For a long time I've wanted a new source that will only show me stories that are likely to be relevant in a year. If no one is going to care or remember something in a month, then I'd rather just skip it. Portal:Current_events is as close to that as I've found.
What I love about it: very short summaries with the most important details about stories that people might still care about in a year, no sensational or partisan headlines, one click to excellent summaries of the issues, and I can easily catch up after missing a few days, whereas many news sites make it hard to see what they looked like even yesterday.
Take for instance the top story on bitofnews.com. The Portal:Current_events summary is:
"<a>A roof collapse</a> at a grocery store in <a>Riga</a>, Latvia, kills more than 50 people."
So it's more up to date than the bitofnews summary that has "at least 32," and if I care where Riga is instead of reading "Riga, which is the biggest city in the Baltics and its biggest seaport" I can click the Riga link and see a map and photo and population etc. If I want to know about the ongoing event, I can click the "a roof collapse" link and I'm presented with a pretty good summary of the issue.
I'm happy to see more news sources like this appear though. My only problem with the Portal:Current_events is that it doesn't have a good RSS feed and if I check it more than once a day, or mid-day, then it can be hard to see what has changed since my last visit.
I'm impressed - clean interface, consumable, and actually really great summaries. The e-mail newsletter version of this sounds very useful. It would be great to be able to select the categories you're interested in too.
I actually have been working on an app that wakes you up in the morning with a voice reading your schedule for the day, the weather and the latest news, and the API for this looks perfect to fill the last part.
I was going to ask what happened with the bit of news bot on reddit [0], but I see it just resumed posting!
I don't check it all that often, but I like getting a summary of recent news by browsing the bots user page every so often. Was saddened to see it inactive for the past two weeks.
I would check out Twitter bootstrap or look for a font, that's the only thing that I dislike is the times new roman font. For a website that's focused on consuming text summaries, efficiently reading / understanding is important, and having a readable clean font is too :D
These are actually really good summaries, though in one case it was to commenting policy that was summarized, not the article... Still I think the best summaries I've seen.
I'd love to know what the tech behind this is like.
The new Xbox vs PS article summary is horrible, though:
* It's also a great gaming system – it has great games this year.
* Ronald Reagan was president, MTV had just launched and choosing a video game system was easy.
* " This holiday season buying a video game system is a bit more complicated.
I think you meant TFIDF, but that would only work if you were looking for salient phrases in an article from many articles. When you look at a corpus of news the algorithm would likely work less effectively than an algorithm that using linguistics, for example Topia or even Rake.
For a long time I've wanted a new source that will only show me stories that are likely to be relevant in a year. If no one is going to care or remember something in a month, then I'd rather just skip it. Portal:Current_events is as close to that as I've found.
What I love about it: very short summaries with the most important details about stories that people might still care about in a year, no sensational or partisan headlines, one click to excellent summaries of the issues, and I can easily catch up after missing a few days, whereas many news sites make it hard to see what they looked like even yesterday.
Take for instance the top story on bitofnews.com. The Portal:Current_events summary is:
"<a>A roof collapse</a> at a grocery store in <a>Riga</a>, Latvia, kills more than 50 people."
So it's more up to date than the bitofnews summary that has "at least 32," and if I care where Riga is instead of reading "Riga, which is the biggest city in the Baltics and its biggest seaport" I can click the Riga link and see a map and photo and population etc. If I want to know about the ongoing event, I can click the "a roof collapse" link and I'm presented with a pretty good summary of the issue.
I'm happy to see more news sources like this appear though. My only problem with the Portal:Current_events is that it doesn't have a good RSS feed and if I check it more than once a day, or mid-day, then it can be hard to see what has changed since my last visit.