Web filtered by humans, not bots
We've been saying for years that news sites shouldn't be afraid to link to the competition — and now Cnet has taken that to the logical extreme, with an entire new section devoting to highlighting the best technology news coverage on the Web.
News.com Extra even has the clever tagline, "The Web filtered by humans, not bots" — a nice jab at automated aggregators like Google News.
A quick look at this immediately shows the advantage over a site like Google News (compare its technology section) in the quality of the story selection, though Google News is still superior when it comes to depth.
But it also becomes clear pretty quick that when it comes to the main stories, this page offers users a better experience than News.com's own home page, by offering readers their headline along with other's angles on the same story. It'd be pretty daring, though, for a news site to list competitor's headlines right under its own on its home page.
News.com Extra also has two other features worth noting: automated headline feeds for international, national, sports, business and entertainment news; and a Weblog-like column called "Missing links" that highlights offbeat stories from around the Web.
CNet is also, by the way, testing out the beta of a new page called News Around the Web, which is much more similar to Google News in that its automated. It doesn't attempt to pick the top stories, though, like Google News -- it leaves that to the humans behind News.com Extra. Instead, it lets you see headlines by site, company or topic. The company and topic searches are what's really valuable -- click on Apple and you'll get a list of headlines and links from stories across the Web about Apple.
Jul 09, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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