News Explorer is a pretty comprehensive news aggregation site created by the European Commission. It shows a number of aggregate views of recent news, including the obligatory geographic view. In addition, it mines the news data for relational information. For example, it can display the names of individuals in the news, relationships to other people and entities, etc. In this regard, it has many similarities with TextMap, though the later also provides subjectivity anlaysis.
Aside from the map, perhaps the most complete news search tool (English language) comes from the UK at http://www.newsnow.co.uk. It will soon break the 30,000 source mark.
NewsNow is in the business of selling their full service with advanced search features so searching here is one word at a time. However, as a browse tool the size of it's crawl, the frequency of updates, and some excellent organization make it hard to beat.
1) Note the hundreds of pre-built news categories (what they call feeds) in the left rail. Often, during breaking news, a category will be created.
2) Each source has a a flag icon next to it to identify the source country.
3) Both mainstream news sources as well as hand-picked blogs. Sites that require a fee or registration are also noted.
For example, here is the "feed" for Peru
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=Peru
and another for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=Pittsburgh+Steelers
Finally, this color coded feed will show you each and every article as it makes its way into the database:
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/livefeed/
and this feed is limited to press releases in the info tech sector.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=Press+Release+Wire
Btw, pages autorefresh every 5 minutes if in an open window.
Posted by: gary price | August 20, 2007 at 04:21 AM