Via Jim Elve at BlogsCanada, I discovered NealeNews, compiled by Brian Neale. I see that he’s inexplicably emulating the format of the very popular and influential Drudge Report. I always thought that the Drudge Report looked like a cross between the National Enquirer and MyFirstWebSite©.
While NealeNews is an admirable pursuit, I’m not sure what it offers that Google News doesn’t. Plus, as far as I can tell, there’s no RSS feed.
What it offers that Google doesn’t is human-edited headlines. I’ve had a bit of correspondence with Brian Neale and he tells me that spends up to 4 unpaid hours a day culling his headlines from various sources.
Like Drudge, Neale takes a fairly right-wing approach to what he considers newsworthy. There’s also a “tabloidesque” flavour to his selections.
The site is, as far as I can tell, basically hand coded. Brian wrote to me the other day asking what the heck RSS is. He’s interested in it and is looking into a few upgrades, one of which might be an RSS feed.
The links lists that he’s compiled are quite extensive and can be very useful. When it looked like he was closing shop, we were in the process of moving those links to BlogsCanada.
While I’m not on the same political wavelength as Brian, I can appreciate the effort he puts into his headline site and I often find stories there that are not prominently featured in Google news or elsewhere.
BTW, Google news doesn’t have an RSS feed, either.
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Jim: It’s the very fact that GoogleNews is not human-selected that I like about it. After all, every weblog I read is essentially a human-picked set of news items.
While Google itself doesn’t provide RSS feeds, there are many other scripts and kludges that generate them:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=googlenews%20rss
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