During the summer Jubii (Lycos Denmark) has launched Jubii News, a site scanning what appears to be the most of the Danish online newssources and representing the news on Jubii News.
Jubii extracts the headline and a resume of the story, and links back to the original source for the whole story. Whereas “comments”-links on all stories stays on the Jubii-site enabling the users to discuss the stories on Jubii.dk.
Well-implemented, interesting, automated tagging
Most interesting is a Tagging-proces, which in what appears to be a semi-intelligent, automated process, chooses a handfull of tags (keywords) for each story.
This actually seems to work: clicking on of the tags on one story gives you the other stories tagged with the same keyword. And clicking one of these gives you the abstract of that story along with the list of keywords, the system has ascribed to that story (at least one of those of course being shared with the first story). In this way you can surf through the news, getting a very interesting overview of recent stories within particular areas.
First Danish deeplinking News-site in several years
The Jubii site is launched after a danish court earlier this year ruled that deeplinking – contrary to what was otherwise widely believed – is OK, under certain circumstances. (Read my posts on this one here:
Danish court approves of “deep-linking” and This is not a database! Says court about online real estate-database in deep-linking case of OFiR vs. HOME).
Discussions after the court ruling, which dealt specifically on realestate-site deeplinking, has been whether it also applies to the areas of news-sites. This is still not clear, and according to sources at Jubii, Jubii therefore has explicit agreements on deeplinking with the sites being scanned.
One thing I really miss is RSS-feed. What use is a news portal without a news feed? I believe that “hard” visits to news portals will be fewer and fewer as RSS technology gets more easy to use. Discussion (in DAnish) about news.dk, RSS and a reply from Jubii on the subject at http://www.asynkron.dk/2006-08-03/jubii-news-uden-min-sympati/
Agree on the RSS part. I went and studied the comments on your site, Andreas, and I must admit I was a bit puzzled about the rights explanation as the reason for not offering feeds.
I mean, what is the difference between headlines on News.dk and headlines on a RSS-feed, if they all link to the original source of the article? It shouldn’t bother the rightsholders, if they have otherwise agreed to the deeplinking. They will get the pageview and bannerexpo just the same. It smell likes a bad excuse on behalf of the Jubii guys.
Thank you for the kind words, Jon, we’re glad you enjoy the site.
I too would love an RSS-feed, but conspiracy theories aside, we do have rights-issues. Some partners mentioned this as a problem, and although we are working to find an acceptable solution with them, it’s a “no go” until we do.
But when we do get that part straightened out, we’re looking at doing a multitude of various feeds – not only for general news, for news sections but also for specific tags that you select. Hopefully that would let us show you exactly the news that you want to see, in RSS or other forms.
I promise, its absence at launch is not my secret ploy to take over the world – this is a product that we’ve done to really serve the users, and because we felt there was a need for such a service. If we wanted to make big $$$ from the site, there would be a LOT more ads.