other posted in other news  on 4 December 2008
by Andrew Lang 
View by Categories | View By Latest

What are they talking about?! news channel launched

You can see at the top of this page a new link: "What are they talking about?!".

Here's an FAQ about it......

What is "What are they talking about?!"

It's a news aggregator - it takes a selection of RSS feeds and publishes a selection of stories from these aggregated feeds - essentially it gives you up-to-date news from a selection of websites.

Where does it get the news from?

From a selection of tech news websites - sites that have a reputation for being trusted and interesting. No news is taken from news aggregators like Digg.com or Reddit.com - aggregating from aggregators is a bit meaningless - instead we get news direct from news sources so you get to the article in one click.

How does it get the news?

From RSS feeds that each news source make publicly available. We only show what each news source makes publicly available in their RSS feed. No "screen-scraping" is done, or anything untoward / bandwidth robbing. We only show a very small snippet (first 200 characters) of the beginning of each news story, with link to the news story and full accreditation of where the news story has come from, complete with link to home page of each news source.

How often is it updated?

Every 30 minutes. Depending on the news source and the frequency they are updated, each news source gets visited every 30 minutes, or every 2 hours, or every 6 hours, or once a day. techcrunch.com's RSS feed gets visited every 30 minutes, Seth Godin's will get visited once a day (for example) because Seth tends to write once a day, and techcrunch have a team of journalists that can post 20+ articles in a day. The daily update (for all news sources) occurs at 7.55AM UK Time so for those in the UK it's a good way to see what's been going on while you've been getting your beauty sleep.

How does it pick the stories?

Newness is the biggest factor. But it spreads stories across various news sources so you won't get, for example, 3 new techcrunch.com stories in a row - in fact, you will get no more than 2 stories in the latest 15 published from any single news source.

How big is the archive of news stories?

Not big. It just keeps the last 7 days of stories. Anything older is permanently deleted. The news channel is really for people who want to see what's happening now, or in the last few days (if they've been away).

Can I add my own blog to this news channel?

Absolutely. As long as you write about anything tech - web design, hardware, SEO, programming, gadgets - and with our approval your blog will be spidered at least daily for new entries, and the RSS information (title, link to article, preamble of article) will be published here - with a full link to your article. Contact us here



Share this article:


view my profile on Google+