Turn Google News Into an Obituary Page

Morbid thought, I know, but if you're curious about who's died recently, just go to Google News and search for "dies."

http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=dies

More Good Article Tools

I continue to love article tools. We've evolved beyond simple "Email this Article" and "Printer Friendly Version" to article tools that change the way we read, share, and manage articles. I ran across this nice little Article Tool bar on the Chicago Tribune's site. It's not visible in my image, but the "Share" link actually includes Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, MyYahoo, and other bookmark sharing tools (the little animation just stopped on Digg when I screen captured it). When you click on it the link expands to show all the bookmark sites. Very nice.

"Single Page View" hides the side columns while the "Print" view strips the page down to one of the more bare bones printer views I've seen. I'm a little disappointed with the "Reprints" link though. I expected to take me to a form for ordering reprints of that specific article, but instead it took me to a generic form and FAQ about reprints. Something to work on there I guess.

Runaway wrecking ball causes chaos, accident - CNN.com

And how was YOUR day?

Runaway wrecking ball causes chaos, accident - CNN.com

The Art of Article Tools

A great trend we've seen on online newspaper and magazine sites, as well as many other sites that feature article content is the increased use of "Article Tools." Article tools include links or buttons like "Print This, " "Email This," "Increase/Decrease Font Size," etc. Some sites only include one or two (usually "Print" or "Send") while some like the excellent news site The International Herald Tribune go crazy with the concept, including things like "Clip This" for saving articles to your own private area.

I've put together a bunch of examples, which you can see by clicking on the image on the right there. As I mentioned recently regarding Younanimous.com, I have no problem with "clutter" and the more article tools I see the more I think the publisher wants to empower me to read the content the way I want.

Tracking Buzz Around the World

Buzztracker has been around for a while, developed originally in 2002 by Craig Mod, but I just discovered it through the Yahoo! Buzztracker widget. The goal of the site is to show the interconnectedness of news from around the world. It's a pretty simple concept that's very nicely executed (abridged from the the About):

"Buzztracker consists of two types of pages. Daily Indexes and Individual Location Indexes. On the daily index page, you see a list of cities with percentages next to them. The number represents the percentage of news stories that city is associated with for that day.

Locations that appear more often are represented by red circles on the map. The more frequently the cities appear, the larger the circle. Connections between locations are determined by intercontextual referencing in news articles. These connections are represented by lines between locations. The stronger the connection, the darker the line."

Just go check it out. It's cool.

Buzztracker

TechCrunch Compares Article Link Ranking Sites

Great comparison of the article link ranking sites. Such a seemingly simple concept has spawned so many sites. TechCrunch points out the key differences under the auspices of how Digg can improve itself. I think the real result will instead be these alternative sites getting a lot more traffic.

Toward a Better Digg

Pipe Down: Fun with Yahoo! Pipes

Well, I've finished my first Yahoo! Pipe. I decided to create a feed that pulls from several "life hacking" blogs and limits results to posts containing lists of tips (which I often find myself drawn to). I rounded up feeds from a list of popular life hacking blogs like Lifehacker, 37 Signals, and WebWorker Daily and told Yahoo! Pipes to Fetch them. Then I connected that to the Content Analysis operator, and then connected that to a filter. I had to set the filter up to permit only blog post titles that contain keywords common in "Tips" type posts. I chose: "tips, top, some, favorite, best, steps, and ways." This was based on reading through several of the blogs and noting what words commonly appeared in the titles of "tips" type posts.

Lastly, I told it to sort by Publication Date and filter out duplicates. Here's the result:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/xMKQRnW92xGrLKYelvXiAA/run?_render=rss

It worked pretty well. A few non-tip posts made it in, but for the most part it did what I'd hoped. I remain very excited about Yahoo! Pipes and will mess with it as much as time allows. It's still beyond non-techies, but I can see this becoming a powerful tool for Webmasters who want to display targeted content and power news junkies who want to create truly unique "newspapers." Yahoo! Pipes plus a newsfeed aggregator like Netvibes or Protopage equals the world's greatest online newspaper.

A Cloudy Feature

I think tag clouds are pretty cool, but try as I might, I haven't seen much use for them. The problem is that they're usually pretty much the same. The big words are obvious.

Tech tag clouds show "Microsoft," "Google," "Apple," etc.

News tag clouds show "Bush," "Iran," "Iraq," "US," etc.

I've never really felt compelled to click on tags in a tag cloud because the tags are either too general or too boring.

What would be cool, and perhaps someone's done this, is if when you clicked on a tag in a tag cloud, it brought you to a new, more specific tag cloud with related tags. Something LIKE that exists, called Google News Cloud. However, rather than successive mini-clouds, it simply highlights related tags.

I'd like to see something similar to the wonderful Visual Thesaurus tool.