June 01, 2004
Announcing TodaysPapers.com
Last week, a developer named Joe Stump and I built out my latest idea involving community, personal news management and online discussion. It is called Today's Papers: http://www.todayspapers.com
Simply put, Today's Papers is a news aggregator (like Google News) that provides a discussion thread for every article that comes through a subscribed feed. This means that you can now talk about news articles with other people even if the originating source does not have a discussion area on their site. Additionally, each news article gets it own unique ID which allows us to provide a Trackback service for it.
We're only subscribed to 110 feeds right now, and that number will certainly go up as we fine-tune the best combination of sources so that the right kind of information comes through to the site. We'll also remove feeds that are underperforming or are pushing news that our community shows no interest in.
We're working on expanding the features of Today's Papers, and your advice and opinions are welcome. Let us know what you want out of a automated news aggregator and a centralized discussion community for the daily news.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at June 1, 2004 03:15 AMit'd be cool if you eventually did the kind of topic normalization google news does, so that comments are about topics rather than specific stories.
it'd also be cool to publish the list of sources, allow submissions from users, and maybe even allow moderation by users on sources.
you could do this as voting or maybe allow people to prioritize them personally. one could do some cool social stuff with this, too, with friends' weighting determing the priority of my unrated stuff, or something.
a most popular category would be cool, too, either most comments or most clicks, or both.
my bet is you're planning all of this already.
(PS: you might want to explicitly set the background to white; my browser setting is grey, but the design relies upon the default)
Posted by: dreww at June 1, 2004 04:27 AM
Just signed up at watchblog.com. Good Luck for success! I second the background to white or perhaps a very light blue would IMHO be easy on the eyes. I also would like to see a most popular highlight at some point.
Posted by: Sally at June 1, 2004 08:52 AM
I get most of this news through my aggregator, Liferea. So, to be useful, I would recommend feeds, feeds, feeds. rdf, xml, rss, atom. Full story feeds, summary feeds and feeds for comment threads - especially feeds for comment threads.
Posted by: Tony Steidler-Dennison at June 1, 2004 02:10 PM
Just a suggestion: When I view the "Full Index" of a topic it seems to be rather of an eye sore and a hassle to read one line of text that stretches from one side one side of the page to the other just to read the description of the article. Would it be possible to have the description within a table so it makes it easier to read and neater for the eye?
Posted by: Erich Hartwig at June 2, 2004 05:48 PM
Just as a note, after clicking full index it lists the headings after 1-20, presumably 21-40, but they appear to me as the same ones over and over again.
Posted by: allan at June 3, 2004 03:57 PM
Lookin' great. I made a note of it in my blog today.
I'm wondering if it's this concept that traditional papers like the New York Times are afraid of (with this story, many in the blogging community are thinking that the New York Times is trying to discredit "a method of people sharing information and news while bypassing established institutional vehicles of news gathering").
Hopefully, with my post, you'll get a few more people with feedback in the next 24 hours.
I recommend comments feeds, btw. :-)
Posted by: David Bisset at June 6, 2004 02:42 PM
