites—Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us—were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study. "

Google hosts news services

Google begins hosting content from 4 news services on its own site, AP via Technology Review (Aug 31)

Google has negotiated with 4 news services to host their news on Google. These are Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press.

For example, "Google visitors interested in reading an AP story will remain on Google's Web site unless they click on a link that enables them to read the same story on other sites. Google does not have any immediate plans to run ads alongside the news stories or photographs hosted on its site, but company officials are not ruling out the possibility in the future."

It's better for Google readers - just see one instance; but it could hurt newspapers that carry these news sources and won't receive traffic for them from Google.

Also Danny Sullivant's comments in Google News Now Hosting Wire Stories & Promises Better Variety In Results - points out that Yahoo News has done this kind of thing for some time. There is a major disadvantage for the user - the article at Yahoo, and now Google news, will expire in 30 days - whereas it might still be found at a newspaper site.

You'll like Newser

Newser: Laterally and Vertically Tiered, Multimedia News Service in Beta by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks ( August 13)

Newser is a new online news service created by Patrick Spain, CEO and founder of HighBeam, and Michael Wolff. Sections are World, US, Politics, Business, Science & Health, Technology, Sports, and Culture & Society.

Stories drawn from 100 English-language news sites. Topics and stories are marked by small graphics. Rollovers, controllable through settings, appear as you pass the mouse over a headline with a link to More and Related Topics. Text, image and videos are intermixed. Stories will be kept permanently - finally a news service where you can see what came before.

Editors write summaries for stories they find important and make connections to related content.

There is a unique process at work:

"Basically, according to Spain, the process breaks news into three categories. “First, after filtering the news into various bins, we use technology to look for the most popular, most emailed news sources, gathered in real-time, which the editors see to identify the hot stories. Second, we look at what the top 100 sites are covering and when it reaches a certain percentage, we cover it too. The problem with those two formulas, however, is that you’re always looking backward. It takes a while. So, third, our editors anticipate stories, some easy and obvious like coming events (the election, the Olympics) and others not so easy. Our editors know what people are interested in. Typically we start with a link to an AP [Associated Press] story and then a story from someone better and 2–3 others just as good. Often we then link to blogs discussing an issue. So far we’ve found that people are interested in good conversation on an issue others are covering.”"

Barbara Quint likes it. So do I. Newser is in beta and is expected to launch in October. Oh - and it's free.

News You Can Trust (maybe)

NewsTrust is a new online news source, in beta, where people read, select, and rate articles from news sources and blogs.

"To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources."

News sources are principally from the US as is topic coverage. But there is at least one Canadian source - The Tyee. and of course CBC.

There will be a range of views on a topic. Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker about Rachel Carson elicited people blaming Carson for malaria in Africa (banning DDT) to those who saw her point about weakening of environmental regulations in the US.

It's good to have access to the articles, and votes may bring the better ones into view, but I question whether it's worth one's time to read the reviews.

One particularly good feature is the list of Sources.

Book: Consider the Source

Information Today Publishes Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to 100 Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web, Multimedia and Internet Schools (June 6)

New book to help people evaluate online news sources - Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to 100 Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web by James F. Broderick and Darren W. Miller, Information Today.

"Consider the Source is an A-to-Z guide to the best and worst news and information sites, according to the announcement. It features100 in-depth, critical reviews and a 5-star rating system."

EU News on Video

Forget YouTube... check out EUTube By Tim Ferguson, Silicon.com (July 2)

EUTube will carry "video content ranging from documentaries covering the EU's activities and history to interviews with European commissioners" - covers major issues such as climate, energy, immigration.

Google News Report

Revealing The Sources Of Google News by Greg Jarboe, Searchengineland (May 31)

Google News Report is a new service that pulls headlines from Google News and reranks them. Henk van Ess in Netherlands has figured out the names of 1,256 or the 4,5000 news sources used by Google News in the US.

This posting also shows the top 25 sources for Google News of which three are non US: two from the UK and one from China.

NewsVine Relaunched

Newsvine, where every one can write editorials on news stories about issues they care about, has relaunched with a new front page and display.

As it says in a small box - "Updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment."

Now you can customize the front page to have what you want, where you want it. Watch as the new stories come up minute by minute. Lots of photos. And there are hundreds of groups - find one that you can talk to.

It's busy, it's alive, it's interesting - wish I had more time.

Sort By Date - Google News

Google News Adds New Sorting Option, Search ENgine Roundtable (May 7)

You can sort by date with or without the duplicates at Google News.

Newspapers Under Pressure

Murdoch's Dow Jones offer chills newsrooms by John Ibbitson, ReportonBusiness Globe and Mail (May 4)

The Bancroft family rejected Rupert Murdoch's offer to buy the venerable Wall Street Journal, but the very act of the News Corp proprietor also owning the esteemed and high business brow sent shivers through many. Ibbitson's article comments on today's unfavourable environment for newspapers.

"Increasingly, people turn to news websites that scalp from newspapers, or to the peer-to-peer opinions and reports found on blogs or YouTube. Bloggers and their ilk are generally not trained in journalism or subjected to the rigours of editing. The bloggers and their readers don't seem to care. Between 2000 and 2005, according to a report by the investment bank Citigroup, 18 per cent of all American households with broadband Internet access cancelled their newspaper subscriptions."

The pressure is coming from shareholders and "impatient children" to get more money even if that means selling. The telling line - "But the pressure to improve performance [meaning financial return] at the expense of product is inexorable."

I suggest that this sums up perfectly an attitude that prevades nearly all enterprise today - business, schools, government - more money at the expense of product - and where do you think that will lead?

Online News and Media Industry

A Perfect Storm Hitting News and Media by Greg Jarboe, Searchday (May 1)

"The news and media industry is being hit by a perfect storm that combines search engines like Google, portals like MSN, news aggregators like Yahoo News, online video Web sites like YouTube, celebrity gossip blogs like Perez Hilton, local news sites like Topix, and social news sites like Digg."

Google News and Web merged

Google News Results Now Live In Web Search Results, by Chris Sherman, Searchengineland (Apr 24)

Sherman has an example, but this doesn't show up in Toronto yet.

Yahoo News vs MSNBC

MSNBC Jockeys for Attention Online, Emily Steele, Wall Street Journal (Apr 2) [Free]

MSNBC and Yahoo compete in online news. Yahoo News has a huge lead with 36.2 million visitors a month, and MSNBC with 25.8. [Total is about 100 million online news reader a month.] Google News is not even on the comScore chart.

In MSNBC takes on Yahoo News, Greg Jarboe at SEW Blog says that Google News has 10,000 sources and Yahoo News only 7,000.

Since then Yahoo has added more -- Yahoo expands ad deal with newspaper partners , IT World (Apr 16)

"In a win for its online advertising strategy, Yahoo Inc. Monday extended a deal that makes it the exclusive online distribution site for U.S. newspapers from a consortium of 12 newspaper companies, enabling the Web portal and search vendor to share and earn online advertising revenue with them." McClatchy Co joins a consortium of Calkins Media Inc., Media General Inc., Morris Communications Co. LLC, Paddock Publications Inc., Belo, Cox Newspapers Inc., Hearst Newspapers, Journal Register Co., Lee Enterprises Inc., MediaNews Group, and The E.W. Scripps Co.

News Experiments

The Changing Landscape of News by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 2)

Sees more of a hybrid of print and online in newspaper publishing - and more and different distribution arrangements. Into this mix there is also blog content from staff and from readers.

One experiment - "he McClatchy Co., the third largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., has announced it will provide international news for the Yahoo! News platform. The project, to be called Trusted Voices, will offer in-depth perspectives and coverage from McClatchy foreign correspondents based in select regions, including Iraq, the Middle East, China, and Latin America. The coverage will include traditional news stories from McClatchy newspapers and will further tap the regional expertise of the correspondents through exclusive blog reports designed to guide readers in understanding the news from these regions. It is scheduled to launch early in 2Q 2007."

Topix switches to citizen jounalism

Topix Transforms Into Community Generated Local News Site by Greg Sterling, Searchengineland (Apr 2)

Topix.com, noted for being able to aggregate news by local area and by topic is changing its model.

"The site, which has been a "top 25" news destination, is now effectively flipping its model and going from being a news aggregator with comments and community at the margins to a community generated local news site with wire service feeds. It effectively creates a news blog for every zip in the United States. And Topix seeks human writers to help create and edit those local news pages."

Risky business.

Journalism use of Audio slideshows

The Best of Multimedia Photojournalism: The Era of the Ear by Keith Jenkins, Poynter Online (Mar 30)

"Listen to Keith Jenkins and the judges of the Best of Photojournalism's Best of the Web contest discuss audio slideshows, the ethics of using certain kinds of audio and the future of online video."

Join Congoo News Circles

Congoo News Circles Adds the Glue by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 26)

"Congoo offers compelling premium content along with aggregated content from around the Web. It recently introduced Congoo News (http://news.congoo.com), which provides categorized access to more than 25,000 free news sources and 300 premium sources. With the addition of the just-announced News Circles feature, Congoo now also offers a compelling social networking and communication platform that adds the "glue" to the service."

Hane gives us a very big tip -- "Here's a tip I discovered in an unofficial blog about Google: Most of the content from Google News Archives (http://news.google.com) requires subscriptions. A good way to get free access to some of the archives is to install the Congoo toolbar."

The Congoo News Circle is really a breeze to set up. Here's mind for now http://www.congoo.com/websearchguide

Google News Algorithm

NewsKnife has detected a significant change at Google News in sources that show up in the top 50 results. This could be a change in Google News' algorithm or just a fluke. Howerver, whereas top listings were from sources like Houston Chronicle, International Herald Tribune, or Fox News, in the last few months Newsknife has seen many more from Euronews.net, Newsweek, and Playfuls.com (which isn't a news site).

See Google News algorithm watch - update as at March 1, 2007

Google News GEO Search

Why Are Google News Searches Not Geo Specific? Search Engine Roundtable (Mar 2)

How tailored is Google News? The front page of Google News Canada will be different from one for the UK - different selection of stories and, to some degree, sources. There is overlap.

To get articles from publishers in a particular country, the article recommends using location -- location:uk. For Canada, use location:canada. Location:ca will pick up articles from California.

Europe Pulling Out of News Aggregators

Belgian court rules against Google News by James Niccolai, IDG News Service, Paris Bureau, IDG News Service 2/13/07

Bad news for Google and other aggregating news service, and bad news for searchers. A Belgian court ruled that Google Inc "violated the copyright of Belgian newspaper publishers when it posted extracts from their stories on its Google News Web site"

Google has had to "... delay its launch of Google News in Denmark after newspapers there demanded a system that would allow them to "opt in" to Google's service, rather than having their content trawled automatically. And a Norwegian media group has objected to the way that Google reuses their news photographs."

Microsoft and Yahoo News are also affected. "Copiepresse [represents Belgian newspapers] will now go back to MSN and Yahoo and apply renewed pressure on them to remove all of its members content ..."

News Aggregators

Surfing through filters by Ivor Tossell, Globe and Mail (Jan 26)

Ivor Tossell recommends people use a "good aggregator -- a site that pulls headlines from other sites, and matches your tastes" to be in the know about what's new and hip.

+ Boing Boing - "Boing Boing offers up a trail mix of technology culture and whimsy: retro art, digital copyright issues, ear-wax removal techniques, electronic voting problems, unicorn pictures." Cory Doctorow from Toronto but now in the US writes for Boing Boing and "keeps the site stocked with a supply of Canadian content."

+ MetaFilter - "where community members hunt for "the best of the Web," and usually turn up nothing of the sort. It is, however, one of the most entertaining ways of staying on top of what's out there." Thanks to this site, I discovered the InsideTheCBC, the official CBC blog, where CBC Radio fans responded to CBC's new radio schedule. [CBC has a 5 year history of replacing intelligent programming on CBC Radio with dumbed down content.]

+ Digg - members submit stories they like and vote on others - "If it's not lowbrow, it tends toward the lightweight (not that I didn't enjoy the item on the "cat-washing machine"). "

+ Popurls - "Popurls, a faintly insane site that takes all of the headlines from all of the Internet's top news aggregators, and aggregates them." There are 15 major sources with 20 headlines each - plus photos - making for a very full page of US-centric news. Still where else would you see that Rush Limbaugh has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Wikio Media

News Search + Personalization + Social Media = Wikio, Chris Sherman, Search engine land (Jan 29)

About Wikio , a news aggregator that picks up online news and blog entries. People can tag, personalize, and vote.

"Wikio is a relatively new startup that blends articles from major news web sites and blogs with commentary and tags from Wikio users. It also offers powerful search and customization options that go beyond what you find at most other "media harvesting" sites on the web."

Findory.com Fading Away

Greg Linden Mothballs Findory, Searchengineland (Jan 15)

I was wondering why my daily email from Findory.com of news headlines was more and more off-topic. According to this entry, Greg Linden, the creator has mothballed it - Findory Rides into the Sunset. This was a personalized news service that sort-of learned from what you like. But suddenly it stopped learning or started to forget.

From Linden's post -- "Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had."

Guess I'll unsubscribe. Pity.

Press Releases

MSN's Live Search News giveth and AOL News taketh away, SEW Blog (Jan 4)

"According to a report from Outsell, press releases have become the top news source of knowledge workers. Outsell called this an “eye-popping shift in most-used information types.”"

Live Search just added press releases to its News, and AOL removed them.

Collaborative Online News

Digg Burrows Down a New Path "The popular news-aggregator site has launched a redesign to counter criticisms of its turn away from hard news. Will the changes help?" by Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek.com (Dec 19)

Digg, the online news community, has 700,000 online. Is this enough to create "wisdom of crowds"? Readers were complaining that the news being posted was getting too weird and foolish. Digg has adopted a redesign.

"On Dec. 18, Digg launched an extensive redesign of the homepage that could address some of its core users' concerns. The site is planning more redesigns in 2007 to focus on personalizing the Digg experience. Digg also plans to expand into different kinds of content aside from news. Adelson, Digg's CEO, says the critics are in the minority. "There are always squeaky wheels," says Adelson, adding that Digg users have public profiles and want to develop reputations for digging quality content. "Most feel their experience has improved based on the increased numbers.""

But these changes sound as if they will move Digg away from hard news and more towards entertainment.

People looking for news might turn to Techmeme and Tailrank.

"As Digg embraces more entertainment content, other upstarts are poised to steal its news audience. Techmeme and Tailrank, for example, use formulas that give preference to the stories most blogged about in order to highlight the news most likely to be fresh and interesting. "

Techmeme monitors 1,000 sources for tech news. Tailrank picks up hard news by monitoring 160,000 blogs every half hour.

Newsvine was not mentioned in this article. But this community news site does have hard news and opinion.

From their about page -- "At Newsvine, you can read stories from established media organizations like the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as individual contributors from all around the world. Placement of stories is determined by a multitude of factors including freshness, popularity, and reputation. Contribution is open to all, and editorial judgement is in the hands of the community."

Yahoo News Feed

Turning a Yahoo News Search into a Real-Time News Ticker, ResourceShelf (Nov 24) -- instructions on how to set up a real-time news feed, with images, from Yahoo News.

Newspapers Partner with Yahoo News

176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo, By MIGUEL HELFT and STEVE LOHR, New York Times (Nov 20)

"A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology, another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat.

In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo. "

Google News in Copyright Hot Water

Google News in trouble - again "Google gets into trouble with its new Scandinavian versions of Google News.:, Pandia News (Nov 19) - Google News picks up photos as well as text - and it probably shouldn't do so without permission.

"The Norwegian association for media companies, Mediebedriftenes Landsforening, argues that Google News Norway cannot make use of photographs without a proper agreement."

Bates reviews Google News Archive

Google as News Archivist, Mary Ellen Bates, (Nov 2006) -- critiques the Google's News Archive - it has some weaknesses. The claim to have 200 years is a stretch. Date clusters may not include all the years; all sources may not be shown.

Bates cites an instance where she was able to view an article for free through Google News Archive and it would have cost money at the publisher's site. But the reverse can happen too where the article might be free or cheaper somewhere else.

Bottom line: "If you want truly historical information, News Archive is a fine place to start -- and often provides an interesting glimpse into what life was like 100 years ago -- but don't expect it to be comprehensive."

Money for Topix.net

Search Briefs: More $$$ For Topix.net; Case Sensitive Searching Too!, ResourceShelf (Nov 6)

Topix.net will be receiving $15 million funding boost. Gary Price lists the reasons this makes him happy. Topix.net is the favourite news search engine for the Resourceshelf team.

News Aggregators

Can news sites keep the wanderers? Commentary: Inform creates new news rivals by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Nov 2)

Online news outlets have competitors everywhere. Now Answers.com is adding a news component.

"In the case of Answers, type in "Brad Pitt" and you'll see that there is a box with links to news articles about Pitt. Answers doesn't get paid for directing readers to those news outlets. But notice that there is a link to "other news, video and blogs." That link takes a reader to an Answers page with links to more news, blogs and videos related to Pitt. Essentially, that's a new page for Answers to put an ad on."

Social networks will likely become a place for people to get their news. Facebook is already testing this.

Inform , a news aggregator that will deliver news anywhere, could benefit.

Popular aggregators are Yahoo News (#1), Google News (#11), Topix.net (#22) but MSNBC dropped from #1 to #2, and CNN also slipped.

"Nearly 4% of people who visit news sites go directly to Google immediately upon leaving a news site ... Now, those consuming news may be done with their news fix and are off to search for something entirely non-related. But it could also be that they're leaving a news site to search for more information about a particular news topic."

Main message -- "While Inform can probably help news sites keep their readership by providing additional information that's easily accessible, Inform can also strengthen smaller rival publishers, like Answers, and maybe social networks in the future, or even the blogosphere. I'd imagine that a small one-to-two man publishing team can tap into Inform's aggregated news content and provide their own news source without ever hiring a writer."

Tips for Google News Archive

Google News Archive Search -An index to articles that reaches back as far as 200 years., By Jonathan Dube. Poynter Online (Oct 19) Has tips on using Google News Archive including -- "And here's a trick: You can use the Advanced Search to search for articles listed as "no price." That doesn't always mean they're free -- sometimes Google just isn't aware of the price -- but sometimes they are. You can also use the Advanced Search to search within specific dates."

Google News Archive

Traditional Information Industry Opens Premium Content to Google News Archive by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Sep 18)

Full review of Google's new News Archive search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch)

Also Who? What? How Much?: Google News Archive Premium Content Suppliers by Barbara Quint

"Three of the big five national newspapers have opened their archives to Google News Archive. And two of the three have left their backdoors open for dirt-cheap downloading. Which two? Read this NewsBreak and see. You’ll find out what traditional vendors are doing sleeping with the enemy, too."

Onscreen Reading

Old Gray Lady Dons New Clothes by Jeff Koyen, Wired (Sep 13)

The Times Reader, an online screen reader to be used by the New York Times, could make reading news on a screen like using a newspaper. But will it partly depend on the screen?

"... The New York Times has developed a stand-alone digital reader that's specifically modeled on ... the printed newspaper." ... "Stories are presented clearly and with priority; artwork aids both design and context. Section heads are customizable, and clicking on them feels as natural as thumbing through the paper on the subway."

Google News with Archives

Google expands online news index by Michael Liedtke, AP via Yahoo News (Sept 6)

"Google Inc. is expanding its online news index to include stories published years ago, continuing the Internet search leader's recent efforts to create new sales channels for long-established media while it strives to make its own Web site even more useful."

Google News

+ will show excerpts on articles older than 30 days and link to the source for the full article. Users might then have to pay the sources to view the article in full.

+ will have old articles from many news sources including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and The Washington Post.

+ some new content from LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam.

Also Google opens up 200 years of news, BBC News

+ some content from 200 years ago

+ includes the Guardian in the UK

+ "People using the search are shown results from both free and subscription-based news outlets."

Topix.net for news search

Topix.net Continues to Grow, New Services and Archives ResourceShelf (Aug 9) - review of Topix.net and recent changes. Topix now crawls 50,000 sources.

Yahoo News Tops

Yahoo News Gains Search Engine News Market Share, SEW Blog (Aug 8) -- According to Comscore , in June 2006 Yahoo News received 33% of news traffic, followed by MSNBC, and AOL. Google News didn't make it to the top 10.

Reading news online

Print Not Dead Yet: Shift to Getting News Online Has Slowed , AP via E&P (July 30)

"Almost three in 10 adults, or 31 percent, regularly log in for news, a rate roughly the same as two years ago, according to the survey released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. People in their 40s were more likely to go online for news than the younger adults."

Digg news the social content way

Digging into the News by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 28)

"Social news site Digg has expanded from technology news into broad-based coverage of many popular topics, with stories ranked according to their popularity among Digg users."

Customization at Digg

Digg Expands into General News Content and Features, EContent (June 30)

"digg, Inc., a web community that enables an internet audience to prioritize news and content, has announced the rollout of new features and functionality for the digg.com website, including the ability for users to prioritize content in new subject areas, such as World and Business, Entertainment, Science, and Gaming. The company also announced the ability for users to customize their views based on specific areas of interest, and the application of the digg concept to videos. A public Beta of the new digg site is now available."

Best Ways to Get News

Web News Wranglers - "So much news on the Web, so little time to read it all. These tools and sites can help make you an incredibly well-informed person--in a hurry." - by Ryan Singel, PC World (June 23)

"What is the best news-management approach for you? We'll examine a number of sites, Web apps, and programs that can help you sort through the best news and commentary on the Net."

Ez2News New

ez2News - an alternative news search engine and portal, Pandia (June 12)

Reviews Ez2News , relative to Ez2find. It has 12,500 news sites and several news categories. However, there is no clear reason why one would use this over some of the main sources that turn up such as BBC or Google News.

Make Your Own Mashups

Where 2.0: New Sites Put Your Life on the Map - "Web sites let you personalize maps to share the times and places of your life." Dennis O'Reilly, PC World (June 14)

Five personal mapping sites - Wayfaring.com, Platial.com, 43places.com, Plazes.com, and Flagr.com. O'Reilly thinks that Platial , which dubs itself "The People's Atlas", has the most stickiness. It's easy to browse and international in scope.

Bharat of Google News

Google News inventor defends aggregator site, by Martin Stabe, Online Press Gazette (June 1)

Profiles Krishna Bharat, inventor of Google News.

""Google News makes it possible — makes it trivial, actually — to read news from multiple points of view on any given issue, and when I see that happening, I feel that we have succeeded," he says."

Has several interesting bits on how Google News works. It is now searching about 10,000 sites (not 4,500) and in all the languages supported by Google News. There is often controversy over what Google News includes or excludes. That it has press releases does not please everyone.

Blinkx gets news clips from Sky News

Sky News and blinkx Partner to Search and Deliver News on the Web, PRNewswire via Marketwatch (May 30)

"blinkx, the smartest thing on the Web, today announced a partnership with Sky News, Europe's first 24-hour news channel. Under the agreement, Sky News will provide blinkx index with hundreds of news clips each week, providing a broad and unique addition to the growing list of news sources at www.blinkx.tv."

Offline Newspapers

How newspapers can face online rivals -- Commentary: Is it too late to cooperate? by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (May 23)

Reports on a panel held at the Interactive Media Conference - 5-year forecast: See the Future Today: offline newspapers are in grave danger. Advertising dollars for newspapers are falling fast as local ads move to the web.

+ "In 1949, newspapers accounted for 37% of the advertising market in the U.S., according to Atwood. Today, they account for 17% to 18%."

+ "newspapers still account for 35.8% of the online local ad marketplace, which he estimates to have been $2.4 billion in 2005." - but this is what is at risk.

Yahoo News is the top online news property. Google News is 11 with 9.7 million unique visitors in APril 2006. Knight Ridder Digital is about the same with 10.6 million.

Personalizing Online News

The Mixed Blessing of 'Personalized News' by David S. Hirschman , Editor and Publisher (May 12)

"NYTimes.com is ready to launch a new function allowing readers to personalize their news habits -- on the advice of Times writers and editors. But maybe I'd rather have my news filtered by a computer."

Here's the nub -- "In allowing readers to customize their own pages, the paper is essentially deconstructing the importance of editors' choices as expressed in the print paper (in the way an editor confers importance on an issue by putting one story on Page One, and another deep in a corner of the Metro section); it's saying that readers can decide for themselves what they want to see first in the paper, and lets them bury stories they presume they would not find interesting. "

Google News Suggest

Google News With A Suggestive Twist , ResearchBuzz (Apr 29) -- Google Suggest for Google News - start to type and Google News offers possibilities. Could save time. Try it at http://news.google.com/news?complete=1

New Software for Reading News Online

New way to get the news - Microsoft software can replicate your newspaper - By TODD BISHOP, Seattle PI (Apr 29)

"Speaking in Seattle to a convention of the nation's newspaper editors, the Microsoft Corp. chairman brought out executives from The New York Times to demonstrate prototype software that displays text and images on the computer screen in much the same way as in the paper."

But you still need a computer and a connection to read the newspaper.

RocketNews Has Sound and Video

RocketNews now indexes sound and video by Lars Våge, Internetbrus in Pandia Search (Apr 3) -- Very positive review of RocketNews -- "RocketNews is among the best independent news search services, along with NewsNow and Topix.net. Now they index sound and video in addition to news and blogs."

Special Collections at NewsPaperArchive

Specialized collections from the NewspaperARCHIVE, Pandia Search (Apr 5)

"The NewspaperARCHIVE contains 35 million pages of historic newspapers dating from 1753-2006 online. In the past month it has launched a series of free specialized collections pulled from the archive of digital newspaper images."

Selections seem to be mainly (entirely?) from newspapers in the United States.

NT Times on the Web

'NY Times' on the Web Unveils New Look, Features, Editor and Publisher (April 2)

"The New York Times on the Web unveiled a fresh new look on Sunday, with new features. Most notably, besides a more pleasing design, there are now many more chances to see what fellow readers are up to. "

Newspapers Online

Newspaper Sites Gain Audience by Enid Burns, CLickz (Apr 4) - Newspaper sites have seen many more visitors in the last year.

" In 2005, unique visitors to newspaper's online sites increased 21 percent. In the same time period, page views went up 43 percent. The report also found newspaper Web sites increased the total newspaper audience. Counted in the increase is a 14 percent rise in the 25 to 34 year-old demographic, and nine percent more readers in the 18 to 24 year-old age group."

WhatsUp MashUp

The world seems even smaller at WhatsUp . News headlines taken from RSS feeds popup in balloons from throbing spots around the world. This is quite a mashup of news and maps done using Flash. Jeroen Wijering, the creator, is a student at the University of Eindhoven. About What'sUp.

Yahoo Local News

Yahoo has launched a beta version of local news in the United States -- http://news.yahoo.com/local. Pick the state and city and read the news. News is collected from several sources which Yahoo lists in the upper right corner.

Personalized News

A Deeper Look At Personalized News Search Engines, SEW Blog (Mar 22) - points to a guide of personalized news sites by Mark Glaser. Only MyYahoo and NetVibes got A ratings.

Rocketnews picks up audio and video

Audio, Video News & Podcast Search Added to Rocketnews.com - Market Wire via Marketwatch (Mar 16)

Rocketnews has added audio/podcast and video search to its choices for searching news. Top stories are shown on each of the topical home pages. This makes it quite easy to pick out headlines for technology, arts and literature, health etc.

"The video and podcast content accessible on Rocketnews is aggregated from authoritative news outlets such as CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Reuters, and the BBC, along with thousands of online audio news sources and podcasts. Visitors to the Rocketnews portal can now search for news, blog, audio, video and podcast content. The Company has also created a simple taxonomy that gives users the ability to narrow their searches to content from business, technology, health, sports and entertainment sources. Rocketinfo will continue to aggressively grow its audio, video and podcast databases."

Newzinger tags news

If you like tags and news you'll like Newzingo. This picks out tags (keywords) from news stories at Google News and shows them in a "tag cloud". The size of the word indicates the number of stories related to the word.

Newzingo is available for the regional versions of Google News including Canada .

This is something you could also add to your personalized Google homepage.

I'm not enamoured with tags, especially single word tags derived from text analysis. Context is lost and often the tag appears based on frequency rather than aboutness. The day I looked at Newzinger for Google Canada News, the tag handover was larger than all others. To me 'handover' suggests that there has been a major change in government in some country, but in this case it was a sports story.

Where People Get Their News

Outsell, Inc. Surveys 2,800 Consumers on News Habits; Analysts Find Newspaper Readers Have Little Loyalty When They Go Online, Preferring Non-Newspaper Sites, Business Wire (Feb 28)

"Health, Wealth and Travel Websites Rapidly Replacing Print as Americans Look for Information And Deals"

"Seventy-one percent of respondents say they rely on network, cable and satellite TV as primary or secondary sources of national news. Thirty-three percent choose their local newspapers first or second to bone up on national events, followed closely by the 28 percent who access sites like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (collectively known as GYM) and AOL News, which are aggregating national news articles from multiple major dailies and wire services. Only 11 percent of consumers are relying regularly on their own daily newspapers' Websites. Outsell's report shows a generational chasm between the older demographics, who prefer the now-dominant TV and newspapers, and the younger, who prefer online access for their news and information."

Bookmark the NewsSearch Portal

The NewsSearch Portal (http://www.nieuwsbronnen.com/newssearchportal/) is an excellent all-in-one international news search page with web tools for news search, alerts, video, radio, news photos, podcasts, RSS feeds. There is also a section for desktop software for news searching. Wim Wylin in Belgium is the creator and keeper of this magnificent page. It likely went online in 2005.

Success of Yahoo News

Why old media dreads Yahoo News, by Jon Friedman, Media Web, Marketwatch

Yahoo News, through the ideas of its general manager, Neil Budde, has become possibly the most popular of online news sites.

"The key has been Yahoo's ability to capitalize on the revolutionary ways that people now "consume news" (to borrow one of Budde's favorite geek-speak phrases).

Once, things were so simple in the ways that Americans obtained their news. We read the morning paper over breakfast and then watched Walter Cronkite during dinner. Today, of course, people get their news in bits and pieces (if not bits and bytes) throughout the workday, as they check their email and do searches. "

And for this market, Yahoo News offers variety, entertainment, and currency.

"In the past year, Yahoo News has redesigned its site, struck video deals with CNN and ABC News and added such well-liked blogs as Huffington Post and Gawker. Yahoo even forged an agreement with NASA to provide coverage of the Space Shuttle Discovery launch."

RocketNews Update

Expanded RocketNews.com Portal Re-Launched, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Feb 9)

Claims that "The updated look and feel of the Rocketnews.com portal is easier to read and navigate. The portal provides the ability to browse and easily find targeted current news or weblog content on any topic. Users can also create their own RSS newsfeeds for use in the Rocket RSS reader or any of the many other RSS readers available online. Several other exciting new tools and services will be introduced in the coming months."

RocketNews picks up 16,000 news sources and 70,000 RSS and weblog sources.

Will we read citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism slow to catch fire - Commentary: Is old media relevant? Plus, Google multiples - By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch (Jan 30) [Subscription]

Top three news sites are Yahoo, AOL and Internet Broadcasting (does web sites for television stations), and Google News is not far behind. So far most revenue is through advertising. But Francisco sees signs of Google and Yahoo trying to change the formula for web news. "Google is trying to do so by enabling people to post their videos on its Google Video Store. Yahoo is doing so by incorporating blogs in its news searches and cultivating its own star."

Will people's news work? So far it hasn't and she cites three news sites that aren't doing well - Pajamasmedia.com, Backfence.com, and Buzzmachine.com.

I can't imagine anyone wanting to rely solely on reports and analysis done by volunteer and amateur journalists for anything other than supplementing formal news reporting with some on-the-scene accounts of a disaster. Who has the time? However, from time to time citizen journalism may expose stories that the mainstream media shut out because of political or business interests.

Google News

Beyond Beta: Google News Graduates by Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Jan 25)

Google News, noted for the way it groups news stories, is not the leading news aggregator it once was: Yahoo News and AOL News have many more users. But Google News is now out of beta and has added some personalized search features.

More in Bye Bye Beta: Google News is a Beta No More, Gary Price, SEW Blog.

Choice in Newsreaders

The Emergence of News 2.0 at Mashable (Jan 24) - News 2.0 is a play on the Web 2.0 - news services with community features such as citizen journalism, user ratings and sharing etc. Sixteen news services are listed in this post and there is more about features from Tin Finger, one of the contestants.

BBC News Archives

BBC to post past reports online for free , Globe Technology (Jan 5) -- BBC will make their television reports on major events in the last century available online for free, but at this time access is restricted to people using a computer in the UK.

"Footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, protests in Tiananmen Square and the famous 1984 dispatch detailing famine in Ethiopia, which prompted the Live Aid charity concerts, are included in a trial project being tested on the British Broadcasting Corp.'s website."

Washington Post Mashup Center

washingtonpost.com Teams Up with Readers for Remix by Tara Calishain, Newsbreaks (Dec 12)

"The Washington Post Co. has launched a new site called Post Remix, described as “the Post’s official mashup center.” Available at http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/post_remix, Post Remix spotlights reader creativity with both washingtonpost.com RSS feeds and other streams of content The Post is making available. "

Inform.com for News

Inform Adds Audio, Video, RSS and Syndication

Several major new features have been announced for the news aggregator, Inform.com.

From release:

"Video & Audio – Inform has added video and audio content alongside traditional news and blogs.

Updated Top Channels Page – Inform has greatly expanded and improved our Top Channels page to showcase more of our powerful directory of news topics.

One-Click Access to More Top Stories Channels – We have installed drop-down menus by topic under our Top Stories tab, with additional news categories. Now you can access the latest Baseball news, for example, with one click from our Front Page.

RSS – You can now create an RSS feed on any person, place, organization, product, topic or combination thereof. The incredibly precise feed can be read through any RSS reader and will include news, audio, video and blogs. Create an RSS URL from any of your Inform channels or any Discovery Path query.

News Widget – Publishers of any website or blog can now add news to their offerings on any person, place, organization, product, topic or combination thereof. Create a Web Widget from any of your Inform channels or any Discovery Path query.

Some of the feedback we addressed in this release includes:

Pop-up On Entry – Inform has eliminated the splash page and pop-up window previously required to visit our website.

Firefox Usability – We have made the mouse scroll wheel compatible with Inform, and restored browser controls to news article windows viewed with Firefox. We continue to be firmly committed to supporting the Firefox browser.

Usability Improvements – We've also made a number of other smaller changes to the site to help make Inform easier to use. For example, we've redesigned our Add a Channel page to try to make the process of creating channels on Inform a little easier. "

Hear report by Frank Barnako at Marketwatch -- Audio

People's News Site Coming

Craigslist plans to make news by Frank Barnako, Marketwatch (Nov 23)

Craig Newmark, the creator of Craigslist , the wildly popular online service for classifieds, will be taking on news stories next where the readers are the editors.

"Newmark said his news project will involve Web technology to let readers decide which news stories are the most important. "

Online Journalism Awards

NYTimes.com Wins Big at ONA Awards Editor and Publisher (Oct 29)

"The New York Times on the Web won three Online Journalism Awards and surprising upstart New West took home two at the Online News Association's 6th annual convention Saturday at New York City's Hilton Hotel."

Article has the list of awards and winners.

WSJ Free Nov 7 -12

Dow Jones Revives Free Online Access Campaign DM News (Oct 27)

"Dow Jones & Co. will offer free access to The Wall Street Journal Online for six days next month after a similar exercise last year generated 10,000 new paid subscriptions to the news site.

The Nov. 7-12 Open House campaign will let non-subscribers read the news and features on the site at www.wsj.com without registering. "

Google Customized News

Google News Canada can be customized somewhat for layout and sections. As well you can create a custom section based on your keywords. Maximum is 20 sections. Customization is for your computer only since it runs on cookies but you can "share your edition" with others by sending a link - or send yourself one in order to set up on a second computer. See the Google News Customized News FAQ

Here is my customized Google News Canada page.

I just wish I could remove Google's pick of the two top stories.

Inform is Good

Inform.com Is Newest News/Blog Aggregator by Denise Dayton, Newsbreaks (Oct 24) Reviews in detail Inform.com, the impressive new tool for reading news and blogs.

"There are already a number of news aggregators out there, but Inform offers several things that it says are new. The system’s differentiating technology uses a series of information structuring techniques and natural-language interpretation to autocategorize and group news stories into thousands of categories. The text of stories is shredded to isolate the important elements of each. Once the elements have been identified, one can easily connect and read news on any person, place, organization, topic, industry, or product."

News Search Engines

Meet the News Search Engines by Shari Thurow, SearchDay (Oct 18) - report on news search engines from a session at the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 8-11, 2005.

- Moreover - "12,000 handpicked, editorially-ranked online news sources from over 126 countries in 36 languages"
- Topix.net - "Topix.net differentiates its news information via categorization and zip-code level localization. News is available via its web site, partner feeds, RSS feeds, email alerts, and JavaScript iframe."
- Yahoo News - "... "Yahoo News is built on a combination of content that we host on Yahoo.""
- Google News - now has RSS and Atom output.

Inform - personal news centre

All the News That You Can Use. And More. by Bob Tedesch, New York Times (Oct 17) - News hounds will be interested in learning about Inform, a new news aggregator service. Inform identifies themes and relationships. As described - "But Inform goes further, scanning every news article from hundreds of well-known publications (and some blogs), then creating an index of important elements in the article. So as a user reads a WashingtonPost.com article about Sandra Day O'Connor, for example, Inform offers a short list of related stories about the justice and other people, places, organizations, topics, industries and products mentioned in the text." It will be supported by advertising and subscription fees for personalized files and access to archives.

Its competitor is Topix.net, which has strong connections to Gannet, Knight Ridder, and Tribune Company newspaper chains. "Inform.com says it believes the services it offers, like customized news displays and searches of postings from prominent blogs, give it a competitive advantage over Topix."

Inform is in beta. Entry page says that it works best with Internet Explorer 6.0.

Registration is free - can customize news channels, view specific news sources from Inform's collection, and flag articles to read later. Registrants are asked for country - United States, United Kingdom, or other - suggesting that Inform is geared mainly to the US and UK. I could not find any Canadian sources, not even the CBC. But I love the tool - the display, the ease of browsing, the connections to topics and names.

Yahoo News has Blogs

Yahoo Integrates Blog Results With News Search ResearchBuzz (Oct 11) - Yahoo has add blog results to its news search although you can also select News only. Talishain says that the "results at the moment are awful -- limited and old."

I doubt that blog results will ever be stunning unless Yahoo can be selective about which blogs and do something to improve relevance. Searchers can choose to search either news and blogs or news only - and once into the search there is no means of toggling blogs on or off. Blog results page also has images from Flickr - why? - this is "integration" taken too far.

Topix.net

Topix.net Gets Modular With Headlines by Pamela Parker, Clickz (Oct 5) Topix.net is offering news headlines to sites to be used as supplementary information on a topic. Topix.net also provides local and vertical news sections on Web sites such as Ask Jeeves, Info.com, America Online and CitySearch. It also operates a standalone Web site.

CNNMoney.com

Time Warner to Consolidate Financial Sites By Kevin Newcomb, Clickz, (September 13, 2005 )

CNNMoney.com to launch in January with "content from the Time Inc. magazines Money, Fortune, Fortune Small Business, and Business 2.0, as well as from cable news channel CNN."

LexisNexis on Katrina

Read stories for news sources worldwide about Katrina at no charge from LexisNexis. This is a vast resource and has some Canadian sources. Check http://www.lexisnexis.com/news/

Free Lexis-Nexis access to Katrina coverage Poynter Online (Sept 6)

Newsknife analyzes Google News

Newsknife rates news sites for quality. It has just added monthly rankings of top news sites based on its analysis of articles picked up in Google News.

Newsknife's current top news sites - Based on appearances at Google News (Sept 2)

Newsknife tallies the first source of a news item in Google News. In August, the top three were the Independent UK, Washington Post, and Guardian Unlimited UK. The preponderance of UK sources was because of their coverage of the bombings in London. Overall for the year, Google picks up Reuters as the first source most of the time.

Newsknife will be adding new ways of analyzing the date in the coming months.

AOL News Noticed

AOL News Joins the Big League of News Search Engines by Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Aug 25) AOL News is viewed by 16 million people, more than double Google's audience. Service has some featured searches.

To my eye, main sources are Reuters and AP. Press releases are abundant and collected into one section at the bottom of the page.

However, AOL News has nothing close to the variety of sources that Yahoo News and Google News have, nor the clustering or categorization capabilities, nor the alerts or RSS feeds. If looking for stories on the lumber trade dispute related to NAFTA, AOL News had only three stories from Aug 24 from Reuters and AP. Google had at least 12 from several sources, and Yahoo News, 18.

If AOL News has such a large audience it must be because of the AOL user community, not because it is better than other services.

RocketNews Viapoint Folders

Rocketinfo Partners with Viapoint Corporation to Provide News Search Adapter Press Release (Aug 24) - Rocketnews is partnering with Viapoint to use the Viapoint Smart Organizer for making "it easier to organize files, emails and news content by saving desktop and web content from searches into Viapoint virtual folders."

MSN Newsbot Source List

ResearchBuzz Tara Calishain discovered a source list for MSN Newsbot - http://newsbot.msnbc.msn.com/s/publishers.aspx. It has hundreds of sources listed including many Canadian online source - Globe and Mail, globetechnology, Toronto Blue Jays, Toronto Star, Torontoist, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Business Journal, Edmonton Journal - tending to pick up at least one newspaper from the provincial capitals and sometimes speciality sources.

Google News Feeds

Google Adds RSS Feeds EContent (Aug 9)

"Google has added a new feature to Google News that enables users to receive Google News results as RSS or Atom feeds in their feed reader of choice. "

Recaps the four ways users can get Google News feeds.

More information at Google News - About Feeds.

Blinkx.tv - more video

Blinkx to Index NYTimes, About.com, BusinessWeek Content MarketingVOX ARCHIVES (13 Jul 2005)

"Blinkx.tv today announced an agreement with BusinessWeek Online to index BusinessWeek content, including video and podcasts. Meanwhile, the New York Times Company announced that NYTimes.com and About.com would provide video content for indexing by blinkx's video search engine."

21% Web Users Read News Online First

One-fifth of Web users prefer online news - Nielsen Reuters via Yahoo News (June 16) -- "The first-time study from Nielsen//NetRatings found that 21 percent of those Web users now primarily use online versions of newspapers, while 72 percent still read print editions." -- This didn't include Yahoo News or Google News -- "In May, Yahoo News had an online audience of 23.8 million and the audience for Google News was 7.1 million, respectively up 3 percent and 4 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen//NetRatings."

Topix.net comes to Canada

Just in Time for Canada Day, Topix.net Launches Canadian News Canadian Newswire (Jun 29)

Good news for Canadians - " Topix.net Expands News Aggregation Technology Outside the U.S. to Include Local News for 4,200 Canadian Cities and Towns"

"A new Canadian news page (http://topix.net/ca) uses Topix.net's NewsRank(TM) technology to create an up-to-the-minute roll-up of worldwide news aimed at Canadian users, highlighting the people, companies and events central to Canadian interests.

Local Canadian news channels on Topix.net (http://www.topix.net/ca/list)
will provide users with access to news and information about where they live, work or travel from over 500 Canadian sources, and over 10,000 sources overall. Topix.net's unique technology allows the site to target news headlines down to the postal code level for over 4,200 local Canadian communities."

Take it for a spin. The Canadian news is about Canada. There are more Canadian news sources on the front page than I have ever seen anywhere: Canada.com, Canadian Newswire, Brampton Guardian, CTV.ca, MyKawartha.com, even Pulse 24. But there are also articles from non-Canadian sources because they mention Canada in some way. Travel.independent.co.uk ran a story on top 10 drives with one of those drives in Alberta.

Note the topics listed for each result - you'll see Canadian place names.

You can search on postal code to get stories for that region. M6S3E5 pulls up Toronto just as it ought to.

Also search on city. Owen Sound had 27 results, and Medicine Hat (because of the flooding) 76.

There don't seem to be any topics that are specific to Canada. There is a list of topics in the sidebar where Canada is listed under World Main.

Advanced Search is the US form (zip code rather than postal code) but you can enter Canadian postal codes and city names. Can limit to source too if you know it. Globe and Mail is recognized as is The Toronto Star. You can take a shortcut by just entering -- ontario source:"toronto star"

Newsiness Metasearch

NEWSiness.com will show seach results from Yahoo News and Google News. That's it - no extra features. However, the home page for NEWSiness has a menubar with links for many major news providers: CBS, CNN, ABC, Business Week, and in the international line, BBC and Agence France Presse - no CBC. Could be a useful meta-search tool for news sources.

[Mentioned in Researchbuzz.com]

EPpy Awards 2005

2005 EPpy Award Winners Announced (June 9)

The 10th annual EPpy Awards were presented at the Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in New Orleans, June 7 - 9. The EPpy Awards recognize the design and content of internet sites affiliated to members of the media industry - newspapers, radio, magazines, and television. Contest is described at the EPpy Awards site.

CBC.ca won in the category for Best Overall Network or Syndicated Radio-Affiliated Internet Service.

New York Times was best for Newspaper-Affiliated Internet Service over 1 million with Boston.com and Washington Post as runners up.

MSNBC was Best Overall Network TV/Cable-Affiliated Internet Service.

Slate Magazine was Best Internet News Service over 1 million and LJWorld.com the best for under 1 million.

Slate Magazine also won Best Internet Entertainment Service over 1 million. This is a magazine to watch.

Design is evaluated. WashingtonPost won Best Overall Design of an Internet Service over 1 million, with AZcentral.com, and, one of my favourites, the Seattle Times as finalists.

For use of rich media, the best was Svek's Instant Replay where Steve Svekis does game talk about the Dophins, football team in Florida. But Globe and Mail was a finalist (doesn't say for what although there are a few short videos and slide shows sprinkled about) as was NY Times Multimedia which is rich with slide shows, video and audio..

For business service over 1 million, Marketwatch received best and Bloomberg and Forbes were finalists.

Awards for previous years are listed at the EPpy Awards page.

NYT TimesSelect

New York Times Content Eases Toward Paid Subscription by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (May 23) New York Times will be introducing TimeSelect, a for-fee service for access to columnists in The Times and the International Herald Tribune and NYT archives. Price is $49.95 US /year.

"More exclusive content for TimesSelect subscribers includes some unique multimedia features, such as audio and photo essays, video, and podcasts. Advance delivery of articles from the Real Estate, New York Times Magazine, Travel, and Sunday Arts comes to subscribers in the “Ahead of The Times” feature. "

Also press release - The New York Times Announces TimesSelect - New Online Offering to Launch in September

Google News Patent Scary

Google News plans threaten indy sites - posting to Journalism.co.uk (May 11)

"New Scientist last week reported that Google has applied for a patent for a new version of Google News. The current news tool lists search results by date and relevance, but the new system would be built around a database of news sources with 'credibility' scores calculated on story length, volume of web traffic and number of reporters and international bureaus. Scores will then be used to rank the search results from individual news organisations."

Such a rating system would hurt the small and independent news service.

RocketNews Annual Report

Rocketinfo Inc. Outlines Corporate Strategy for 2005 in Business Wire (May 3) via Marketwatch [requires registration]

RocketNews reports on its successes in this press release as part of its annual review. The release provides a useful summary account of features and content of their news products.

+ advertising in RocketInfo through Kanoodle
+ better "content scraping and indexing technology"
+ learning system for tailoring news
+ the free "RocketNews portal now retains search history and allows full personalization and allows users to obtain current news from over 100,000 business news content sources (including 16,000+ global information sources and 80,000+ RSS/Atom news feeds and Weblog Sources)."
+ "over 37,000 registered users now use our RSS products to create personalized search based news feeds"
+ "database includes all of the world's leading news outlets including Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, the New York Times, BBC as well as content from specialized content providers such as trade journals, industry portals, government filings, specialty magazines and the world's most popular and dynamic weblogs."
+ free Rocket Desktop Search tool - create and save searches to run on last week or month.
+ planning an alerting service.

Findory - New Look

Findory, the personalized news service with articles from news and blog sources, has undergone a redesign. Statistics about your use of Findory are in the top bar to the right. A right panel lists favourites and recent sources.

Meantime the number of Findory users has been growing exponentially. See Findory Announces Exponential Growth , PR Newswire (Apr 26)

Yahoo News - New Version

Yahoo Changes News Site, Adds Features - Reuters via Yahoo News (Apr 27)

"The new version of Yahoo News aims for a "cleaner" and more organized delivery of headlines and news content, Yahoo said.

The redesigned site also includes Yahoo's YQ search technology that enables users to pull up search results related to key phrases or names in stories -- without leaving the page."

Growth of Personal Media

Big media ain't going anywhere - By Molly Wood, CNET.com (Apr 14) -- Personal media is surging - blogs, podcasts, videocasts, and the traditional media are taking up some of the same tools. New York Times bought About.com, CNET is starting its own podcasts. But personal media won't take over traditional, if for no other reason than people don't have the staying power of organizations. Many interesting bits in this article about the extent of personal media.

"People-powered information is surging, from blogs to podcasts to videocasts to open-source browsers with a million user-created plug-ins to open-access academic journals. "

"Meanwhile, a group called the Participatory Culture Foundation announced this week, a "new platform for Internet television and video." They're building a free, open-source desktop TV application wherein you subscribe to "channels" via RSS and own your own broadcasting by uploading video for free, whenever you want."

Also mentions the video GoogleZon -- "portrays the takeover of traditional media by "participatory journalism," consumer-edited information, and EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct". -- Fascinating.

RocketInfo Desktop

Rocketinfo Launches Rocket Desktop News Search Tool , Business Wire (April 12) -- RocketInfo has released a beta version of desktop news search tool for "always on" news.

"A key feature of the Rocket Desktop is the ability to access content from the dynamic and comprehensive Rocketinfo current news database. The database spans over 16,000 current news sources, including national and city newspapers, specialty publications, newswires, trade journals and interest- and industry-specific websites. These sources are constantly scanned to ensure that Rocket Desktop users can view up-to-the-minute news on any topic. Search results feature targeted contextual ads from Kanoodle."

Download is available from RocketNews. There is no information on system requirements but we can assume it is for Windows.

The application is described in the SEW Blog - Rocket News Releases New Version of Desktop News Search App

Inside Yahoo News

Inside Yahoo News: Aggregator brings RSS to the masses, by Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review (Apr 1) -- Glaser visited Yahoo News at their offices in Sunnyvale, Calif, and got a preview of the redesign of the service.

"According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Yahoo News is the second most trafficked News & Information site on the Web -- and top Current Events/Global News site -- with 20.8 million unique visitors in February 2005. Over the past two years, the site's traffic has hit peaks and valleys depending on news stories such as U.S. elections and the Southeast Asian tsunami. But generally, traffic has gone from 16-19 million uniques in 2003 to the low 20 millions in 2004, while time spent on the site has gone from the high 20 minutes to low 30s."

Yahoo News was an early adopter of RSS technology, and integrated RSS feeds into My Yahoo and to the mobile version. "Gatz says that Yahoo has more people using RSS than any other service, a number of users that's "in the low millions." He estimates there are 6 million RSS feeds around the Web."

Includes a list of the features to look for in the new Yahoo News, expected in a beta version in late April - tabbed and integrated.

Pay for News

Dow Jones Executive Foresees More Paid Web Sites - by Martha Graybow, Reuters (Mar 29) -- Gordon Crovitz, president of electronic publishing at Dow Jones, sees publishers charging for online access to articles published in print. It points to the Wall Street Journal Online version with 700,000 subscribers at $79 / year (or $39 if subscribe to the paper).

Dow Jones, itself, provides the free Marketwatch and, mercifully, has no plans to change that. "Crovitz said Marketwatch is expected to remain free because it is an Internet-only publication that does not compete with a print version of itself."

No mention of the Globe and Mail practice of restricted access to online content: making some articles available only to online subscribers at time of publication, and all others locked in for-fee archives after 7 days.

Rocketinfo and CNW

Rocketinfo and CNW Group Announce 5-year Licensing Deal -- press release in Canada Newswire (March 29)

Canada NewsWire Group will be using Rocketinfo's database to feed its MediaVantage Service.

"... CNW Group will have full access to Rocketinfo's current news and business information database. The content to be provided by Rocketinfo will be integrated into CNW's MediaVantage service, a full-featured, near real-time media monitoring solution developed by CNW and their technical partner dna13 Inc. The Rocketinfo content database includes a broad and diverse collection of current news sources, weblogs, and RSS feeds. This database includes unmatched coverage of more than 1,000 Canadian sources including content in both official languages and content from Canadian radio station websites."

Topix.net Gets Support

Newspaper Publishers Invest in Online Site in ECommerce Times (Mar 23)

Gannett Co., Knight Ridder Inc. and Tribune Co. are each taking a 25 percent share of Topix.net, the news aggregator that has excelled at local news.

"Topix uses a computer program that its founders designed to separate news stories into very specific categories and geographical reasons. Thus a user can type in a ZIP code and get local news from that area, or go to one of the 300,000 pages that contains specific categories of news."

+ "searches for stories from 1,400 daily newspapers, 800 college newspapers and 3,000 magazines" and others.
+ got 1.4 million visitors in February according to comScore Media Metrix.

Andrew Goodman in his posting - Newspapers Continue to Beef Up Online Presence - notes, "This continues a trend of traditional news organizations hedging their bets by acquiring strategic online properties -- Reuters investing in Moreover, NYT buying About.com, etc."

Customize Google News

New Customization, Personalization Features at Google News By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Mar 10)

"The Google News home page is now customizable, allowing you to add or delete main news categories (such as business, sports and so on), as well as increasing or decreasing the number of headlines within a section. You can also add sections from any of the 22 country-specific versions of Google News to your own page."

You can also set up your own topic by entering key words. Google News appears to pick up stories with your terms in the headline. Already, I have three good entries about search engines I hadn't seen before.

Online News and 2004 US Campaign

75 Million Americans Used Internet in '04 Race by Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News (Mar 7) -- reports on new study by Pew Internet & American Life Project the internet's role in the 2004 election.

"The Pew study was based on a survey of 2,200 adults between November 4 and November 22 last year. The report found that consumers of online political news grew to 29 percent of the U.S. population in 2004 from 18 percent in 2000. Among online Americans, the Internet is a more important source of news than the radio."

Full report - E-Gov and E-Policy Pew Internet and Amercan Life (Mar 6, 2005)

Moreover's Jim Pitkow Speaks to Infomation Today

Moreover, the News Aggregator: Interview with Jim Pitkow by Paula J. Hane, Information Today (Mar 1) Moreover was among the first to aggregate news from online web sites. Jim Pitkow, CEO of Moreover since May 2002, reviews some of the recent history of aggregation, and describes Moreover's services to corporations, vendors like Factiva, and some news search engines. Moreover classifies its news stories through an editorial system. Versus - Google News which uses an automated system.

Of interest: "We spent 100-plus person years building our editorial system from scratch. It's a combination of human editorial input with automated systems underneath, coupled with the latest in information extraction technology. We use a combination of lexical, semantic, and contextual analysis to reliably extract things like location. Unless there are sophisticated technologies behind the scenes, you just won't get precision and accuracy."

Moreover also supplies RSS feeds to MSN, and has a broadcast content package for enterprise clients.

For 2005 -- " We see 2005 as a strong continuation of the momentum begun in 2004. We'll continue to evolve our work with broadcast, do some cutting-edge things with RSS, and expand the content in our corporate products. We started with current awareness, expanded that to blogs, and, recently, to broadcast. We continually examine what makes the most sense to our users."

Topix.Net Profitable

Topix.net: All news is local by Frank Barnako, CBS Marketwatch (Feb 28) Topix.net is in the black and making a profit. This has become a very popular and useful search engine. It takes in 150,000 Web news sources every 30 minutes and has just added content from the New York Times. Search by keyword or topic. US residents can also search by zip code and city.

Rick Skrenta says, ""Try doing a news search on your home town in Google News. It's pretty tough," ... "But we can bring it down to a four-block-square area, because we have 30 thousand feeds, for every city and town in the U.S. and for every country, too.""

Rocketinfo expanding

Rocketinfo to Access Prestigious NewsStand Inc. Content Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 24)

Rocketinfo customers will have access to publications offered by NewsStand, including the New York Times, Barron's, Harvard Business Review, International Herald Tribune, National Law Journal and the Asian Wall Street Journal.

Of interest >> "Rocketinfo's database of over 100,000 business news sources includes all of the worlds leading news outlets including Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, the New York Times, BBC and many other well-known news sources. In addition, the Rocketinfo database covers thousands of smaller specialized publications as well as content from niche content providers such as trade journals, industry portals and specialty magazines. The Rocketinfo weblog database also includes the world's most popular and dynamic weblogs."

Wikinews

Looking for news stories from the grassroots? Wikinews might have it. Wikinews is based on the same premise as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Anyone can add or edit an article. At Wikinews the aim is collaborative news gathering and reporting. In theory editing by others will make for neutral and unbiased reporting because errors are corrected. But that doesn't prevent new bias or new errors being introduced. In practice, Wikinews might have some value for picking up first hand accounts by citizen (untrained) journalists, but it's not likely to ever be a fully credible source.

Wikinews creates the unassociated press by Aaron Weiss, CNet News (Feb 11)

Of interest: "Despite the obstacles, the Wikinews community has produced more than 500 articles in its first two months. One contributor, Lennart Regebro, a consultant from Paris, said he was drawn by the opportunity to shape online news delivery. Another, Seth Matheson, a junior at St. Mary's College of Maryland and editor of the college newspaper, said he was interested in bringing diverse news sources together. And Wiki Wickramarathna, a freelance photographer and journalist from Sri Lanka, saw an opportunity for reporting on recent events from his location."

Wikinews - Seven language 'editions'.

Wikinews - English - browse by subject and region.

Blog at MSNBC

MSNBC.com Announces Blog This. EContent (Feb 11)

MSNBC.com has added a Blog This - "designed to allow users to quickly and efficiently write blogs related to specific MSNBC.com news stories and communicate their opinions to others."

Blogs at Findory

Visualize A Weblogs "Neighborhood" at Findory.org, "the "personalized" news and weblog tool". Search Engine Watch Blog (Feb 2)

NY Times on Topix.net

If you like Topix.net for its 12,000 sources and categorization into 150,000 topics, you'll like it even more now. New York Times buys featured position on Topix.net Silicon Valley (Feb 2)

"Hoping to attract more online readers, The New York Times is paying to have its headlines featured in sections of Topix.net, an Internet startup that compiles news snippets from hundreds of Web sites."

State of Newspaper Business

An Online Rescue for Newpapers? Not unless the pace of revenue growth -- already robust -- picks up. By Rick Edmonds, Poynter Online (Jan 27) Newspapers have been buffeted by declining subscriptions and falling ads, but as this article examines, the online activity has been growing by 30 to 35% and in some newspapers more (Gannett by 60%). But will online return enough revenue? Edmonds crunched the numbers and thought not - at least not in the next five years unless they pick up a good share of the expected growth in local advertising. But hey, with broadband and other players, some yet to appear, anything could happen.

MSN Newsbot Canada

Hooray - there is a MSN Newsbot Canada that can show the most popular stories depending on the numbers of people reading them, and also adjust what it shows you according to your choices.

MSN Releases Australian and Canadian Versions of Newsbot Search Engine Watch Blog

RocketNews Adds USA TV News

RocketNews has added news content from 4 US television networks -- ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC.

From the press release - "Rocketinfo's database includes all of the world's leading news outlets including Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, the New York Times, BBC and many other well-known news sources. In addition, the Rocketinfo database covers thousands of smaller specialized publications as well as content from niche content providers such as trade journals, industry portals and specialty magazines. "

Major U.S. TV Broadcasters Content Added to Rocketinfo Database Market Wire (Jan 11)

Mentioned in RocketNews Adds Local Television News Content Search Engine Watch Blog (Jan 12)

Google and Yahoo News

Forecast 2005: For Newspapers, Competition Too Big to Ignore "Newspapers better be prepared to gear up for 2005 innovations" by Rick Edmonds, Poynter Online (Jan 3) Those innovations are coming from the internet and specifically Google and Yahoo.

Of interest >> "Google and Yahoo go first among the new forces in news for three reasons. They have boatloads of capital to invest in new ventures and acquisitions. They have strong existing news aggregation products, increasingly able to become the personalized "Daily Me," so long a staple of thinking about the-newspaper-of-the-future."

Google News

Google News has introduced versions for Argentina, Chile, Canada Français, México, Österreich, Schweiz or Suisse. See all versions listed on the about us page.

Slate moves to Washington Post

Washington Post picks up Slate from Microsoft Matt Hines, CNet.com (Dec 21) Slate. the online magazine with a bent for US politics, has survived. Microsoft decided it wasn't a media company and sold Slate to the Washington Post. 6 million readers will be glad.

Top News Sites 2004

Newsknife has released its list of the top news sites for 2004 based on analysis of Google News. New York Times, Reuters, and Washington Post took top 3 positions.

Google News Under Fire

Google News' chief robot speaks out By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco, The Register (Dec 8) - Does Google News have a point of view? Krishna Barat of Google News says not. Orlowski is not convinced and would like Google to publish criteria for inclusion in the news aggregator.

Local News

On Local Sites, Everyone's A Journalist
By Leslie Walker, The Washington Post, December 9, 2004 -- Some news organizations are encouraging citizens to cover local news.

"Jarvis said his firm, which owns a string of community newspapers and Web sites, is preparing to launch citizen-journalist Web sites in six towns in Oregon, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The sites will essentially be town blogs, in which postings from different residents will be grouped together and presented in a newsy format."

LexisNexis AlaCarte

LexisNexis AlaCarte! - Search the archive for free by Jon Dube, Poynter Online (Nov 30) Recommends the new news search service called LexisNexis AlaCarte!. Search headlines for free, pay for what you want (at $3 to $10 per document). LexisNexis has over "3.8 billion documents from over 20,000 sources of news, public records, and government information, including top newspapers, magazines, and transcripts, company and industry reports, deed records, liens, zip demographics, state and federal legislation, and intellectual property."

RocketInfo partners with CanWest

Rocketinfo and CanWest Interactive Form Strategic Content Partnership Market Wire via CBS Marketwatch (Nov 30) RocketInfo may deliver to its enterprise clients content from FPInfomart Direct service. "In total Rocketinfo will enhance its existing content offering with more than 150 full-text news and business sources -- from major Canadian dailies and newswires, to regional community papers, TV and radio transcripts, corporate databases, specialty trade journals and magazines."

Wikinews from Wikipedia

Wikipedia Creators Move Into News by Joanna Glasner, Wired (Nov 29)

Members of the Wikimedia Foundation have decided to try their hand at journalism by creating Wikinews where members can collobaratively create and edit news stores. Objective -- "to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view." But will these amateur journalists dig out a story through interviews and analysis of data or will they be mainly (only?) summarizing what the news they read?

Wikinews is available at http://demo.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Young people and the news

Newspapers Should Really Worry by By Adam L. Penenberg, Wired (Nov 24) Young people - ages 18 to 34 - aren't interested in reading newspapers. They get their news from browsing and sampling online information sources - Google News, blogs, news websites. They don't read newspapers or magazines.

News Delivery - RocketInfo

Rocketinfo Successfully Renews Contract With International Trade Canada Market Wire (Nov 23) via CBS Marketwatch. RocketInfo delivers current news to companies doing business abroad through The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service (http://www.infoexport.gc.ca/)

RocketNews News

Rocketinfo Adds Innovative Personalization Features to RocketNews Search Engine MarketWire via CBS Marketwatch [registration] RocketNews has new personalization features for saving seaches, having a personal page, and ranking results based on what else you've looked at.

More at Topix

More Sources at Topix.net, Advanced Search Too! Search Engine Watch Blog (Nov ) Topix.net now has 9,000 sources (up from 7,000) and supports limiting the search by several parameters.

Dow Jones to buy Marketwatch

Dow Jones to buy MarketWatch for $520 million by Steven Musil, CNet (Nov 14)

Dow Jones owns The Wall Street Journal. This purchase of MarketWatch (which owns CBS Marketwatch) will "expand its reach into the consumer financial news business."

"If approved by shareholders, the purchase will give Dow Jones access to a wider Internet audience and a bigger slice of the online-advertising market. Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal Online edition requires a paid subscription, and subscriber growth appears to have leveled off at about 700,000 users."

Findory Upgrade

A new Findory at Geeking with Greg (Nov 1) Announces improvements at the personalized news search engine - Findory.

Yahoo News Advanced Search

Search Tricks #2: News Search by Jacob Rosenberg at ysearchblog (Oct 26) Tips for doing advanced search at Yahoo News -- by location / source / category / language / news type. Also covers RSS features.

Mentioned in TVC ALert.

Are news sites expanding or contracting?

Open Season: News Sites Add Outside Links, Free Content by Mark Glaser. Online Journalism Review (Oct 19) -- Good news for news junkies -- "Now sites such as the BBC and News.com are linking more outside their domains, and WSJ.com and NYTimes.com are opening up more free content in a nod to the "news conversation" online." Several news sites are either extending the availability of their content (New York Times and WSJ) or enriching their stories with more outside stories (BBC). The article didn't notice the changed policy at the Toronto Globe and Mail to put more articles behind the subscription barrier.

Dialog Live News

Streaming Live News from Dialog by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 18) " Dialog has begun a personalized news monitoring service, called Dialog Live News, which provides real-time, automated streaming of news reports from 2,300 sources."

MSNBC has RSS

MSNBC.com Users Get Personally Relevant Headlines Delivered Directly to Their Desktops MSNBC.com Adds 'Really Simple Syndication' (RSS) News Feed. PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch (Oct 15) [registration required] MSNBC offers 16 news feeds plus alerts.

Findory for Personalized News

Good Things Come in Small Packages, or, Findory Gets Personal
by Gary Price, Searcher (Oct 2004) Profiles Glen Lindon and Findory News, a personalized news service he created.

Google News Still in Beta

Google News: Beta Not Make Money by Adam Penenberg. Wired (Sep 29) -- While Yahoo and MSNBC pay money for the news they show, Google just grabs headline and first paragraph from the sources. (Google uses 7,000 sources of which 4,500 are in English.) Penenberg says Google News is stuck in beta because they can't make money on it. Once they try to sell advertising, they could be charged with violating copyright by making money from other people's content. It would no longer be "fair use".

Bias in Google News?

Is Google News Biased? By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (September 27, 2004) J.D. Lasica at OJR finds that Google News has a conservative bent? How could this be? Surely the ranking algorithms are neutral. In whatever human create there is potential for bias. As well, bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Ads come with the RSS feed

Web news feed syncs up with ads By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (
September 24, 2004) "Moreover Technologies has introduced a free, advertising-supported service that lets Web surfers set up a personalized collection of headlines from news outlets around the Web." It's FeedDirect> - choose the news you want and FeedDirect will give you the javascript to add to the web page - but you'll get advertisements too.