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    News Search, Blogs and Feeds: A Toolkit
    News Search, Blogs and Feeds: A Toolkit
    News Search, Blogs and Feeds: A Toolkit
    Ebook316 pages3 hours

    News Search, Blogs and Feeds: A Toolkit

    By Lars Vage and Lars Iselid

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    About this ebook

    This book is about news search and monitoring. Aimed at professionals with a strategic need of monitoring the surrounding world, users with a need to find the best news sources, monitoring services and news search strategies and techniques will benefit from reading this book. The main purpose is to present a practical handbook with an analysis of readily available tools, blending with passages of a theoretical nature. It is also useful for students at LIS programmes and related information programmes and for librarians and information professionals. The authors aim to aid the reader in reaching a greater understanding of the core in news search and monitoring.
    • Presents effective tools to evaluate news search engines and databases
    • Harness the power of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds in online news search and monitoring
    • Learn how to navigate and critically question the news found in the blogosphere
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateSep 27, 2010
    ISBN9781780631813
    News Search, Blogs and Feeds: A Toolkit
    Author

    Lars Vage

    Lars Våge is currently a librarian at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall for the department of Technology and Media. He is responsible for the subject of computer science, electrical engineering, informatics and statistics. Since 2001 he has maintained a blog reporting on search engines on the Internet, Internetbrus.com.

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      Good source of information to help with creating Blogs and RSS feeds

    Book preview

    News Search, Blogs and Feeds - Lars Vage

    writing.

    Preface

    This is a book about searching for news. More specifically, it’s a book about searching for news online. This can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can be understood to mean searching for news that’s been published online, and second, it can also mean searching for news, printed or otherwise, using an online search interface. This book is about both. Mostly it’s about using free news search tools on the web, but it’s also about using professional online services and news monitoring services. However, its scope isn’t limited to searching for news articles. Many interesting stories and comments on stories are published today in blogs, and so we also cover the blogosphere and how you can search for blog posts and discover new blogs with interesting content. Newer additions to the media landscape, such as podcasts and social media, are also investigated in a news-related context.

    Chapter 1 discusses the nature of news search and what we can expect to find using the news search tools. An increasing number of people now use the internet as their first stop for finding news, and news search engines can be instrumental in providing them with a much wider range of stories than ever before.

    In the second chapter we concern ourselves mainly with free news search tools. Here we give an account of how free news search engines have evolved from the mid 1990s onwards. The tragic events that unfolded during September 2001 became the catalyst that gave rise to the rapid development of new and powerful tools for searching news online. Major players in the search engine field realized the necessity of robust, specialized news search engines that could cover a significant proportion of the articles and stories with news value that were published around the world on the web. In this chapter we describe in detail the most popular and useful of the currently available free news search services. The diverse mix of news sources that appear in their results lists are also explored. Google News and other news search engines index not only newspaper sites but also, to a varying degree, broadcast news, news agency material, press release wires and many more specialized information sources. Although these search engines mainly cover news published on the web, some also offer limited search possibilities for printed news. A section on the numerous historical newspaper digitizing projects is also included towards the end of the chapter.

    Chapter 3 is devoted to the fee-based online news services that are available to those willing to pay for news search. Many companies, organizations and even individuals have very urgent information needs that cannot be satisfied with the free tools. In this chapter we describe the many advanced searching facilities that the professional news services offer to their users. The power of the manual indexing that enables much more precise searching is also considered. The main emphasis is on features that can be found within the so-called ‘Big Three’, namely Factiva, Dialog and LexisNexis. Their amazing scope and coverage empower the users of these services to find almost anything that has been published in the printed versions of many of the major news publications. However, we must remember that, for legal reasons, they cannot provide the full text of articles written by freelance journalists. This means that sometimes the conscientious searcher may have to resort to slowly browsing through the pages of publications using a microfilm reader.

    In Chapter 4 we take a look at the various news or media monitoring services that offer convenient business intelligence to stressed professionals. These services provide an easy way out of your informational dilemmas, but can be rather costly to subscribe to. The quality and scope of their monitoring vary considerably and a thorough analysis of what you need and whether they can satisfy your demands is essential. Some of the free news search engines offer keyword-based search monitoring in the form of email alerts and RSS feeds. The professional search services described in Chapter 3 can also be used for monitoring. They are very good at this and will possibly enable you to fine-tune your searches in many more ways than do some of the dedicated monitoring services.

    In Chapter 5 we pause to discuss how you can evaluate different news search tools. It can frequently be difficult for users to compare them and make the right choices, and so we have tried to outline key components of a well-functioning news search environment. Some suggestions for manual evaluation procedures are also presented in this chapter. What is most important for individual users will of course vary, but it is hoped that some general remarks will be of value to most people interested in these questions. If we don’t pay attention to and react to inconsistencies and complain to the search companies, their services will perhaps not evolve in the way they should.

    The explosive growth of blogs during the last decade has changed the web forever, and many interesting stories are now being written by bloggers all over the world. The initially hostile reaction to the blogging phenomenon by professional journalists has given way to a more relaxed relationship and many of the most active and influential bloggers today have a background in the media world. Chapter 6 is about the blogosphere and how to search in blogs and discover new blogs to read. After trying to define what a blog is we attempt to trace both the history of blogs and the evolution of blog search engines. This is followed by an inventory of the most powerful blog search tools that are currently at our disposal, such as Google Blog Search, Bloglines, Technorati, BlogPulse, IceRocket and a few others. Also several large blog directories are mentioned that can be browsed to find blogs on almost any topic.

    If you don’t know what RSS feeds are, or have just heard these words, Chapter 7 is for you. The extraordinary power and versatility of the simple XML format generally referred to as Really Simple Syndication has opened up many interesting possibilities. This is especially true for those with an interest in news-related content. This is because many newspaper and other media sites today publish their material in RSS versions as a complement to the normal web versions. What’s particularly good about RSS is that you can subscribe to these feeds within so-called ‘feed readers’ that can effectively automate a lot of your web browsing for you. RSS is also frequently used to enable monitoring of keyword searches in news and blog search engines, and even in research databases. We describe in detail some of the best RSS readers, such as Google Reader, Bloglines and Netvibes. There is also a section on podcasts, an interesting new development that relies on RSS to deliver video and audio content.

    Currently a lot of the buzz on the internet is focused around what are called social media or social networking services and tools. A prime example of this trend is the emergence of microblog services such as Twitter. In Chapter 8 we look into this new media scene in relation to news search. Many prominent people, bloggers and even journalists now have their own Twitter streams that are followed by their colleagues, friends and fans. As in normal blogs, the twitterers often include links to news stories within their posts. It has become increasingly important to be visible in social media networks, and tools for searching and monitoring this new sphere have evolved rapidly.

    In Chapter 9 we present some concluding remarks, chosen to highlight some of the key points from the preceding chapters. They are presented in the form of advice and recommendations and are not intended to be a full summary of the book. We have also included a list of abbreviations and list of recommended further

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