Newstin Weblog

As an advanced webmaster, you might want to integrate news headlines from Newstin RSS directly through PHP script on your site. To make things easier, you might want to look for a solution that is already been written instead of building from zero.

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Widely used tool is Magpie RSS. Don’t worry, it wont take any glitter out of your site, but it can take any RSS feed and paste it into a page in any way you need it. It basically takes a remote feed and converts it into an array of variables you can easily use in PHP code. It is very simple, has no extra stuff, only defines couple of new functions. That’s why Magpie is ideal tool to integrate into any PHP based application. A very nice article explaining how to use Magpie can be found here. Magpie requires basic knowledge of PHP and ability to make changes into the PHP code.

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Magpie is able to cache feeds as well. You can define the time interval in which the feed is cached. This results in minimal load on your server with high number of requests coming to your site.

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This awesome tool doesn’t need to be installed nor configured, since it consists of few functions put into a php file. All you need to do is to call for it to be included in a php script.

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Magpie is a simple, no-load, GPL tool that can display Newstin RSS feeds on your site without unnecessary hassle of installing and configuring scripts with interfaces. It can be integrated with almost any existing php solutions within minutes. Thumbs up for Magpie!

With the new launch of Newstin’s front end we will also be soliciting as well as accepting advertisement placement offers. If you are looking for a great way to gain additional exposure for your company, or even if you are a blogger and want to add a simple text link to our website please get in contact with us and lets talk about a way to find placement on one of our 650,000 topical pages.

One of the major benefits of advertising with Newstin is our ability to pinpoint a very specific target audience. Due to the fact that we organize our news by category enables us to fine tune the news categories as well as attract a readership that is interested in a very specific set of information.

Whether our readers come from a search engine (which finds our pages via search words) or directly they ultimately end up on a page that is specific to their content needs, which goes hand in hand with the need of any advertiser.

Maybe you are an international company or aspiring to gain an international audience, with our cross language navigation it is also now possible to advertise to our topic specific audience in the regions of the world you wish to reach. Do you need to reach an audience in countries that cover, English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Czech, Arabic, Portuguese or Chinese.

Shoot us an email and let us help you find the best way to advertise on the first cross language news site in the world.

With our traffic and website users constantly growing, NewsTin is overwhelmingly happy to announce that we have reached 1 million page visits for the last month. And this does not even include the thousands of regular feed subscribers.

This important milestone comes right before our introduction of new features, tools and overall portal re-design, which you will be able to see by the middle of March.

We look forward to growing our services and products to match the needs of our users as we move along this exciting path of development.

Thank you to all of our users, which span 200 different countries across the globe, for their continued use and interest in Newstin.com!

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

I’m Jeremy Lopez, director of business development at Newstin.

Newstin is a unique, semantic and cross-language information retrieval engine with metadata tagging and data visualization capabilities.

Newstin pulls content from more than 150,000 global sources in ten different language publications; organizing this content into over 650,000 topical categories.

Major features include ‘across language navigation with integrated translation’, ‘text mining,’ and ‘semantic contextual searching’.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Our new feature ‘Across language commenting’ – coming soon. If a reporter puts out a story in English and someone from Russia translates and reads this story and then decides to comment on it in Russian, the reporter will have the tools on the page to be able to have the Russian comment translated back into English.

With our news retrieval system we have collected and organized news in such a way that you do not have to speak Russian in order to find, say, Russian news on computer and software supplies.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

There is a whole lot more to come. We are currently in the process of re-designing the site for easier use and enhanced features.

A few of the major features that will be functioning by the beginning of Q2 are:

1. Social Newstin - personal accounts, editable categories
2. Commenting outside of publishing, ability to create discussion groups for editors, cross language commenting
3. Sentiment analysis - tone of the story and category will be displayed

4) Why are you doing this?

News is one of the highest growth categories on the internet but the world is stuck in cultural and linguistic silos, the reason is because there is no one source that organizes it all.

If the world’s web newsreaders were to cross language and cultural borders with ease so that there were no need for these linguistic barriers then we would suddenly be all on the same page.

We have usage from 193 countries already and we are trying to put up local domains to bring more access from each of them so they don’t have to first navigate with an English site.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Newstin is a free service! We will be implementing an upgraded version in the future with additional tools and access. This will be a more professionally focused service with a cost.

6) How will you make it pay?

Advertising, sponsorships, premium service in the future…to name a few.

You can also find this publication at: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2008/02/11/innovations-in-journalism-newstin/

In the coming months we will be launching a new aspect to our news site, not to give it all away before the launch I will only be able to wet your appetite.

The world wide web has thousands of services for news, social networking and commenting that gives users the ability to connect via topics, ideas or even confrontation. One can play scrabble with another half way around the world via facebook or enter into discussions on news articles with like/non-like minded people through various news and aggregation services. With all these great technologies and services coming out there is still one thing that people cannot do. All of these services say the same thing, “connect with people from around the world,” when the slogan should really say “connect with people around the world…that speak the same language as you.” How can one truly see into the thought process and idealism of others and truly appreciate the commentary when a single language has to be used…this dilemma leaves many people without a say or even worse left unheard.

Newstin’s upcoming social features will not be hindered by the same issue as other products representing global capacities…LANGUAGES, we are breaking down the language barriers.

Watch our blog for updates as to when Newstin Social will be revealed.

We are glad to have Joey Kilrain from Gigapixel Creative in the office this week to help us hammer out some of the the final points to our site re-design. Joey is the creative director behind the new look that Newstin will display in the near future.

We have been working with GigaPixel over the past 6 months where we have had tremendous insight and help from their very motivated, experienced and passionate team.

Gigapixel, www.gigapixelcreative.com, is a New York based strategic design & development company.

With the continued help and developing partnership between Gigapixel and ourselves we will be launching our new look and social features in the months to come. Watch out for the new Newstin!

The new year is here so I would like to review the main events and accomplishments of NewsTin in 2007 and invite everybody to add everything I might have forgotten!

 
* we moved to a new beautiful office,

* we came up with new design that was so far ahead from what we had before,

* NewsTin opened an office in Los Altos, California

* we introduced entities to our system aside from our topical categories and even though we are still dealing with entity extraction issues, the whole project has been very successful so far,

* we were constantly improving our front end, working on our existing features and introducing new ones, such as “Send to a friend” feature or social bookmarking

* we welcomed new colleagues to our taxonomy development and IT team - Stella Yu, Kamila Hassanova, Giovanni Mina, Vladimir Meier, Michal Kubrt, Lukas Stanek

* NewsTin participated in the numerous conferences such as Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Denver, European Text Analytics Summit in Amsterdam, 3rd Annual Text Analytics Summit in Boston, the BOBCATSSS Symposium in Prague, The Hatchery All investors Panel in New York City, Annual Meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics in Prague, etc.

And what are we up to in 2008?

 
* we currently deal with around 26.000 topical categories in each of our 11 language editions - we are preparing changes in the taxonomy structure in order to make it easier to understand and way more intuitive to use

* we manage about 27.000 personal name entities and about 16.000 corporate name entities as well and these numbers are going to grow fast

- we are planning on including as many relevant persons and companies as we can and we have a big part of the world to cover:-)

* we are looking forward to the new revolutionary design of our webpage and it looks like it will be worth the wait, the new front end will be much more dynamic, interactive and user friendly

* we will soon introduce sentiment analysis and event extraction that should both become interesting tools for users who go to NewsTin just to quickly check out the news as well as for professional users who use NewsTin as an open source intelligence resource

* we will be implementing number of social features but I will keep them secret for now and let our product development manager Pavel Dyurych reveal them one by one:-)

Let’s see next December how it all went and turned out.

I wish happy holidays and an awesome new year to all our users and a successful 2008 full of hard but fruitful work to the NewsTin team!:-)

Here are a few pictures of the teams “having some fun” portion of the work requirements we endeavor here at Newstin. If possible we like to keep it light and breezy, having as much fun along the way as possible. From our team to you…Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Vilem, Micha, Honza and Jan taking advantage of the wonderful spread! That was some good eatin.

Teams that eat and drink together, “develop cross-language semantic information retrieval systems” better together.

Pavel enjoying a bit o’ Pita…

Getting everyone gathered up for the team photo always seems to be a task in itself… I believe it only took 15 minutes to accomplish this chore.

Its always a happy time when the beverages arrive!

Thank you to all of our users for a very positive and successful year in 2007. We look forward to bringing you all the best of what we have to offer in 2008. Cheers!

If you read Newstin on the daily basis, you will find My Newstin very useful feature to organize and personalize the world of news according to your needs. This tool helps you to save shortcuts to your favorite Newstin items and keep them in one place always accessible from any Newstin page. It’s not necessary to be registered to use MY NEWSTIN but if you want to keep your favorites safe and to be able to access them from different computers, please, register. (It takes less a minute to register with Newstin.)
What can you save? You can save your favorite topics, search queries and your customized categories. For example, if you want to read news about “Plasma TV Sets” you can save this topic in MY NEWSTIN simply by clicking +MY NEWSTIN button. “Plasma TV sets” will be added to MY NEWSTIN under the “topics” folder. Your favorite topic will be saved there until you remove it by clicking -MY NEWSTIN button.
Let me tell you a little secret. You will be able to add news sources and blogs to MY NEWSTIN soon. Sounds good, does  it not?

New version launched today. With the new version 2 major updates provide added value on our front end.

1. Article “detail” page: We now provide an article analyzer within our article detail page to give an overview of the article under the following categories;

a. What is this article about

b. Geography

c. What companies/organizations are involved

d. Who was mentioned in the article
e. Related articles link (allows you to see other articles written on the same topic from different sources)

f. Bookmark individual stories
2. “My Newstin” section now organizes your saved topics in 3 different formats:

a. My topics (categories that are pre-developed within the system)

b. My search queries (any saved keyword searches performed by you)

c. My custom (combination of categories by user)

Coming soon: the ability to bookmark stories with regional bookmarks. For example people reading russian stories who wish to bookmark them will be able to bookmark them with Yandex and others.