news posts

Android, Palm, and iPhone users get new Google News page

by Jay Hathaway Nov 20th 2009

Google has launched a new mobile version of Google News, designed specifically for current-gen smartphones: the iPhone, Palm's WebOS phones (the Pre and Pixi, so far) and Android phones.

Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian already had their own Google News page, so its only fair for the new kids on the mobile block to get in on the action, too.

Google's pretty vague about the changes in the official blog post, but it looks like they've just managed to do more with the same amount of screen real estate. Navigating between sections is easier with the new layout, and you can now customize your Google News the same way you've been able to in a full desktop browser.

Tags: android, google, iphone, mobile, news, palm

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Microblogging

Twitter Lists feature hits beta, makes Twitter a lot better

by Jay Hathaway Oct 15th 2009

Twitter's new Lists feature has rolled out in beta to a large number of users, and it adds a lot to the Twitter experience without detracting too much from the site's simplicity. You can create, view and manage lists of users from the Twitter.com sidebar, and add users by going to your "following" page. Once you've got a list created, clicking on it will show you a timeline of tweets from the users you've added.

If you make a list public, you can send a link to others to share it, and they can add everyone on your list in one fell swoop. You can also see which lists you've been added to by clicking on a link located at the top of the sidebar next to your following/followers numbers. This bumps the link to your timeline, showing your total number of tweets, out of the way to a small-print link under your username. Of course, it's also possible to make private lists, in case you want to group people into categories without offending anybody.

Tags: lists, news, twitter

Filed under: Google

Newsaholics can get their fix with Google Fast Flip

by Adam Maras Sep 15th 2009

Google has decided that you're not getting enough news in your balanced diet of information. Equatable to hooking up an IV of coffee to get your necessary caffeine, Google Fast Flip, a new Google Labs project, aims to provide you with more news than you probably want, faster than you probably want it. Fast Flip provides a magazine-ish interface to news stories from (currently) three dozen popular news publishers.

You can flip through news articles based on popularity, news sections, hot topics, or publishers. On the home page, you can scroll through a strip of stories to find the first one you're interested; once you've selected a story, you can use the big left and right arrows on either side of the story to go to the previous or next story in the section. You can also scroll through the section's stories using a pop-out sidebar on the left side of the page. Also, the iPhone and Android versions let you actually flip through the stories using touch gestures, making the whole experience more fluent.

Google makes loading the news stories faster by caching them as images; this way, to read a news story, you don't have to load the entire publisher's web page (with all of its graphics and other elements) making load times significantly faster. Instead of having to wait ten seconds for a news site's page to load, the next story's screenshot has already been downloaded and cached in your browser.

Fast Flip also provides recommended results for anyone with a Google Account; it can automatically track the stories you read as well as base recommendations on articles you click the "Like" button for.

Tags: google, google labs, GoogleLabs, news

Filed under: Audio, News, iPhone

Rejoice, news nerds! NPR arrives on the iPhone

by Jay Hathaway Aug 17th 2009

NPR has launched a new iPhone app with that's so good it might replace both your computer and your radio as your favorite way to listen to the news. The app allows you to listen to live streams from hundreds of NPR news stations, as well as reading and listening to archived stories. All told, you're getting over 1,000 stations, news programs and live streams on your iPhone for free.

To keep all this content organized, you can add stories to your queue and listen to them in order. If you're just interested in what's playing on your local station, you can easily locate it using the NPR app and your iPhone's GPS. The NPR app is more than news, though: it also lets you listen to popular programs like Car Talk and Fresh Air. If they're on air anywhere in the country, you'll see an "on air" badge, meaning you can listen live. For shows that aren't live at the moment, you'll still be able to listen to the most recent episode on demand.

[via Mashable]

Tags: iphone, news, NPR, public-radio, radio

Filed under: News, Web services, Google

Google News RSS buttons go missing, but feeds are still there

by Jay Hathaway Jul 22nd 2009

If you use Google News frequently, you may have recently noticed something missing from your search results. The buttons to create RSS feeds from search results have been removed from the page.

The missing buttons don't prevent you from creating RSS feeds anyway, though. There are a couple of ways to do it. If your browser autodetects RSS, you can just click the RSS icon in the address bar to get a feed going. You can also get a feed by creating a new Google Alert and selecting "feed" from the dropdown menu.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Tags: alerts, feeds, google, google-news, news, rss

Filed under: Google, Social Software, web 2.0

Google Reader now 66.6% less antisocial

by Lee Mathews Jul 16th 2009

Those of you who use Google Reader for your RSS fix may have already noticed the newly-added following and liking features.

There's a new box in Reader's sidebar aptly called 'People you follow.' Using the search feature, you can hunt for specific names or terms in Google Profiles and follow them to view news items they like. As with your subscriptions, Reader will update counts next to each user when new items are liked.

When sifting through your feeds, you'll now see how many people liked a particular item. Click the count, and you'll see their names. Hover over a name to view a snippet of their Google Profile or click to the full version, to view their location on a map, or to follow him or her.

Other blogs have taken issue with the like feature, saying it adds confusion. Personally, I'm not sure where the confusion comes from. I use stars in Reader to tag items I want to revisit later or blog about - not to indicate whether or not I like a piece. If I want to do that, well, I'll click like instead. Feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments!

Why the 66% in the title? The last of the three big additions is decidedly less social. Google has added a new option to Reader's existing sharing features, allowing you to choose only certain groups of people (from your Google Contacts) to view and comment on your shared items.

Tags: google-reader, news, rss, sharing, social

Filed under: Windows Mobile, Mobile

Mobile news reader AvantGo shutting down

by Brad Linder Jun 5th 2009

Once upon a time AvantGo was synonymous with reading news on a Windows Mobile or Palm device. If you wanted to read the New York Times, Guardian, Wired, or hundreds of other newspapers, magazines, and news sources, you wanted to install the AvantGo client which provided access to full length articles, not just RSS headers.

In an era of always connected Smartphones, better web browsers, and RSS readers, it looks like AvantGo has opted to change its business model. AvantGo as we know it is shutting down on June 30th.

Now honestly, it's been years since I used AvantGo, so I suppose I can't complain. But there are still plenty of people out there using older PDAs that aren't integrated with smartphones with 3G connectivity. So this news could leave some of these people high and dry.

The AvantGo team is directing users to try a new application called Snac that provides access to news from a handful of sites including The New York Times, USA Today, Facebook, Twitter, and weather forecasts. But Snac works with Java enabled phones, Blackberry devices, and some Windows Mobile phones. But there's no support for Palm or older Pocket PC devices.

[via Mobility Site]

Tags: avantgo, news, rss

Filed under: Macintosh, Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Realtime event tracking with Almost.at

by Jay Hathaway Jun 3rd 2009

As people discover that social sites can be pretty decent news sources, especially when it comes to event coverage, I think we'll start seeing a lot more projects like Almost.at. Almost.at uses text, photos, videos and links from sites including Twitter and Flickr to show as-it-happens coverage of everything from concerts to conferences to breaking news stories. Right now, for example, a Phish concert, the E3 expo and a missing Air France flight are all being covered.

Almost.at's three column layout and automatic refresh are nice, but the site goes beyond what you see on its web display. You can add usernames to an event on Almost.at, so others can see and follow people who are at the event, and you can also download a standalone Almost.at browser for OS X. If you're interested in a particular event, it beats opening sites and search results across different tab and refreshing them manually.

Tags: almost.at, flickr, news, real-time, realtime, social-networking, twitter

Filed under: Design, Web services, Google

Easily put Google services on your site with Web Elements

by Jay Hathaway May 28th 2009

Google wants to make it as easy as possible for you to place its content, like news feeds, maps and calendars, on your site. Apparently, using the existing APIs wasn't simple enough, so now there's Google Web Elements, for even easier installation of custom Google widgets. Web Elements is starting with eight different modules: Calendar, Conversation, News, Custom Search, Maps, Presentations, Spreadsheets and YouTube News.

Of the eight, Conversation and Custom Search are the two I see actually gaining large userbases. A lot of sites have comments or shoutboxes, and a lot of them already have custom Google Search boxes. Those aren't going anyway any time soon, and it can't hurt that Google's made them so easy to install. Web Elements doesn't seem to be targeted at major sites, but it does offer some features that beginning -- or just time-crunched -- site owners wouldn't build for themselves.

Tags: google, maps, news, search, web-elements, widgets

Filed under: Business, News

Newssift: business-oriented news trend browser

by Jay Hathaway Mar 23rd 2009

Newssift is a way to gauge the media buzz around various business topics, companies and people. It analyzes qualitative data from a whole bunch of news sources, and lets you browse stories on a subject and see if the overall media vibe is positive or negative. It strikes me as a sort of Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes for the business world.

Newssift has a search feature, and also a list of popular topics to browse from the front page. You can combine more than one topic into a single search, and save searches if you want to keep up to date on them. Newssift also shows a breakdown of the sources on a specific topic, so you know how many stories are coming from newspapers, TV or blogs. I'm not in the financial field, so I'm not sure how useful a tool Newssift is, but it's definitely an interesting experiment.

Tags: business, finance, news, newssift, trends

Filed under: Developer, News, Search

NYT Explorer shows off New York Times Article Search API

by Jay Hathaway Feb 23rd 2009

At a time when a lot of newspapers are shutting down or finding themselves forced to come up with a smarter online strategy, the New York Times is evolving its web content with improvements like the Article Skimmer and an Article Search API. The API can be used to build interesting applications on top of the Times' huge database of articles and information. Taylor Barstow's NYT Explorer is one early example of an app built on Article Search.

When you search for a topic on NYT Explorer, it quickly delivers a list of the relevant articles, sorted by date. For example, a search for software turned up about 40,000 results. That's a lot of articles, but not to worry: NYT Explorer's sidebar has a bunch of quick ways to refine your results and get what you want. You can check a person, a specific column in the paper, a subject, or a location to narrow your results down. All of these categories are sorted by the number of times each item appears in your results. It's an efficient, unfussy way to browse through a mountain of news.

Tags: API, new-york-times, news, newspaper, NYT, NYT-explorer

Filed under: Internet

More Americans get news online than from printed newspapers

by Brad Linder Dec 25th 2008

Just in case you had any doubt that the newspaper industry is in trouble (or needs to change the way it thinks about content and revenue), Pew has released a study showing that for the first time more Americans get their news from the internet than from traditional newspapers.

To be fair, television still trumps them both. 70% of respondents said that they get most of their national and international news from TV, 40% cited the internet, and 35% said newspapers. The numbers add up to more than 100% because people were allowed to give more than one answer.

What may be the most interesting figure is the fact that 59% of people under 30 said they get most of their news online while an equal percentage said TV was a primary source of news. The kids these days are not as keen on newspapers, which got a response of 28%. Radio came in fourth, followed by magazines.

Now, this isn't all bad news for traditional media organizations. We've seen companies like CNN and the New York Times make some great strides in providing news online over the last few years. Part of the reason people are moving online for their news is because they can find trusted, reliable news sources on the internet. The question that remains to be seen is whether internet news can be profitable enough to fund the kind of in-depth journalism old-school papers like the New York Times have been doing for years.

[via CNET]

Tags: journalism, news, pew

Filed under: News, web 2.0

Newsified gives your favorite social news sites a new look

by Jay Hathaway Nov 17th 2008

Newsified is a simple, but brilliant, idea. Take your favorite social news sites, the ones you normally read on the web or through RSS, and lay them out like ... a newspaper. It's an old-school approach that actually proves really useful when it comes to deep sites like Metafilter and Digg. You only see a small percentage of the popular content on the front pages of these sites, but Newsified gives a broader view at a glance.

Newsified pages exist for 6 sites so far: Digg, Reddit, Metafilter, Mixx, Delicious and YouTube. It takes the most popular front-page content from those sites and puts it in a prominent position at the top of the page. Then, as you read down, you'll see the deeper content that you might have missed, laid out in convenient capsule form for your consumption. It's a quick, fun way to read news. In fact, I like the concept so much that I'm giving it a try as my homepage this week.

Tags: delicious, digg, homepage, metafilter, news, Newsified, newsreader, reddit, social-news, youtube

Filed under: Internet, Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Beta

Livestation adds more TV channels, Linux and Mac clients

by Brad Linder Oct 5th 2008

It's been a while since we looked at Livestation, a video player that allows you to watch live streams of TV channels, with a heavy emphasis on news programming. While the channel selection was rather limited in February, there are now over a thousand channels to choose form, thanks to user submitted links to channels that stream live TV signals. Most are still news related, but there are also a handful of channels of music and other genres.

Another major change is that Livestation is now cross-platform. There are Windows, Mac, and Linux clients available. The Linux version works best on PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards, while the OS X version should run on any Mac with an Intel processor. The Windows version also no longer requires Silverlight to be installed.

The user interface has also been tweaked, making it simpler to search through the long list of channels or flip between channel presets. If the video window looks small in the screenshot, all you have to do is double click on any video to watch in full screen.

While Hulu, Joost, and other online video sites are focusing on offering video on demand, Livestation provides a decent way to watch live programming. And there are two things that most people would rather watch live than pre-recorded, news and sports. Since there's a lot more money involved in getting broadcast and webcast rights for live sporting events, I doubt we'll be seeing ESPN or similar channels on Livestation any time soon. But if you want to catch the latest BBC, CNN, or Bloomberg news, Livestation's got you covered.

[via MakeUseOf]

Tags: livestation, news, online-video, streaming

Filed under: Internet, Video, News, Web services

MediaScrape Aggregates News Videos from Around The World

by Lee Mathews Sep 23rd 2008

News buffs will want to bookmark MediaScrape.com, a Canadian site that aggregates video news reports from a host of international sources.

Feeds from AP, Reuters, BBC News, CBC Television (Canada), ANI (Asian News), and many others are available for viewing. Since MediaScrape is all about news for the visually inclined, there's also a Google map view that geotags videos. Clicking a marker on the map pops up a thumbnail and link to the video.

Video transcripts are also available, a welcome feature for writers needing to reference a report. Registering gives users the ability to customize MediaScrape's feeds to include only their preferred networks, regions, and topics.

One thing I found a bit bothersome was the proliferation of Adsense ads. Video pages display two text blocks, and the video itself gets an ad overlay - you can close it, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.

Still, there's a ton of great news content to view and most of you are probably running Firefox and adblock anyway. If not, sites like this may convince you to install it.

Tags: aggregator, news, video

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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