[Reader-list] NewsRack Updates

[Subramanya Sastry]

Hello everyone,

Here are several updates about NewsRack.

. NewsRack is now multilingualized (as noted in an email earlier last month)

. The news display screens have been changed in several ways.  
  - The Browse page feels a little less cluttered than before. 
  - For each news item, any available news description (or summary) is
    also displayed -- sometimes useful to get a quick flavour of the news 
    article
  - Most significantly, for every news item, NewsRack also displays all the
    other categories that it is classified in.  This is useful in a couple
    of ways.  It serves as a way to cross-reference the item across
    different categories (for example, a news item that is classified under
    nuclear-energy is also classified under cancer; or a news item classified
    under World-Bank is also classified under hydel-projects).  Additionally,
    it indirectly highlights the "importance" of the news item, so to say.
  - This category information for a news item is also displayed when the
    cached news item is displayed.  This allows visitors (via search engines 
    like google) to browse more related news items (i.e. it provides a focused
    entry into NewsRack, or put another way, for "directed browsing" ...)

. NewsRack's feeds (or results) are now being used (or linked from) the
  following websites.
    - http://www.tsunamiindia.org
    - http://www.narmada.org/pressclippings.html
    - http://narmada.aidindia.org
    - http://www.indiawaterportal.org/news.html
    - http://www.cacim.net
    - http://www.asianpeoplesforum.net
  I either personally know the people involved in running the above sites
  or I myself happen to administer a couple of them.  But, despite that, the 
  use of NewsRack on the above sites should be an indicator of the utilities 
  NewsRack's work can be put to.

. In terms of daily visitors, access log statistics show that as of today,
  about 50 unique visitors access NewsRack every day, about a third of whom
  are visitors from Google.  I do not know the exact number, but a significant 
  number of all total accesses (almost half) are for RSS feeds (those that are 
  generated for NewsRack categories or those that are generated by NewsRack 
  crawlers for newspapers like Deccan Herald, Business Standard, etc.)

. The backend of NewsRack is now fairly stable and I have addressed a couple
  of scalability issues.  But, there are still several scalability issues
  that remain to be addressed.

. In the course of the last several months, I have personally set up several 
  profiles on NewsRack (a) to showcase the versatility of NewsRack (b) and to
  help individuals/organizations to be able to monitor news of their interest.
  I have done this on a somewhat adhoc basis as and when time is available.
  I would say that almost 75% of profiles on NewsRack today have been set up
  by me.

. NewsRack has ceased to be a single-person project at this time, and while I
  have had several offers from people to work on various aspects of the 
  project, none of them have materialized as yet, but I remain hopeful :-)

. There is a strong likelihood that an M.Tech student from IIT-Bombay is going
  to be working on NewsRack-related projects for the M.Tech thesis/project 
  under the guidance of Prof.Om Damani in the CS Dept there.  Last year, an
  undergraduate student from Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad had been directed 
  by Om Damni to me to work on NewsRack.  So far, Jai is the only other person
  who has contributed any code to NewsRack directly.

That is all for now.

Subbu.