About Anything » newsflashr.com http://www.alstevens.org The personal blog of Al Stevens. Focus is overrated. Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:17:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 newsflashr — News the way it should be. In a glance, in depth. http://www.alstevens.org/2008/03/10/newsflashr-news-the-way-it-should-be-in-a-glance-in-depth/ http://www.alstevens.org/2008/03/10/newsflashr-news-the-way-it-should-be-in-a-glance-in-depth/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:02:27 +0000 Al Stevens http://www.alstevens.org/2008/03/10/newsflashr-news-the-way-it-should-be-in-a-glance-in-depth/ Hiawatha Bray raved in the Boston Globe today about newsflashr, a site that ranks newsfeeds transparently. I tried it and left it up in a Firefox tab all day. It’s effectiveness is a direct result of it’s simplicity. Select one of the topics: world, business, elections 08, technology, science, health, showbiz or sports and you get a cloud of “hot news topics” where, according to Gal Arav, the company founder:

- the size of the hot news topics corresponds to the number of news headlines
- the color of the hot news topics corresponds to their freshness

At a glance, you can see what’s going on. Today, under politics, “prostitution ring” was growing larger and staying red. One click and I was reading all about Spitzer (aka Client 9).

I’ve been a fan of Google reader until now, but this wins hands down. The “newsflashr cloud” is a much higher bandwidth way to see what’s happening. For the traditionalists, they have a feeds view, but I can’t see why anyone would use it.
Their site is www.newsflashr.com

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