[Reader-list] Tsunami news on News Rack

[Subramanya Sastry]

the following was a quick response i sent out... fwding the same to the list.

-subbu.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 02:54:51 -0600 (CST)
From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu
To: SPACE <space4change at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Tsunami news on News Rack

> I've followed your News Rack through the reasearch postings. I want to
> know what advantages does News Rack have over Google News and Google
> News Alert, aprt from Google being commercial and News Rack being
> 'free'?

several ...

. long-term archiving
. user-directed classification of content
. long-term, incremental maintainability of the classification system
. collaborative and shared development of the classification system.

google news alert sends you email alerts for keywords that you enter.
now, it works well for one or two keywords.  even then, you have to
have do some post processing for archiving the content and filing it
in folders.

but, anything more involved than this quickly becomes quite complicated
and hard to maintain.  imagine the search phrase below:

(rehabilitation OR R&R OR resettlement OR displacement OR ....) AND
(sardar-sarovar OR ssp OR SSNNL OR sardar sarovar narmada nigam limited
...)

In Newsrack, this would simply be "rehabilitation AND ssp" where these
rehabilitation and ssp are concepts that are maintained separately, and
whenever new terms and phrases are discovered, the concepts are updated,
and the rule itself stays unchanged.

regards,
subbu.