What is Newsodrome?

In my previous post, I wrote about why we started Newsodrome. In this post, I wanted to tell you what Newsodrome can do for you and share some of our excitement.

Newsodrome shows you the most interesting news in your areas of interest. News that matter to you. And it will do that in your familiar, uncluttered newspaper format.
Interested in Cars? Fashion? Video games in general or specifically in Wii? is you favorite sport Baseball or is it Yoga? want the latest in Python development or the latest buzz about Knitting? you can get it all at Newsodrome, up-to-date and from the best online sources.

Powering Newsodrome is a computerized editor. An artificial intelligence that sifts through huge amount of content, classifies it and ranks it. But the automaton's work doesn't end there... behind Newsodrome is our vision of an AI that evolves to offer you better, more interesting news over time. After showing you your newspaper, our computerized editor continues to listen to your feedbacks - articles you liked and disliked, topics you read more than others, news sources that attracted your attention - and it evolves. It learns from your experience and from the experiences of others and over time it will pick on subtle hints that even you might have missed - a writer you tend to read more than others, words and expressions that put you off, specialized topics within your topics of interest that better capture your attention. The end result? your personalized newspaper with the best news the Internet has to offer on your areas of interest.

But... Newsodrome is at a very early stage. We chose to start small - expose only a few selected news topics with a basic AI, keeping things to a minimum and build it from there, basing our expansion decisions on your comments and feedback.

So - stop Google-ing for news. Forget about registering to dozens of blogs. Leave the days of sifting through tons of articles just to find the one article that is of interest to you. Come visit us at Newsodrome instead!

Waiting for your thoughts and ideas.

Welcome to Newsodrome!

News.

For a long time it's been my habit to keep up-to-date with the news. Not the generic top-of-the-world, one-size-fits-all news you find in the large online newspapers, but the news that really matter to me.

At first it was only work-related news. I read news about my company and our product, the latest on my line of work, on people management, on the technological platform that we use, news about my CEO and so much more. Lately, in an "A-HA" moment, I started applying the same news gathering processes on my hobbies, my favorite musicians, authors, celebrities. Joy.

It's really great to see that more and more people contribute their opinions online. They put them in blogs, newsgroups and dedicated websites around the web for everyone to read. Some of these guys truly know what they're talking about and are also a pleasure to read! This means that if you have the time, and know how, you can find top-notch news on any topic on the Internet. Really everything.

I find reading these news both important and fun, even though my news gathering process is quite time consuming and the quality-to-noise ratio online can sometimes be abysmal, requiring a lot of sifting to find the really good stuff.

This also been a constant itch. With so many micro areas-of-interest each and every one of us has, and with so many potential news sources online, how does one find the most interesting articles to fit her unique taste?

When I discuss this issue with colleagues I find one of three common responses.

1. The "Unaware" - he doesn't realize that you can find great news on his specific, personal areas of interest. He settles instead on reading just the really generic news you find in the large online newspapers.
2. The "Casual Reader" - She visits a forum, blog or online magazine discussing her favorite topics, but misses out on interesting stories that appear in other online news-sources. She knows about different websites that discuss her other areas of interest, but can't find the time for the "footwork" required to visit all these different websites.
3. The "Newsoholic" - He reads dozens of blogs, several on each topic of interest. He gets good coverage, but constantly complains that he invests most of his reading-time sifting through less interesting stories in search of the really interesting stuff. When he returns from the weekend, he gets depressed by the amount of news that piles up in his news reader. (Myself, I am a "Newsoholic", but I preach on the amazing world of online journalism to the "Unaware", e.g. most of my acquaintances.)
   

So what might be the solution to these issues? how can the "Unaware" become aware of great pin-pointed content without being too tech-savvy? how can the "Casual reader" get a better coverage without much footwork? how can the "Newsoholic" get the same coverage with less clutter, focusing only on the most interesting news?

I believe we just might have an answer. We call it "Newsodrome" and I'll tell you more about it in our next blog post.