NewsCred optimistically tackles the problem of monetizing journalism in today’s world. With the rise news aggregation sites that hardly pay writers at all, the journalism trade has suffered a great deal. NewsCred looks like a response from some technical boxers fighting from the reporter’s corner. The idea behind the NewsCred Platform API: if you can get your story out to more sources in a more standard and workable format, you can sell your content more effectively.
RecordedFuture, at first glance, is scary. It’s one of those projects that brings the saying “with great power comes great responsibility” to mind. The company has developed a platform for providing momentum and sentiment ratings around two conceptual abstractions: events & entities. Its system is continually scanning “thousands of high-quality new publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial database, and more,” then making that available via the Recorded Future News Analytics API. This type of news aggregation and processing is a level of awareness that no single human could otherwise obtain. From a theoretical perspective, having a tool such as this at one’s disposal would create a huge information advantage. Could this be called an information weapon?
A lot of our readers, like me, are news addicts. The latest news matters to a lot of us, and there are some good new mashups to help us find it. Take, for example, Tweetnews.mobi, which shows you the latest breaking news being tweeted through Twitter in realtime:
USA Today is continuing its march towards opening up more of its data via its USA Today API. The newspaper company most recently made available articles, including blog posts, newspaper stories and wire feeds back to 2004. The latest set of APIs announced includes three reviews APIs and a snapshots API that give access to USA Today’s movies, books and music reviews and its iconic statistical graphics.
Since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, technology has certainly played a role in communicating the disaster across the world. Before and after imagery has made the devastation very clear. The three maps mashups below help describe different angles of the same disaster: from the seismic activity, to the radiation levels, to the services available to people in need of help.
Avvo, the lawyer and doctor directory we profiled last week, has recently opened its Avvo API for wider use. To understand Avvo’s plans for its API, we spoke with Joshua King, Vice President, Business Development & General Counsel at Avvo. It is interesting to note that Avvo prioritized the release of its API over other opportunities that it had. Read the full Q & A with King below:
The use of location in applications is a key differentiator today. While the current craze towards Location Based Services is gravitated towards deals, coupons and services, we often overlook the most fundamental of them all i.e. the news in your vicinity. Outside.in, a location based news aggregator, has welcomed 2011 with enhancements to its Outside.in API that could give rise to a new set of hyperlocal news.
USA Today is keeping its promise to release more data from its network. The latest dataset that the newspaper has exposed is Articles, where you can use the USA Today API to access feeds and present it to your users in ways that you want. The dataset contains all web stories going back to 2004, as well as blog posts, newspaper stories, and even wire feeds.
Nearly 100 developers gathered on the 15th floor of the New York Times building last Saturday for a multi-API marathon of hacking, sharing, pizza and beer (plus URL-enhanced M&Ms). Representatives from industry heavyweights including Google, Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr were joined by indie hackers, makers, and tech talent from NYC’s growing startup club.
Remember all the WS-* specifications that had garnered significant traction in the last decade among major software vendors? It seems that we might have seen the last of them. The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) recently announced that they had completed their work. All WS-I’s assets, operation and mission will now transition over to OASIS that will continue to drive open standards, as applicable. WS-I, which was started in 2002 had a clear goal of laying the groundwork for Web Services Interoperability and did so actively by developing profiles, sample apps and tools towards that.
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