This week was slow until someone posted wondering where everyone was. Someone mentioned the automatic news gathering systems like Google News, and mentioned that Microsoft was working on one: “When I first checked the french version, http://fr.newsbot.msn.com, its lead story was a link to a two-paragraph story on a french business site about “Playboy et les femmes de WalMart deshabille” — illustrated with a head shot of Donald Rumsfeld. For all the early glitches that people reported on Google News, I never saw anything any way near that bad.
As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.