Library clips

Following on from an earlier post about Yahoo! News.

Yahoo! News – Full Coverage is typical of Yahoo’s strength in creating portals…they are great at leveraging their directory/search prowess.

They capitalise on their abilities to take their data further, by organising it into packages for consumption.

If you are thinking of making a topical news portal, check out Full Coverage first, as a similar one may be already in flight.

Eg. Oil and Gas

Unless I’m not totally happy with the quantity, quality, and result ranking of Yahoo! News (sources), this is a great current awareness portal for the Oil and Gas industry.

Their coverage of mainstream media and press releases is quite good…not so sure about trade and industry newsletters/journals/reports, but then that’s why you have to pay for Factiva (also benefit of an archive, as opposed to Yahoo! News one month archive).

…then there is also news from blogs.

The Full Coverage page is divided into:

• News Stories
• Feature Articles
• Opinions and Editorials
• Related Web Sites
• Audio

Now here it comes…wouldn’t it be great if each of these sections had an RSS feed or even a general RSS feed

…if this were so I would use it, RSS is becoming so common that I am starting to get an attitude that I only read stuff if it has a feed, it’s just easier that way!

There are a few essentials that I use email alerts or monitor with WatchThatPage (highly recommended, don’t know what I’d do without it).

Same goes with the Yahoo! Finance Industry Center, there are so many packaged portals in this list.

Industry Center provides more than just news, they have:

• Industy Market Summary
• News
• Industry Top Performers
• Industry Calendar
• Industry Profile
• Top Ranked Analysts
• Locate Industry by company
• Industry Statistics
• Community Spotlight
• Related Industries
• More On This Industry

An RSS feed for at least the News section would be great, it beats a search term RSS feed, as the aboutness of the subject is more precise.

Then there is a further list of portals at the company level.
These RSS feeds are listed on another page, right on!

Some more stats for feeds, check out:

Grafolicious

Cloudalicious

Found these via plasticbag.org, from the website:

“Cloudalicious was apparently inspired by the Grafolicious service which tracks changes in the rate of bookmarking for any given URL as well as creating browsable interfaces for getting to grips with tags. Cloudalicious takes this one stage further - showing how the actual tags that people use to describe a given URL change over time. This blurry mess of semantic data is known as a ‘Tag Cloud’.”

This is a great post in describing the way people approach tagging…annotative (like a post it note stuck on the bookmark) or a filing model (placing the bookmark in a folder)….see the picture on this post for a description.

Check out NewsBot, yet another RSS - text to audio tool.

This one is a simple tool that creates an audio version of your blog (that’s all it does, there is no interaction by the user…lacks a list of entries).

Although, you get to watch this attractive female bot called Halo read your stuff!

Here is Halo reading my blogs feed.

…see others.

See SEW post about viewing Halo reading search results to you.