Newsletter

News aggregation and economics

Currently, news websites and newspapers have news for people at the granularity of a day. Headlines are day-specific, and there is no way to decrease your granularity. Say you've been out of touch for a week or a month. I want to just read the major headlines over that week or month. As it is, however, I can only read the last few headlines for the last few days if I want to catch up, and hope that enough information is there to explain what's going on.

Really, what would be nice is, given a timescale (a week, 2 weeks, 13 days, a month, or something), a news service would feed back the most important headlines or news stories sorted by topic that happened over that timescale such that it would be easy to get up to speed on what happened. Even better (but harder): summaries of each issue.

By the way, the above service is totally on my list of things I think would make for a successful startup. If someone gets involved making the above thing, I want to be involved. It shouldn't be that spectacularly hard. I can't imagine it would be much different than the technology that runs the Techmeme family of news websites (Techmeme, memeorandum, Ballbug, and WeSmirch). Seems like a perfect Google App Engine application once they roll out automated job support.

Occasionally news services do this manually for stories when really big stuff happens. I link to two three of those that seem relatively important right now.

• Subprime timeline
• The crisis: A timeline
• New: 5 Easy Pieces