sean.blog

I like to try and keep up with the news. I like to know what is going on in the world. I want my news to be full featured, easy to see and comprehensive. I am going on a hunt, not for the Frill Shark as the title of this post suggests, but for a news site that allows me to find the best view of the news. I am going to use the recent photographing of the Frill Shark as my sample news topic, and I have entered the search term “Frill Shark” into some news sites to see what I come up with.

Wikinews
CNN
Google News
Newsvine
Daylife
Yahoo News
MSN News
Technorati
Gather.com
Inform.com
Topix.net

This assortment of sites runs the gambit from traditional news outlets, to news aggregators, to blog search engines. Out of all of these, I found three sites that give a pretty good picture of the recent Frill Shark encounter in Japan. The information from Daylife, Inform.com, and Topix.net seemed to cover the event the best. A few sites like Gather.com and MSNBC did return any results to the search.

Daylife is a newcomer to the news aggregator arena. The site launched to somewhat of mixed reviews due to a lack of interactivity and RSS feeds. The site does do a nice job of combining news, blogs, and pictures on a single news or search results page. They don’t currently offer video’s on the news page, a pretty important part of news I think. Daylife has this idea of Players, where they take names or people or places from the articles in a search and provide links to the related news pages. This does provides some interesting results in my Frill Shark search, showing Hawaii but not Japan. I like the results of the Frill Shark search using Daylife. The inclusion of the various articles and the pictures is nice, and the layout is pleasant. I got slightly better results by searching for “Frill Shark” with the quotes.

Inform.com is a much more mature web news aggregator. The search results for Frill Shark are pretty sparse on Inform, but you can click the related stories link to be presented with a very nice overview of the news relating to the topic. Traditional news as well as blogs are covered. Inform is the opposite of Daylife, they include video but not pictures. The news presentation on Inform is very text based, but it does seem to give a good, if plain, overview of a topic.

Topix.net provides the most plain search results. It is focused just on the news. No pictures or video links are included in the search results, and you cannot get to a nice overview page like you can with Inform. While the results were good on Topix I was not terribly impressed with the presentation.

I wanted to mention Newsvine. I really do like the Newsvine site, and I think it offers a great opportunity for people to become publishers and distributors of information. The ability to submit not only links, but user written commentary and articles makes Newsvine a pretty special place. The problem I have with Newsvine is that it sometimes feels like I am missing the news. They have built a gigantic op/ed page with some great links to news articles. I wanted Newsvine to give me the best results, but I get disappointed with Newsvine by the one thing I like about it so much…weird.

From these brief results I have decided that I like the looks of Daylife the best fit for me. I think the site has some work to do, and it does sound like some new things are on the way. It still provides a nice looking and complete picture of the news I am after. I am going to start using Daylife as my source of news, certainly when I want more details on something that I have heard or seen. Now I just need to train myself to stop clicking the CNN button.