News Feeds from Voice of America

I agree that we do need better formation similar to a file browser here. I do want to have items sorted by dates. The ‘read’ tab seems to just automatically select the one at the top and doesn’t have next / prev buttons to serially read documents. It would be nice to have a date for the file when it was publish and a date when it arrived completed on the system. Even the size is nice to have.

Now I know we could just pop in to a shell and find some of this but i think we should be able to have a more advanced librarian webpage too.

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Like I said in my reply I figured that out, but the question is WHY? I recognize that is not specific to this thread or under control of someone who feeds the news, but when your choice is either to display files by time without any details or filename sorted alpha there is no easy way to look at the latest news from each area as the files are currently named, you will need to scroll through a whole list of files looking for the latest of each area’s news. Two bad choices. One solution is to change the file name format to start with an integer, so all today’s news starts with 999, e.g 999-Asia-News-voanews.com-16-11-06.html, tomorrow is 998-Asia-News-voanews.com-16-11-07.html. Another solution would be to place each news in a separate folder. Better is to fix the UI so recent tab shows full info, and/or browse tab allows sorting by received time as well as filename alpha.

Maybe it would be best if the files are just overwritten by default? So there is only ever one ‘Africa-News-VOA.htm’ ? Then if a user wants to do something different & keep the archive it’s up to them to do that manually (or automatically)

It would save space and provide better UX? @Abhishek what do you think?

If the news is a news briefing I would agree over write it. But if the news artical contains analysis, with which people can go back and get the “back story” of a current news situation would say store for 3 months.

I guess the main issue will be will we have the ability to search all the Outernet Library news article’s.

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I think in the medium term (months) then this current news hack will be replaced by a better system.

(I’m working on a method that sends each article as a individual file with a source and datestamp in the title)

These could then be presented chronologically in the web interface. (probably with a seperate page for each language)

So in light of the fact this is a temporary hack i’d say overwriting is going to be the better user experience for most users.

@Abhishek I also found this creative commons news/analysis site: About openDemocracy | openDemocracy do you fancy adding it? openDemocracy RSS

It might be a good signal to users that Outernet isn’t only promoting US govt agenda (Via VOA)

Thanks

Sam

Sam has a good idea here. I looked at openDemocracy RSS and find it very good, albeit less news per day than other services offer.

Here’s a list of RSS sources I’ve been looking at to get a feel for “the best” whatever that could mean. I’m using PDF Newspaper - FiveFilters.org to render each, print them, and read them. However, each feed suits Outernet’s transmissions as we are currently doing with VOA and UN.

Needless to say, publishing rights needs to be addressed, as each source has a different set of rules and fees. What does the Outernet Staff and other Discussion Group members think? Technical issues aside - - Outernet Content needs to drive the train. Ken

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That looks like a good range of views, the issue with it is the licencing. I think they will all probably want paying. We can certainly ask, but I think we can assemble decent content from creative commons sources.

I do also think we should be mindful of the languages spoken in the world

And those without press freedom

And internet censorship

Looking at the intersection between the three China seems a key location, particularly as they already have the ability to produce lanterns en-mass.

This might be a good RSS to add (English version)

Perhaps 200,000 Chinese people would pay 0.0001 bitcoin a month to have that delivered to their mobiles?

I’d also be keen to see Arabic and Russian supported, as well as some Farsi content .

Of course you start getting into some fairly serious geopolitics, it will be interesting to see if Outernet have the appetite for it.

Thanks for this info.

I had not even considered Language and freedom in considering Outernet.

I would like to suggest to @Abhishek that the date portion of titles of the news feed be changed from _2016-Nov-08 . . . _ to 08-Nov-2016 . . . so the latest articles appear on the top of the Bowser List instead of the oldest. There may be a problem going from 09 to 10 to 11, so see how renaming works before you do anything.

It would be great when the Librarian starts, to go to a new article first. Ken

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Deutshe Welle was once a Twitter feed, @Syed. You must have had an arrangement with them back in the early Ku Band days.

Currently, they provide a very informative RSS group of News feeds which you may want to include in Outernet’s News section. Ken

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http://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-welle-making-news-available-worldwide-via-outernet/a-17873917

Yes be great to get this

Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Top Stories English
DW-WORLD.DE Top Stories Arabic
Deutsche Welle: DW-WORLD.DE- Titulares Portuguese
Deutsche Welle: DW.COM Top Stories Russian
Deutsche Welle: DW.com Themen des Tages German
http://rss.dw.com/rdf/rss-fre-top French

Also some of the Radio Netherlands stuff looks worth having and is available so long as you don’t profit from it

Associated Press RSS Feeds

Just to keep everyone updated, I have not let up on my contact at the Associated Press to allow Outernet to rebroadcast their RSS content.

This week I discovered they were still working on pricing the service to the world - - something they have never had to deal with before - - as their current subscribers have definable listener numbers. So I’m standing by :blush:

Maybe Syed needs to make a trip to DC to help on this one!!

Ken

Associated Press has a history of biased reporting and other improprieties. Not sure their material will pass the global sniff test. AP is a staple of American broadcast news sourcing, but still yet, under close scrutiny, like any news source, there can be found some style that can be construed as leaning one way or the other.

As an example, I cite the suggestion earlier in this topic for “opendemocracy.net” as a source. One only has to go a little way into the feed to find the statement, _“How much trust can be placed in such a principle when, as of 8 December 2016, only 8,162 asylum seekers, out of a legally binding quota of 160,000, had been relocated from Greece and Italy to other member states?” That is purely an editorial slant/strata in the overall story.

Real unbiased journalism doesn’t provide, offer, or imply obvious direction or conclusion on things political. Only the facts.

Voice Of America is fairly straightforward. Good source for this sort of news feed. VOA has been, for a few years, experimenting with using various digital data modes over shortwave to deliver text and images. Maybe this playlist could become something of a feed for general interest content for Outernet. http://voaradiogram.net/

You are right on target - - but all news media have some sort of bias.

When Outernet started to include RSS news feeds, the corporate folks in Chicago, and a few of us Discussion Forum members, came up with the current daily VOA and UN RSS feeds.

I contacted AP because they were close to me in Washington. Imagine if I had gone to Fox News :imp:

Anyway, Outernet needs more news feeds to balance out what some believe is also biased reporting from VOA and the UN. It’s not an easy process, especially if the news source charges big bucks to use them.

I found it amusing that AP can’t figure out how to charge for their RSS feeds for Outernet’s amazing approach to putting “a library in the sky” :slight_smile: Ken

I also like Al Jazeera. Here’s what they have today for World News, Ken

Oops- - sorry that’s not very readable. Ken

Ken Syed and all News assistants at Outernet.

I think Outernet needs to formulate a Policy on NEWS Information that is added to all broadcast News articals at least once a day.

It needs to state the type of News / Propaganda that Outernet has allowed to be broadcast and to also guide / educate people to develop a healthy “cynicism” etc, of the way news is “massaged” by different news providers and groups.

Just my 2 cents worth here…
Size … why not just take TEXT only and zip it and use the software at the Rx end to unzip it transparently? Ordinary text text compresses amazingly well. - Unicode does too.
Bias … well there is no answer there, unless you want to curate it yourself, but then the bias is from you… the independence of VOA just took a nosedive too BTW ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-big-change-to-us-broadcasting-is-coming--and-its-one-putin-might-admire/2016/12/09/6c6d5786-bcb7-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html )

That apparently is how it’s done now, as evidenced by the zip files piling up in my opaks folder. The automatic unzipper seems to be failing to unzip and clean out the folder.

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Yeah, I realised that all the files are tbz (open source zip) files after I posted this :slight_smile:
I imagine it would fail if there is a write space or ram problem… :frowning: