Wouldn’t it be great if someone created a ‘Cliff Notes’1 site for daily tech news? A one ot two sentance summary for everything with buzz – hit the important points and move on. I’m getting too busy to follow all the news sites I have in the past, so I want my information more condensed.
At lunch on Friday, I learned that the reason people were so excited about the Canon 5D was because of the full-frame sensor. I’d seen a bunch of posts about the 5D, but camera posts are ripe with detailed information and I hadn’t bothered to read them because I didn’t have time to delve deeply.
I wish there had been a summary like this:
Canon today released the 5D, a new digital SLR. People are excited about it because it has a full size sensor (no crop like most DSLRs) and is priced at $3300 and previous full size sensor DSLRs cost $5000-7000.
A summary of the PowerMac G5 Quad would have looked something like this:
Apple announced a dual-core, dual-processor 2.5ghz PowerMac G5 that they are calling the ‘Quad’. It is expected to run 70+% faster than the previous top of the line PowerMac G5 and is also expected to be the last PowerPC based PowerMac.
Each post could link to popular news sites for more in-depth information. Perhaps even create a few different “channels” or better yet, tag each post and publish RSS of the tags. A group of editors would review their favorite sources and add the summaries.
What do you think, would you use a site/service like this? Perhaps there is one already that I just don’t know about?
- Alex Notes? [back]
Now that is an RSS feed most all geeks would subscribe to.
It would be cool, but there would have to be a lot of editors. Even /. can’t cover stuff like new cameras.
If there was one that was comprehensive enough, I would use it.
So places like slashdot, wired, gizmodo don’t do that? Too complex of posts?
I suppose I just look at digg for general news and deals, gizmodo, tomshardware and such for new hardware, and the various mac sites for mac news, like applematters, macrumors, etc.
One place that combines all that? Eh, maybe, but I don’t know if we need yet ANOTHER tech gadget/news site.
Digg.com isn’t bad, and for reading Slashdot you may wish to try Alterslash which only shows the top rated comments – I often find these more valuable than the original post. And for gadgets I like Engadget.
I’d definitely use it. My RSS reader is completely overloaded and I’m getting burried in news I have to sift through. I’m pointed at Memeorandum, Slashdot, Techdirt and a bunch of others, but they don’t seem to get to this nice consise format that you’re suggesting. The only trick is getting decent editors.
I usually skim through my RSS feeds – rarely reading the content. That way I see “New iMacs Announced” or something like that. That’s why the speed of FeedLounge is so important – to me, at least.
I generally do the same, but mainly because I don’t want to read 3-4 paragraphs. I think I’d read more items if I could get the meat in a couple sentances.
We agree that speed is vital to a feed reader, that’s why we aren’t fully opening the doors to FeedLounge yet. 🙂
You could do it programatically if you’re willing to sacrifice some quality, using Perl and module Lingua::EN::Summarize.
For instance your post: https://alexking.org/blog/2005/10/10/google-reader/
when fed into the summarize function (with a maxlength of 500) returns:
I figured that this was coming sooner or later. My first response was still along the lines of .ah crap.. 🙂 Since I.ve been working hard on a web based feed reader of my own. There are some similarities in the underlying technologies and basic feature. The two applications have a totally different feel. I.m sure that many people will find the Google approach works for them. I.m also sure that there will be other people (like me) that won.t be satisfied with the user experience. A few others have already said as much.
The periods for punctuation is due to the smart punctuation breaking copy and paste to text.
I wouldn’t personally find that useful.