News aggregators have been around for some time, starting with sites like Drudge Report, breitbart.com and the Huffington Post.
However, with the rise of automated aggregation, far more news sites have become available allowing you to view and filter news and its context in interesting ways.
Daylife provides a different type of news template dependent on the category of the subject being discussed. For instance if the subject is “Barack Obama“, Daylife will not only provide stories, but an extensive collection of images, quotes, videos and more about that person. This style of aggregation provides users with a higher level of context about the subject, adding to the story they are reading.
Ohpan displays news in a scrolling screen, pushing information to the user to passively digest. The site colour categorizes sections of news so it is easy to identify what is being discussed e.g. Sport, Culture etc. The further users interact with the site the more relevant news is made to their preferences – people that are interested in sport will be fed more sports news.
Google also has it’s own news aggregator, displaying a large format home page which can be filtered by specific sections. Google news can also be personalised to suit the readers needs.
Perspective of the editor
Of course all of these sites, as they are automated in nature, miss out on the perspective of the editor. The editor generally gives a human filter, providing direction to a story as it runs it’s course, written in the voice of a publication. Having said this, many key news sites such as BBC news and News.com.au are adding personalisation features to their sites allowing users to place their own filter of relevance on what they’re reading.
Care to comment?
What is your favourite news site? Have you come across any other ways of aggregating news that are worthy of mention?