News You Choose (Meta-NewsFilter)

August 2, 2005 9:17 PM

CommonTimes must be what you'd get if you combined Google News, Del.icio.us and Flickr Groups: a participatory news site where citizens become editors. The front page contents are determined by the news stories which users link to most frequently. Adding stories is easy: just save them off the home page or use the handy bookmarklet to post them to your channel. There is an experimental AJAX news browser derived from the AJAX Director, an optional Greasemonkey script for adding stories from Bloglines and an initial set of REST APIs for remixing the site. CommonTimes is part of the CommonMedia network, the folks who released CommonBits and CommonTunes (earlier MF link) and recently wrote Be The Media on emerging tools for citizen journalists.
posted by hybernaut (14 comments total)

News companies insist that America doesn't like its news to be about relevant things. So obviously this is doomed to fail.
posted by 517 at 9:48 PM on August 2, 2005

I don't know, it's kind of chaotic. I feel like I need an about page to walk me through the various parts and explain how to glean some information from the the dense text.
posted by mathowie at 10:04 PM on August 2, 2005

Well I already found an article about Carter talking on recent things, I doubt I would have seen it otherwise considering that he's a peace loving flower smelling damn hippy swedish loving dirtbag democrat. Where do these people get off. Knowledge is power. Ok kids I'm off to bed talk amongst yourselves.
posted by nervousfritz at 10:21 PM on August 2, 2005

My first reaction was "shit, another echo chamber". On the other hand, I found a bunch of interesting articles (like this one on china)
posted by Tlogmer at 10:52 PM on August 2, 2005

Another good article (on living in israel). Looks like a solution to newsfilter.
posted by Tlogmer at 11:00 PM on August 2, 2005

Yikes! Nice concept, but could use some visual tweaking. Definitely has potential.
posted by shoepal at 11:09 PM on August 2, 2005

With the caveat that my thoughts on this have already been contradicted by the people above who've used this to find interesting stories, I'm worried that this might lead to the burying of less "well known" news. Already, that front page is quite US / War-On-Terror centric. But sometimes the most important events are happening way off the mainstream US radar, and I don't see how this site can help fix that, given that the prominence of stories is based on how many people link to them. If a plane crashes, killing 50 people, in Florida, I'm sure the story will shoot straight to the top. If a plane crashes, killing 50 people, in Mali, I doubt it would get any more prominence here than it would on any other news source. All we end up with are the typical "talking points", and the system could be quite easily gamed.

Having said that, all this applies only to that "front page", I suppose. It looks like a great resource if you start diving deeper into the tags.
posted by Jimbob at 11:38 PM on August 2, 2005

Seems like a brilliant idea. Pretty much what I've been looking for. I'd agree with jimbob that it's a bit UScentric (the front page anyway. I guess that's the nature of the beast though - American stories are simply more popular.

I spent 15 minutes finding some African news stories and saving them - they didn't seem to show up though even though I'm logged in and using the "save to commontimes" link. Anyone any idea why that could be?
posted by twistedonion at 2:21 AM on August 3, 2005

Thanks for such great feedback everyone.

TwistedOnion - your stories are there now. We use a special process for approving sources we haven't seen before. It takes a little longer.
posted by commonmedia at 2:34 AM on August 3, 2005

brilliant commonmedia, cheers for letting me know. That makes sense.
posted by twistedonion at 3:17 AM on August 3, 2005

Hey now, this is pretty cool. Thanks hybernaut.
posted by BoringPostcards at 4:21 AM on August 3, 2005

Here's a question for all you seasoned MeFi NewsFilter veterans. So many news sources require bogus, worthless, annoying "registration", imagining that they're harvesting tons of valuable marketing information. Bugmenot comes in handy, but I hate to post links to CommonTimes which lead readers to a reg-gate.

I'm aware of the NY Times Link Generator which does an end-around of the reg gateway. And BugMeNot sure comes in handy. I'm also tagging with "reglink" where appropriate.

Any other suggestions for dealing with reg-required links?
posted by hybernaut at 6:16 AM on August 3, 2005

Ah, once again I posted a question in a thread that should have been in AskMeFi.

Moved.
posted by hybernaut at 6:44 AM on August 3, 2005

Well, predictably, I will put in a plug for my own newsbot and also for Findory. Both try to do pretty much the same thing as CommonTimes (i.e. news filtering) using implicit ratings (findory exclusively so). My own stats over the last 3+ years of running memigo show that an overwhelming majority of people would rather just read a news article than rate/save/highlight it. The problem with relying on user-entered meta-data is that the users have to actually, er, enter it and that just doesn't work --just wait until people get tired of tagging everything under the sun...
posted by costas at 6:45 AM on August 3, 2005