Joho the Blog
|
|
|
April 28, 2005
Yahoo News has been redesigned for the better. Unlike Google News, it doesn't automatically figure out what's news by looking at thousands of news sources. Instead, it defaults to showing you the news from one of six major news sources, one source at a time, although you can add any RSS feed as a new source. I like the fact that at Google you're likely to find an Indian or Chinese newspaper's version of, say, an American political story, but Yahoo — which is configurable, while Google News is not — presents more stories on a single page than Google does. If you want to see how Yahoo manages the problem of compressing more news stories per square inch of screen real estate, hover over any of the news links for a second or two...
Cool! [Technorati tags: yahoo google news] Posted
by D. Weinberger at April 28, 2005 07:11 AM
|
Comments
How exactly do you add sources that are not already listed there? It seems you are able to add sources from their preconfigured list but no more.
I checked out the claim that adding sources to my.yahoo would add them to yahoo news. Seemingly not true. I added my own blogs plus some other stuff, and I can figure out no way to add them to Yahoo News. There seems to be no help for this although the claim is made that adding sources to my.yahoo makes them available for Yahoo News.
I would be more impressed if I could add the sources I want. As it is now, I feel constrained to the Yahoo list which is substantially more limited than the Google list.
Posted by: Bud Gibson | April 28, 2005 07:57 AM
Damn. Did I fall for hype? Misunderstand them? I have to run to a meeting so I can't check it out. But see http://my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/index.html Thanks for the alert...
Posted by: David Weinberger | April 28, 2005 08:17 AM
If a source isn't in their default list, but has an RSS feed, it's very easy to add it, but you're right that their list is more limited. Then again, if there is an RSS feed, you can add it as a Livelink in the Firefox browser and bypass Yahoo altogether.
Posted by: Jody | April 28, 2005 09:35 AM
"If a source isn't in their default list, but has an RSS feed, it's very easy to add it, but you're right that their list is more limited. Then again, if there is an RSS feed, you can add it as a Livelink in the Firefox browser and bypass Yahoo altogether."
How, though? I have really tried. I see nowhere to do it. I'll send them a note.
Posted by: Bud Gibson | April 28, 2005 01:23 PM
David, I appreciate the RSS feed feature, if it works, but aren’t you a little off-target to say “Yahoo [is] configurable, while Google News is not”? The latest iteration of Google News is indeed configurable, though perhaps not in the ways you want.
Posted by: AKMA | April 28, 2005 01:50 PM
The presence of Indian and Chinese etc. etc. news sources are actually a source of disappointment for me. Not because they're there, but because they feed of the same Reuters and AP stories that all the other newspapers feed off too. When you look at the thousands of news sources on major news I find them depressingly similar in content, and therefore in opinion.
Posted by: Claus Dahl | April 28, 2005 03:12 PM
AKMA, I'm 100% confident you're right. I missed the google news configurability.
Claus, too true. That's why we have http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/
Posted by: David Weinberger | April 28, 2005 08:54 PM