Recently released: the News 2.0 site, which is part of the AustralianBlogs.com suite. It looks really promising – if you haven’t already visited, do!
Basically, News 2.0 collects and displays posts from all the blogs that are listed on AustralianBlogs.com (this blog is one!). It uses the RSS (or XML or Atom) feed generated by each blog and obtains new content from each blog using the feed. Aussie readers, if you haven’t added your blog to AustralianBlogs.com yet, do consider it – AustralianBlogs is a nice way of enabling your blog to found by more people, and News 2.0 is a great way of showcasing your blog.
The tag cloud displayed on the right of the page is a very nice visual representation of the tags used by bloggers over the past twenty four hours (although I am disappointed to see that my ‘navel-gazing’ tag doesn’t seem to have made it in the cloud).
My major (and only) criticism of the site is that it doesn’t yet have any RSS feeds, for people like me who have become really reliant on RSS and prefer it as a means of keeping track of updates to sites. JY, whose baby this site is, says that feeds will be available soon. Although, thinking about it, if I want to look at the tag cloud, I might just have to bookmark News 2.0 and come and take a look at the site every now and again.
The list of Frequently Asked Questions provides a lot of information about News 2.0, in case what I’ve just written here doesn’t make any sense.
I like it, JY, and look forward to watching the site grow!
Categories: News2.0
(Two posts in one day! I wrote a post combining News 2.0 and the Quiz Night – see below – but then decided this wouldn’t do either justice so I split them. The conference papers are due tomorrow and I am in no way ready to submit them so for the next few days posts may be scant. If there is nothing posted tomorrow it will probably be because I spent the morning writing my papers instead. Back soon.)
4 Comments
Thanks for the kind post, CW.
News2.com.au, was an idea that came up only shortly before the Perth blogger meetup, so I was keen to get some validation from power users such as yourself, Genevieve, Kay, Richard, Cam, et al. It’s still in a pretty raw state both from a formatting as well as functional perspective. I hope to be able to apply some polish to it shortly and then formally launch it.
Appreciate the 5am review!
Cheers
Jon
perthblogs.org are running something similar. It’s a good idea to have it national. Unfortunately news2 hasn’t picked up our feed since the 22nd, but it’s still in beta so that’s to be expected.
hi CW,
there’s a couple other sites showing feeds from australian blogs, feedtagger.com and australianindex.com. with australianindex.com you can also specify feeds from certain categories, eg library blogs:
http://www.theaustralianindex.com/?page=posts&stateID=0&categoryID=43
it also has stats pages showing popular terms
Jon, me, a power user?! 🙂
As I say I will be happily keeping an eye on News 2.0. Already it’s been a great way of seeing what the Australian blogosphere is talking about!
Skribe I’d forgotten about that site, perthblogs.org! Will bookmark it too!
Thanks Sarah, I’m going to have to go and check those sites out now 🙂