Creating a global social news platform: news and people
We at Newstin believe there is much in the world that might bind us together – if we could bring it to light. If we could find that common ground, then we could overcome the differences that threaten to drive us apart. At Newstin we’ve set out to organize the world of information into topic categories. Through topics Internet readers can find what they are looking for and then connect with others who share their interests. But we want people to feel they can reach out beyond their own language, too – we want them to understand and share their thoughts without language barriers. That’s our ambition and how we want news to connect people and create a global social news platform. So read on if you want to know:
what we stand for,
the challenges we face, and
how we plan to create a global social news platform.
What we stand for: the Newstin mission
At Newstin we see it as our mission to make the world a better place by providing a platform where people can connect. Our mantra – “all the news, for all the world” – means that we aspire to depth of coverage and diversity of sources across languages. There are three forces at work in the world of Internet news we at Newstin must aim to achieve this: tabloidization, ghettoization, and unilateralism.
Tabloidization
Overwhelmed by the chaos of information on the Internet, many news readers settle on the tabloid presentation of top stories. We at Newstin organize the news into more than 650,000 (the number is growing everyday) categories in an easy-to-navigate NewstinMap. We guarantee that in the 30 seconds you might spend reading headlines you’re only half interested in on your usual news site, you’ll be able to find detailed information on a subject of interest to you at Newstin.com, bookmark it and be reading an article that interests you on a much deeper level in no time. After all, once you have a map, it makes it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for – you can go straight to where you want to be and avoid wandering around aimlessly. We think when you try using the NewstinMap to navigate around the news universe, you’ll find it’s a real eye-opener.
And what about keyword searching for the news you need? Well, it can be pretty hard considering that, by its very nature, news isn’t something you look for with pinpoint precision. News is truly part of the semantic Web, where navigating replaces searching and where organizing according to the context of an article replaces the less effective keyword search that is useful only when you know what you are looking for. That is why our multi-lingual taxonomy center – one of the largest in the world – organizes the news based on the way you think: according to the topic categories that interest you. If you want to make sure we do it right, you too can become an editor for a specific category or make comments. And we hope your participation will last longer than the lifespan of a news article; we hope it’ll be the beginning of a journey of discovery with others brought together in that community of interest.
Ghettoization
How could we fulfill our ambition to provide you with the long tail of news if we didn’t enable you to access to everything, regardless of language? With our patent technology, we have sought to challenge the ghettoization of news by creating truly global communities of interest. Once you’ve identified your topic, you can read – in your own native tongue – what the press is saying in 10 other languages on that same topic.
Whether you’re in business and looking to get that critical edge by unearthing the innovation your competition is working on in another part of the world, or you’re doing research and want to be truly comprehensive, or perhaps you’re just one of the world’s 750 million regular Internet news readers wanting a better perspective on another part of the world, we invite you to expand your horizons and experience our cross-language navigation. If you are a polyglot, you might make do the multi-language tools that are out there and operate in a variety of language ghettos. But for those of us who know one or only a handful of languages, having the ability to actually navigate across languages is essential for reading what will soon be a predominance of non-English language Internet news.
Unilateralism
Unilateralism threatens peace even more than ghettoization because it attempts to impose a single view of the world. We often don’t realize how much we’re subject to news-source hegemony. The reality is that the Internet news is more unilateral than it should be, when we consider our ability to access so many different sources. It’s as if we kept going to the biggest bookstore in the universe and buying books by the same author. And even if we had the time to constantly look up new sources, who could cull through them all? That’s why we at Newstin have created the one-stop news shop. Think of Newstin.com as the Amazon or iTunes of news, the long tail. It gives you a chance to experience the diversity of views that the world has to offer, not just the brashest of the media titans’ offerings, though we’ve got plenty of that too if you want it.
We track more than 150,000 sources, including news services, blogs and press releases. We also implement a process of duplication analysis and consolidate sources with similar stories so you only read the same published story once. If our spider has missed a source you’re familiar with or you think we’re covering something we shouldn’t, . After all, there’s junk as well as gems on the Internet and our goal is to make sure you discover the gems you’re looking for instead of wasting your time on junk.
The Challenges
We’ve set ourselves a gargantuan task and there are many stumbling blocks to deal with. We’ve overcome some of them through years of development, and others are ahead of us in some areas. Providing an alternative approach to news, blogs and social networks means there will be entrenched interests combating against us. Here are the weapons we use in our battles, the limits they have and how you can help us.
The weapon against tabloidization: Taxonomy
Our semantic organization analyzes the entire meaning of an article, searching for certain words and rules that can trigger our complex organizational methods, so if our constantly vigilant team has missed any or might add a key category please . It is bound to happen when you have one of the world’s most comprehensive taxonomies for organizing Internet news – especially when you are increasing its scope daily. We have a multi-disciplinary team of native speaking technologists, linguists and library scientists all who have a passion for getting it right. Nonetheless, when you have to organize a quarter of a million articles daily into 650,000 categories across 10 languages, mistakes can be made.
The weapon against ghettoization: Cross-language Navigation
Giving you a chance to read a quarter of a million articles a day in 10 different languages by providing you translations on the fly is never going to work perfectly. Our cross-language navigation is something unique in the world, allowing you to scale otherwise impossible language barriers. The idea is to provide you with a general sense of the way the news is being reported on the topic you have chosen. If you discover the article is essential reading you can order a professional translation. Machine translation is not Newstin’s core technology, but a third party solution. We use best-of-breed technology for this. We are always on the look out for better ways of providing translations for you, so feel free to and help us in this Tower-of-Babel challenge.
The weapon against unilateralism: Source Discovery
Some sources may be given higher or lower priority than they deserve. Some of them might not be worth listing. There may even be sources we haven’t discovered yet. We may have 15 times as many sources as some of our main competitors, but the ever-expanding number of Internet sources is tremendous and our head start doesn’t make us any less dedicated to continually discovering sources and listening to your . We strive to be a responsible publisher and we know that just because something is published on the Internet doesn’t necessarily mean it warrants attention. While we’re not a product of citizen journalism, we are happy that the Internet allows easy dialogue with our readers so we can continuously use their input to improve our algorithms.
The Global Social News Platform
By creating a map of the news we’re trying to create a map of the world of ideas. Like any map that is fresh and new our efforts can show people places to both explore and inhabit. When people explored new worlds in the last millennium they created communities based on shared interests. In the same way we’re inviting people to found communities of interest around shared ideas. To explore the world of ideas, free of barriers. Newstin is about news and people. It’s a platform for people around the world to connect through news. Not all our social features are available yet but since we’re a platform we’re not planning to be the only means of transport in your explorations. We’re looking to create strategic relationships with the various networks that are already well-suited means of travel for the Internet globe-trotter. We're not so concerned how you get there, we just want to call your attention to all the other people you haven’t yet met who share your interests.
