Friday, February 08, 2008

Local News from Google: Bighow Local Lite?

Following Topix.com, Google News now allows you to search for local news by punching in your Zip code or locality. The announcement from Google says,
We’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources.

But, using Zip codes to search for stuff does not come naturally to us and Geo Coding of all the news sources in the world is in its infancy.

I haven't been posting on this blog for almost a month now.

Reason: I am moving across the country looking for people to put some seed funding into Bighow, which takes a two-pronged approach to aggregation and publishing.

So far, no progress and I think that is because I don't have a programmer since October 2007. No team, no money.

For example of better news aggregation, may I suggest these links from an unfinished Bighow.com?
Work on Bighow.com stopped while we were working on the publishing end. Work on automatic aggregation is next on the work list, along with 100 other items. :-)

Note: Being the only active tester of Bighow.com, the pages have not been since December 2007.

Bighow Countries
http://bighow.com/country/USA
Bighow Cities
http://bighow.com/city/San%20Fransisco
Bighow Local
http://bighow.com/local/Janakpuri
Bighow Groups
http://bighow.com/group/Actually%20Useful%20Technology
Bighow Tags: Best of 2007
http://bighow.com/news/tags/Best%20of%202007
Bighow Lists
http://bighow.com/news/tag/type/List
Bighow Tags: Best of 2008
http://bighow.com/news/tags/Best%20of%202008
Bighow Tags: Worst of 2007
http://bighow.com/news/tags/Worst%20of%202007

At its core, Bighow is a multi-platform, 'Publishing cum Aggregation' tool using which we plan to have a global news network of bookmarkers and reporters.

The future of news depends on quality aggregation, a promise for which I shall fight on.

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posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:24 PM 0 Comments