Danwei used its recent revamp to introduce a tool to "aggregate" or collect the news. On its home page, it is called "From the Web", but it is much easier to use their RSS-feed into your RSS-reader.
Since the aggregators are slowly replacing the traditional media in the way how people try to get some order in the chaotic online publishing business, it makes sense to have a closer look at it. I will later use my own selection of aggregators to explain how in my case my dragnet fishes up the information I want from the internet.
There are roughly three kinds of aggregator. There are the hand-picked ones, like those by Chinabiz (only China business) or Global Voices (only weblogs). Then there are the automated ones, says the Google News and Yahoo News. Those you can manipulate them up to a certain degree, for example you can select news on key words like "Shanghai" or "search engines", but it is basically algorithms, apart from the initial selection of media that is being searched.
Third is a hybrid of those two and you find an example at your left hand side. It is my selection of feeds I use on my RSS-reader and would include feeds from handpicked sources and automated ones.
Are you still there?
This is my radar for China-related news in English. Not the China Daily and of course not the South China Morning Post, since you cannot even link to them. The selection can go wrong in two ways. First, there are too many "doubles" or "triples" in the selection. That means that the same article shows up more than once. So, at this stage I only add aggregators that give information I do not get from others. Danwei's aggregator is still in the waiting room, but the one from Jongo I kicked out. They did not add value to my selection and were not really using authoritative and identifiable sources.
The other problems is that I might miss important news. In China, because of the availability of so much information, you need to make a selection. So, every now and then I discover I'm missing a source or subject I find important. That means, you have to try and include those sources in your RSS-reader.
In the column on your left hand side, you find my selection of China-news. I do have other hobbies, but did excluded them from this tool, because that cater really for another audience. According to my RSS-reader I now monitor 222 feeds and that is after a major cleaning operation.
Why did I write this piece? Because I think it is important you know how I select my news. In the past that was all to obvious and you could mention a few big media. Now, that process has been much more diluted, and knowing how other select their news is - at least for me - an important issue.
How does your radar screen look like?
3 comments:
I am also a collector of information on China on a daily basis. ChinaBiz as an aggregator does not do well simply because it is not automatically updated. Look in IT and the first two stories are this year and then you go back a year. If ChinaBiz thinks there only two stories on IT in China this year then it simply is not worth following seriously.
Gareth Powell
You could pick up the SCMP 'media' stories as mirrored at the UCLA site by Tom Plate's students
Linkname: AsiaMedia
URL: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/
and
Linkname: more on east asia »
URL: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/eastasia.asp
@Gareth I agree that Chinabiz is doing very bad in following different industries: there are much better services for that. But I use it for a quick glance on what is happening overall and pick up one or two stories per day that are worthwhile.
@AsiaMedia: The service did not have RSS-feeds for a long time and was difficult to follow. Now there are, but for example in the case of the East Asia feed, they cover mostly stories I'm not interested in and would mess up my "China-reader". Whenever I pick up SCMP-stories (and that happens at least once or twice a month) they mostly come through Asia Media, through one of the search engines that notice it.
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