In Search of a Better News Aggregator Part 3
This is part 3 of the series which looks for a better news aggregator for Indian Content. Today I have unsubscribed all the news aggregators feeds (Startups.in, Avashya and Indimeme). These aggregators have too many posts than I can read. There are some good posts which get lost in the huge list from these aggregators.
What if some one reads posts for you and summarizes it in 100 words for you? Brijit provides abstracts of most popular articles from over 100 sources including popular magazines like Economist, Time, New Yorker etc. Brijit crowdsources this work. Any one can take up the work listed in Brijit and get paid $5 for text and $8 for audio or video. They also have RSS feeds based on the source of article. So if you read The Economist and don’t want to miss any of their articles, you can subscribe to the abstract feed from Brijit. Unfortunately they don’t provide link to the source of the article from their RSS feed. Currently Brijit is temporarily shut down due to lack of funds. They are no longer taking new abstracts of the news articles, but around 16,000 articles are available online.
Brijit cashes on the fact that there are way too many sources of information and reader don’t want to miss any of articles from their favorite blog or website. Most bloggers do not provide the summary of the post in the beginning. The aggregators take the first few lines of the first paragraph and use that as the abstract of the post. What do you think a Brijit like service for India? I think, such a service should summarize content in English as well as other vernacular languages like Hindi. Will crowdsourcing method work in India? I personally do not think so.
Robert Scoble of Scobleizer reads over 800 feeds and shares interesting news items on google reader with some interesting comments. So from more than 1000 post items, you get to read around 30 to 40 posts which is most relevant to social media and technology. Is there an Indian blogger, who shares his/her reading items consistently?
In both cases a human reader summarizes or shares the most relevant content for you. This is different from the RSS feed aggregation which most Indian News Aggregator follow. What you have the the RSS feed is what you get!
Please read Part 1 and Part 2 in this series and let me know your thoughts.
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Nice article Saad. I have been having a lot of problems to get a proper news in technology & business trends from Indian perspective. Hopefully brijit like service will get introduced soon in India.