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Surprisingly I have not been able to find a site which does this:

  • has a craigslist minimalistic design with paragraph summaries of the most important 100 news events that has happened around the world in the last 24 hours
  • the closest I have found is the two-page news summary in the print edition of the Economist in the front, I'm looking for something like that
  • news.google.com is close to what I mean, but its purpose is more of a "launch pad" for you to go read headlines and then click to read the news stories in more depth, the site I'm looking for has a different purpose: for you to spend 5 minutes reading it (on screen or print) and you know pretty much everything important that happened in the last 24 hours, not in depth, just the bullet points
  • just like at news.google.com you can search and customize it, so if you want the top 100 news "things that happened in Sri Lanka" you can get it with a simple search

I just went to Google News and read through five articles in about 10 minutes. I summarized them here in the format that I am looking for, which takes about 10 seconds to read:

Example:

TECH: Bing has cornered 12.7% of the market in the 12 months since it launched. / The top five top search engines are still Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL. / Apple acquired Canadian company Poly9 which creates browser-based 3D software, last year it also bought PlaceBase which produces maps that can be layered with private, public, or commercial data.

POLITICS: U.S.-led United Nations Command met with North Korea about sinking of a South Korean warship, North Korea maintains innocence, the result of meeting will probably be just more talks. / Argentina granted full rights to gay citizens. / Russia and Germany concluded talks: Medvedev welcomed German enterprises' participation in the hi-tech hub Skolkovo outside Moscow.

If a site like this exists, it would probably be best created by crowd-sourcing: people reading the news and writing reviews such as the above. I know I would write for it since writing those reviews helps you pay attention to the news you read, remember facts etc. Would be cool if a site like this existed.

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5
  • twitter news lists ?
    – phwd
    Jul 14 '10 at 16:01
  • you mean just following a word such as "sri lanka" on twitter? that gives me way too much garbage, plus news about bands and clubs that have "sri lanka" in their name, I'm thinking a site like this would have to be edited by experts in some way, perhaps just done with an efficient up/down-vote crowd-sourcing mechanism.
    – Edward Tanguay
    Jul 14 '10 at 16:04
  • That is a search I meant a list example NYTimes Earthquake List (obviously this list has outdated by now) These lists tend to be dynamic and you change to suit when the events grows near.
    – phwd
    Jul 14 '10 at 16:14
  • This is interesting, as I have pondered on a variant of this idea for some time now. What other features would you like with the site? Would you prefer a summary, or just the parts of the news that would matter to you? How could the site know the news that would matter to you? Should there be an option for you to extend and get more information on certain posts, buttons for -more like this- etc? And feel free to add anything else you think it should do/how it should work - not necessarily for me, but someone else might see this.
    – tobeannounced
    Jul 15 '10 at 10:04
  • @tobeannounced: I posted an example in my question of the format I am looking for.
    – Edward Tanguay
    Jul 15 '10 at 13:09
6

How about http://newsmap.jp? It primarily gets its data from Google news. But then it gets news pretty much in a minimal way. If you want to read the whole article, I'd recommend google Reader to subscribe to feeds and then use a minimalist extension on your browser over it.

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1
  • Looking at Newsmap, it seems to emphasise very recent arguments, and not be so good for daily browsing
    – Casebash
    Jul 18 '10 at 9:05
1

You may try Cruxbot

It provides a tool that summarize web article. That way you can summarize any news articles.

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0

Is it possible that what you want is an RSS feed of news sites? You might want to try Google Reader.

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  • I use both Google Reader and Google News but there is too much unsorted news there. What I am looking for is, e.g. on one page I want 60 paragraphs (with important words in bold) succinctly summarizing the kernel facts of the 20 most important political/social/technological news items that happened in Germany, France and England within the last week. If you use Googler Reader/News to try to do this you spend too long getting lost in the detail of each news story with unclear headlines such as "Is economic collapse looming for Milan?"
    – Edward Tanguay
    Jul 15 '10 at 8:41
  • 2
    I'm sure busy politians have access to these kinds of "cliff notes" for current events so that they can be aware of the most important news items in the least amount of time. That's what I'm looking for, so, say, if I'm traveling to Paris in November, I can spend 5 minutes a day reading this list and when I get there be very informed of the current issues there, know what people are talking about, etc.
    – Edward Tanguay
    Jul 15 '10 at 8:44
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I also would like something similar to that. With all the RSS news feeds I have in tech and non-tech categories, I want to just get the gist, the main points of each news article and not an in-depth reading of multiple storytelling pages on the topic.

For now I use my.yahoo.com as my main portal and have separate tabs for different categories of news. As I hover my cursor over any topic, I get a popup balloon which gives me the first 3 or 4 lines of that feed. That is close to what I'd like to have but does not provide the gist or a summary of the main points for the article. i.e.

"Seagate releases new hi-capacity 4TB hard disk, rotational speed 7200rpm. Due to go on sale Sept. 2012, est. street price $300"

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0

The Circa iPhone app offers the exact "snack-sized" news summaries that you're looking for (except it's not available as a web app):

News without the fluff, filler, or commentary: Circa’s editors gather top stories and break them down to their essential points -- facts, quotes, photos, and more...

More info: Circa’s New iOS App Will Change The Way You Consume News

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0

I just created this http://pippalo.com. It creates summaries. Right now it is only pulling from a handful of news sources but should be pulling from 100 by the end of the month.

Ps... it will be fully customizable to deliver only the sources and content you want and be available as an app in the next couple days :)

Pps... i am looking for coders who want to help me make this truly great :) Hit me up.

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0

NewsCo.me website has summaries. It seems they have an Android app too.

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1
  • Are you affiliated with newsco.me? If so, you should disclose it.
    – Vidar S. Ramdal
    Nov 24 '13 at 20:28
-1

Maybe this is what you're looking for: The Drudge Report.

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1
  • 1
    That's not news.
    – emptyset
    Jul 14 '10 at 19:02
-1

The best site I have found is www.gist4me.com The Trending topics on World News is really cool and provides a Gist of what's happening around the world in a simple and well organized way.

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