Subject-specific news trackers

A NEW breed of news-tracking services for monitoring the latest hot ideas/products is evolving. NetSpeak profiles a few of them.

News from a multitude of sources flows through the length and breadth of cyberspace. Among the several news dissemination tools on the Net, blogs have a prominent place. Millions of bloggers post links of the latest information found by them on their blog and make the blogosphere always live.

As discussed in an earlier column (http://www.hindu.com/biz/2006/01/09/stories/20060 10900831600.htm), news trackers (like Memeorandum — http://memeorandum.com/) help us aggregate the important and popular ideas in the blog contents using automated tools.

Tailrank (tailrank.com/) is another news tracking service worth a try. For each of the threads listed on its home page, Tailrank displays several comments made on it by different bloggers. This helps the reader easily navigate/read diverse viewpoints on the item being viewed.

Chuquet (chuquet.com/) is yet another blog links aggregator worth a mention.

However, simply aggregating blog content entirely with a program may not be sufficient to fetch genuine or popular ideas/news/products being floated on the Net. To allow human interface into this news-tracking arena, the latest trend is to initiate services, where users can submit links to news articles and vote for/or against links being posted by others. Based on this voting data, the service ranks each of the postings and displays the most popular ones on its front page. Digg (http://www.digg.com/ ), the famous technology news aggregation/ranking site, is one such news aggregation service.

Of late, a plethora of such services is surfacing on the Net. The news tracking service Newsvine (http://www.newsvine.com) meant for displaying latest news stories on a range of subjects such as business, politics, science and technology is a popular product in this genre.

Reddit (http://reddit.com/) is another service of this kind worth exploring. New services enable aggregation of blog comments on specific subjects

The popularity of this kind of collaborative news tracking — combining readers' perception with software — is giving rise to subject-specific news trackers. New services for aggregating blog comments on specific subjects are being built.

The news aggregation service, Postgenomic (http://postgeno mic.com/), developed for aggregating posts "from life science blogs" is an example of this trend.

StockDiggers (http://stockdigg.com/), created for aggregating financial news, will be a useful place for anyone engaged in financial matters.

You may also note that all the services mentioned above provide webfeeds for helping you read the latest content on them with your newsreader. Also, if you want to read the contents of a few popular news tracking services together from a single web page, check out: http://popurls.com/

Open access journals

The concept of open source publishing (http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/biz/2002/07/15/stories/2002071500060200.htm) has gained considerable prominence and tens of hundreds of open-access, free journals on a variety of subjects are available. A tool for accessing these journals easily is very much essential. As mentioned earlier, Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj. org/) is an attempt in this direction. On this count, the recently launched open access journal portal Openj-gate (http://www.openj-gate.com/), a laudable Indian initiative, assumes significance. The service indexes more than 3,000 open access journals and helps you access millions of articles rather easily. The portal database can be searched with keyword, author, title, and institutions.

Graph creation tool

Many of us use different types of graphs for effectively conveying information. People from varied professions such as politicians, planners, scientists and businessmen make frequent use of this tool. The availability of simple graph creation tools facilitates this process. Now, if you are away from your machine and need to draw a graph, an on-line solution will be ideal. On such situations, take advantage of the on-line graph creation application available here: http://tinyurl.com/phub5

The `Create a Graph' service helps you draw five types of charts (XY, line, pie, bar and Area graph) with your browser. Besides generating a graph for your data, the service allows you to save or get it printed in your local printer. It also supports the feature for e-mailing the graph output to your clients.

Cheat sheet collection

A cheat sheet for a service or software is a web page with almost all important commands/tips available with the service/software embedded on it. A cheat sheet for a product serves as a handy reference for its users. Google cheat sheet mentioned in an earlier column (http://www.hindu.com/2004/11/15/stories/2004111500771 700.htm) is an example. Recently this author stumbled on a `Cheat Sheet Round-up' web page (http://www.petefreitag. com/item/455.cfm) with links to cheat sheets for about thirty services/programs. The list includes cheat sheets for HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, Java, PERL and so on.

Freeware list

The distinct feature of the Net as we all know is the availability of free programs for almost all conceivable problems. We have free anti-virus tools (like Antivir/Avast), free audio tools (like Audacity), free graphics tools (like Gimp), free office tools (like OpenOffice), free PDF programs (like PDFCreator) and free HTML editors (like NVU). For an exhaustive list of such free programs, check out: http://tinyurl.com/ayzan

E-mail encoder

An e-mail id listed on a web page has a fair chance of reaching a spammer's hand. However, if the e-mail address can be accommodated in an encrypted form, no spammer will be able to grab it. In this context, the simple on-line application `e-mail riddler' (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/) will come very handy. For an e-mail address, the service offers a short JavaScript program for encrypting it. Paste this code on to your web page, where you want your e-mail address to be displayed.