The team at NewsNow has built page, updated every 5 minutes, with news from Myanmar/Burma. Tens of thousands of sources (global in scope) are visited and the page will auto-refresh every 300 seconds.
+++ Burma Cyclone +++
Source: NewsNow
See Also: Hundreds of Other Topical Collections Can Be Found in the Left Rail of All NewsNow Pages
SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections
8 pages; PDF.
From the abstract:
Motivated by our work with political scientists who need to manually analyze large Web archives of news sites, we present SpotSigs, a new algorithm for extracting and matching signatures for near duplicate detection in large Web crawls. Our spot signatures are designed to favor natural language portions of Web pages over advertisements and navigational bars.
The contributions of SpotSigs are twofold: 1) by combining stopword antecedents with short chains of adjacent content terms, we create robust document signatures with a natural ability to filter out noisy components of Web pages that would otherwise distract pure n-gram-based approaches such as Shingling; 2) we provide an exact and efficient self- tuning matching algorithm that exploits a novel combination of collection partitioning and inverted index pruning for high-dimensional similarity search. Experiments confirm a increase in combined precision and recall of more than 24 percent over state-of-the-art approaches such as Shingling or I-Match and up to a factor of 3 faster execution times than Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), over a demonstrative Gold Set” of manually assessed near-duplicate news articles as well as the TREC WT10g Web collection.
Source: Stanford InfoLab
Barry Schwartz writes:
Live Search News takes a more linear view of news, when you compare it to the Yahoo News home pages. Live Search News looks more like a Techmeme style news approach, but it obviously uses a different algorithm.
Source: Search Engine Lande
See Also:
Two More Excellent News Resources:
1) NewsNow
2) Topix
A online news search pioneer releases some new technology. We’re going to give it a whirl.
From the announcement:
Rocketnews.com goes further, working with news seekers to bring them what they are looking for by creating easy to configure, user-defined feeds from a database of over 60,000 sources, and growing…Rocketnews.com introduces the Topic Discovery Engine, which 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.
Source: News Release
eufeeds: over 300 newspapers updated every 20 minutes
From RSS4Lib:
EUFeeds is a special-purpose RSS aggregator for European newspapers that provides access to more than 300 papers from the European Union. Provided by the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands, this site lets you quickly browse the print media from each EU member nation.
The site defaults to UK newspapers; there is no apparent way to set a different country as your default entry page. It also does not provide an RSS feed for the aggregated content — so you cannot subscribe to the aggregated Czech Republic news, only visit it on a web page.
Chronicling America Newspaper Site Adds More Pages, Features
From the announcement:
More than 79,000 newly digitized newspaper pages, along with several new site features, have recently been added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 500,000 digitized newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, and representing 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
New features in Chronicling America include:
+ “See All Available Newspapers” page - A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site.
+ RSS feed and E-mail Update service - Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery at www.loc.gov/rss/ (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.
Make sure to see the news release with links to a few highlights from the database.
Source: LC
NewsNow Beta Testing New Site, New Look
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.
+ Flags identifying news source still available. Also, notes if a site is subscription based and/or requires registration.
+ The World News category is outstanding.
+ U.S. Sports included in Sports Section (by team)
+ BIGGEST CHANGE: You can now search for MORE than one word in an article headline. ||| Example
You will also be told IF any newsfeeds are available that cover the search terms. ||| Example
We are very excited to see (we will be watching) if NewsNow (Beta) adds any additional tools or features.
Note from Gary: Earlier today I did a presentation for SLA, NewsNow was listed as one of my top two news sites. Amazing resource.
See Also: Compare with the Current Live Version
The Guardian Launches Version of Newspaper Site for America
From CyberJournalist:
Editor Michael Tomasky explains:
The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers….
Direct to Guardian America
Guardian America RSS Feed
Direct to The Guardian
Source: CyberJournalist
Thanks to PW for the news tip.
See Also: CNN.com Home Page Can be Personalized With Three Versions of the Site
+ International Version
+ U.S. Version
+ Arabic Version
Look for the set edition link near the top, far-right side of page.
We’ve been writing about NewsNow since we started ResourceShelf. It’s one of our favorite news sites. Though better news search tools exist, for overall breadth of sources (mainstream news and some hand selected blogs), we especially like NewsNow — along with Topix — as news/current awareness tools.
Specifically, we’re talking about NewsNow’s free service.
If you subscribe to their fee-based current awareness service, searching is much more robust than found with the free version. The free version only allows you to search a single word. That’s when Topix and it’s case sensitive searching and interactive graphs become essential tools. Remember, no search tool is perfect and many other excellent news resources are out there but NewsNow and Topix top our list but individually and used together.
The free version of NewsNow is MORE THAN worthy of your attention and use:
+ Over 30,000 sources organized into hundreds of topics (aka newsfeeds)
Here are a few examples:
+ Regions/Countries: Africa
+ American Football
+ Tourism Industry
+ Airbus A380
+ Each source is marked with flag of country where source originates and also notes if it’s a blog and/or a site that requires registration.
+ Pages update every five minutes.
+ Pages will auto-refresh every five minutes
+ Stories identified by country of origin with flag icon next to headline.
+ Newsfeeds are found in the left margin. One for most countries, many industries, etc.
:
Two special feeds are available
+ Live Feed
Real time access to every story as it enters the database
+ ReleaseWire
Real-time feed of news releases dealing with IT.
+ Topix Adds New Features: Top Picks, Polls, and Car Seats
Btw, Topix now also offers browsing for international news by country. Also, you can access local info for Canada entering a Postal Code.
See Also: Topix Mobile? Yes, it’s available. Just enter http://www.topix.net into your mobile browser (auto-detection) or go to http://m.topix.net
See Also: Topix Search
A) Topix search is case sensitive. Example: SAT vs. sat.
B) The interactive graph at the top of a results page clickable and makes finding older content easy.
See Also: Top Blogs Page
“monitors the activity of 25,000 blogs and ranks the stories that bloggers are writing about.”
See Also: Most Popular Top Stories
Ranked by number of commentators.
Note: All Topix pre-built topics and search results have RSS feeds.
+ Google tools to power virtual worlds (via News.com)
Worth noting that two weeks ago, the CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, invested in Forterra, a provider of virtual worlds software.
++ See Also: On a somewhat related note, two other companies first invested in by In-Q-Tel and then acquired by Google are Keyhole Corp. (Google Earth) and @Last Software (Sketch-Up) .
+ Google News in licensing deals with wire services (via News.com)
The partners, which include Britain’s Press Association, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press of the United States, will have their stories featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News-hosted landing pages.
The article goes on to say that this should help cut down on duplicate stories. That’s good news! The issue is what metric will be used to determine a dupe? Some versions of let’s say an AP story might be 750 words while others might run a 450 word version. From a business angle it will be interesting to see how news sources that run AP content (for example) deal with their site not getting the notice it once did. Of course, AP, AFP and many news organizations have “deals” with Yahoo (nicely organized page) (in addition to its own crawl of news sources). Dow Jones MarketWatch also offers content from many sources. Nice advanced search interface.
See Also: NewsNow About to Reach Milestone, 30K of News Sources
Well organized and updated all of the time. You can even see a color-coded feed of each article as it enters the database. Also note how each item contains a flag showing where the news source is located.
See Also: Original stories, from the source (via Google News Blog)
Google: This Week’s Economist Cover Story
Two articles
1 ||| 2
This time we want to get the celebrations 
off to an early start as two of our favorite and most used around ResourceShelf HQ prepare to reach and pass milestones.
1) NewsNow
This site will soon offer access to over 30,000 sources. Both mainstream news and hand selected blogs. Each item has a flag next to it showing where the news service/blog originates from. Searching is poor (via the free site) but the ability to browse news via hundreds of categories (what they call feeds) are wonderful and useful. Here’s the feed for the airline industry. Pages (feeds) also autorefresh (if left open) every 5 minutes. If you want to review each item as it enters the database that’s possible by visiting this color-coded ticker. A separate ticker for info tech press releases is available.
2) PublicRadioFan.net
This database that can be personalized (favorite links, time zone, etc) is both a real time directory of what’s airing on PUBLIC radio stations around the globe (WBUR, CBC, etc.) but also an excellent searchable directory of even more stations. What’s also useful is that in most cases you can go directly from PublicRadioFan.net and open the stream of the station you want to listen to. OK, cool but what’s the news? The milestone that soon will be reached comes from another section of the site, their directory of public radio podcasts will soon pass the 1,000 mark. Wow!
Continued success to both sites. Essential tools for web users.
+ PsycPORT (Psychology in the News)
This one-stop shop for news about psychology and related issues comes from the American Psychological Association. Access is free.
Key Features:
+ RSS Feed and Various APA RSS Feeds
+ Content culled from a variety of news sources including Washington Post, AP, and Reuters
+ APA Press Releases Also Listed on Page
+ Mobile Version Available (via AvantGo)
Source: American Psychological Association
If you’ve read ResourceShelf for even a short amount of time you know that we’re big fans of
NewsNow.co.uk. This news site culls material from close to 30,000 news sites and blogs. While the search is poor (only one word at a time unless you purchase their service), the pre-built “newsfeeds” are excellent for browsing and “keeping an eye on” throughout the day.
These pages, if left open in a browser window will automatically refresh every five minutes. All newsfeeds are listed in the left rail and look for new feeds when major stories are breaking around the world. Make sure to also note how each article has a flag to identify where the news source is coming from.
Today, we want to point out the U.S. Politics Newsfeed. It is an excellent one stop for U.S. political news. A must bookmark for the policy wonk, academic, news geek, or concerned citizen, anyone interested in U.S. politics.
Again, all of the pre-built Newsfeeds are listed in drop-down menus on the left side of the page. On a related note, here are a couple of other feeds that might be of interest. We will continue to feature NewsNow feeds in future posts.