Offline News Aggregator – January 2010 Ideas
The second idea for my 365 social ideas is news aggregation-based as well as usability-oriented. The idea is a cross between the fascinatingly simple Readability bookmarklet and the recently launched Danish online newspaper “Ugen” (Eng: “The Week”), which is a downloadable AIR-application for news reading.
The idea is to create a bookmarklet, just like the Readability mentioned above, but instead of simply scraping the contents of the article and only present it to the user on-screen (and then all this is lost when he leaves), also connect to his locally downloaded and running News Aggregator, which will then store the URL, headline and body (and maybe the images, that the user selects as interesting and relevant) for offline viewing at any later stage. Imagine it a bit like sharing a link on Facebook, but actually only share it with yourself by copying the full contents and selected images to a local storage, and then read any article that you have found interesting at any later point.
This idea is completely legal, as no server ever scrapes any content from any website and no public display is made of the copy. The “copy” is made by the user himself only on his computer to the user’s own hard drive as if he copy-pasted it into a Word-document (which is always legal if only for personal use). If one wanted to implement a sharing-function in the application, it would however have to link directly to the original URL as the scraped content cannot be shared in a way, that could ever satisfy publishers.
Why?
Reading long articles in your browser is difficult and tiresome – especially when cramped in between navigation, advertisements and “layout”. If this idea was implemented, we could all in a legally safe way copy article contents for local viewing without having the problems of RSS-feeds (most only showing the first paragraphs) or news aggregators (some blocked by publishers).
What’s next?
Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.
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Category: January 2010 Ideas, JavaScript 5 comments »
January 4th, 2010 at 03:38
The RSS aggregator that is build into the calibre software works wonders, I’m using that to get Information in FULL on my Kindle, and it generates Python scripts that can be tweaked \o/, all-in-all a wonderful scraper
January 5th, 2010 at 02:46
Hi Kim,
I was not thinking about following some RSS-feeds and then reading them offline. I am talking about finding those few articles each day for completely different sources, that you would like to be able to read under more fitting circumstances – articles that you find via friends’ recommendations on Twitter, Facebook, Slashdot, Delicious or any other medium.
But of course, looking at existing scrapers and how they are doing it is interesting.
January 5th, 2010 at 06:23
I wasn’t really talking about RSS either, I do of-course know “readability”, but RSS is the lowest common denominator in integration.
I have a tendency to open up ideas, and take them in different directions as you might have noticed ;-)
January 5th, 2010 at 20:06
And that’s what it’s all about (taking ideas, adding to them, mixing it all up and see what happens). Many ideas in future posts will probably be spin-offs or expansions of other ideas and so on.
Feel free to spin-off as much as you wish ;)
January 14th, 2010 at 12:31
Okay, this actually almost existed in the wild – I have received some incoming traffic from http://www.instapaper.com/, and it seems obvious why. But then in this post are some ideas for them to grab.