Something new in News
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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Readers sound off on the latest headlines.
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By Chrissy Vick, The Daily News, Jacksonville, N.C.  Sep.
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PHP Magazine has a new pointer to a new article from MySQL Database Handling In PHP.
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This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.
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By Mike Jackson Daily Herald Outdoors Writer  How interesting that a major media outlet suddenly recognized there's money to be made from an outdoor sport.
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PHP Magazine has a new posting today about an article from WebProNews.com concerning a new article - Generate HTML Files With PHP To Reduce The Server Load.
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By Emma D. Sapong, The Buffalo News, N.Y.  Feb.
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There have been some rumors floating around lately about an RNC ad that is being sent to people living in the Bible Belt about how 'liberals' want to "ban the Bible" (what that really means, I don't know, but there you have it).  It ain't a rumor folks, this is U.S. Presidential Campaign 2004, at its finest.
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What's responsible for this welcome news? Longer life expectancies, better driving -- and hurricanes.
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If you are looking for the most interesting fallout from the mutual fund scandals of the past year, don't go looking in old headlines. Look instead at some fairly new court cases.
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The headlines around South Asia
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A listing of news events to watch for in the coming week.
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It seems even a crusty old newshound like me can get burned. My item last week about a couple naming their baby âYahooâ turns out to be a hoax cooked up by a (now-unemployed) Romanian tabloid reporter. Reporters making things up just for a laugh? I am shocked, simply shocked.Â
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After spending a day with the old keyword page, and getting bored with it, I came up with a new way to look at news, something I've not tried before, that might be fun and/or useful http://nytimesriver.com/keywords.html  Since it's likely to change again soon, here's a screen shot. How it works. Every hour, as usual, it does the nytimesriver scan. Every story is linked to in the database undern all the keywords it references. Then the report, in HTML, is prepared, with the keywords in the left column, and links to all the stories in the right colum. The list is sorted by number of references, the keywords with the most references appear at the top of the list.  So today, baseball is the top item, with 15 references. The teams, the Cleveland Indians and Colorado Rockies, rank high. For some reason (heh) the Boston Red Sox don't appear, even though they're still in it, and the Yankees, even though they've been eliminated (yay!) are near the top at position 10.  It's another leaderboard! (Oh shit.) The stories age, and are removed after 24 hours. After all this is news, not olds.  If you have comments, post them under the screen shot, linked above. PS: Note that since the list just started up today, the initial stories, even though some are already 24 hours old, will remain in the queue until tomorrow morning at this time. So the list will be artificially fat today, it'll thin down tomorrow.
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Headlines can tell you both more -- and less -- than they intend.
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Also: Big Bang not the only big bang. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.