I couple of weeks back I signed up for a free trial with CustomScoop. This trial period is now coming to an end, so I'm going to try and capture some of my impressions here.
This is what CustomScoop has to say about itself:
A leader in the online news clipping service industry, CustomScoop provides your organization with a daily, customized news briefing. Our proprietary technology reviews news sites around the globe to gather the latest information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and deliver it to your desktop. Our pre-screened database of online news outlets includes not only the major wires and daily papers, but also TV and radio stations, smaller daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and new media publications.
The trial was set up in the following way: up to 5 keywords or phrases are provided and a set of source types is specified. The source types include:
- U.S. Online News (5,000 sources)
- International Online News (2,000 sources)
- US & EU Government Web Sites (7,000 sources)
- Policy Web Sites (1,200 sources)
- Blogs (6,000 sources)
Clearly, the service is very much news oriented.
I chose 'xbox', 'playstation', 'electronic arts' as my keywords and the two news and the blogs sources. Note that the blog sources have a very low count suggesting that they are hand picking blogs in some way. I haven't seen any information on their site about how they are getting their sources - is it via business relationships or do they do the crawling by themselves?
CustomScoop delivers daily clippings and provides a web served interface for exploring the data generated by your configuration. Currently, the daily email reports are not particularly useful for me as they are too long. This is not much of a criticism as clipping services are better suited to a low stream of daily results. So the comments that I will make are on the web based interface.
Perhaps the most interesting feature that the interface provides is a breakdown of results by the geographical region of the source of the clipping. In other words, CustomScoop has annotated all of their feeds with the location of that feed allowing them to break down results along this dimension. This is a great feature. The interface, however, is a little cumbersome. It lists all regions including all US states, all countries, and other breakdowns in a single long list. It would be far more useful to see only those regions which had results, together with a count of the results rather than this long list (possibly with the option to see the empty categories).
The interface provides a number of graphing and charting facilities. Here is an example from the top level report:
Initially, I've found this breakdown confusing. For example, under 'Radio' I have 3 results. Clicking through I can get to a display of all the clippings and their sources. I then find that the content is actually online content on a site for a radio company (e.g. here). In a sense, all the text is online, this is a breakdown of the type of media company whose online presence, or online version is being harvested.
The Charts and Graphs section can show me histograms of clipping volume along a number of axes including the source (URL), keyword, and date. This goes part of the way, but what I really want in order to get some value is the ability to intersect these things. In particular, I want to see keywords over time, locations over time and so on. Of course, it is not surprise that their fee based enterprise version appears to contain the usual trend charts like those that I describe.
In summary (and I want to be up front with the fact that I haven't given enough time to really looking at this service) there are a number of modifications that could be made to the interface that wouldn't compromise the teaser strategy that CustomScoop is going for with this free demo, particularly the rearranging of the navigation by region. The geographic location break down by sources is, I believe, novel in free tools - though this is only free for 2 weeks as a demo. The mixture of source types is confusing. The fact that there are 6, 000 blogs - which blogs are they? how were they picked? - doesn't present the user with enough information in order to judge what to make of the data they are seeing.
I'm sure there will be many regular updates to this tool as CustomScoop gets more and more feedback, so I hope to get back there sometime to give it another go.
I appreciate your review. You've offered some good suggestions. Let me also try to help out with some of your questions.
* We have our own spider that gathers information.
* The Enterprise product is also available for a 2 week free trial (and it does meet many of your requests for trend charts, etc.)
* The blogs selected are primarily political and technical ones. However, we are currently significantly expanding our coverage and hope to have an announcement on that in the not-too-distant future.
* In addition to information we spider, we have the ability to import feeds from other services that offer RSS feeds to allow for an integrated information display. (We also allow RSS and XML exports from out Enterprise product.)
I'll make sure our developers see your other suggestions and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of them offered in the future. Finally, I should note that we're looking at making more free tools available -- we just want to make sure what we provide doesn't undercut our core subscription product, however, as that business has been very succesful for the past 5 years.
Posted by: Chip Griffin | August 05, 2005 at 05:00 PM