Friday, August 22, 2008

Addictomatic Creates Instant News Pages

You can enter any subject into Addictomatic – like “google” or “comic book” or everything else – to view a customizable instant news overview page on it. The news bits are presented as little widget boxes and pulled from all over the web; some by APIs, but most by RSS, as creator Dave Pell says. (Addictomatic – or Addict-o-matic, as the logo says – was programmed by Crowd Favorite and designed by Bryan Bell.)

Try the page on the topic “Google”, for instance. There will be headlines from sources like Twitter search, Google Blog search, Wikio and others, and image and video content in the form of thumbnails shows from YouTube, Flickr, and Truveo video search. You can then rearrange the page elements via drag and drop, or expand the Available Sources settings to opt-in to even more sources. While not suited as a search result if you’re looking for a specific page, this approach seems potentially useful for finding random new articles (and also to find new search feeds for your research).

A couple of special news pages are available as well. The popular page for instance aggregates feeds like Yahoo’s most viewed photos and news stories, or content from Delicious, Digg, and Technorati. The Thought2.0 section lists blogs like Boing Boing, Kottke, Textism and Neatorama. It would have been nice to be able to instantly grab the RSS link from these boxes to use the feed elsewhere but that doesn’t seem to be possible at the moment (though a link to the source page is available, and a little searching there can yield the respective feed).

[Thanks Juha-Matti Laurio and Dave!]

Addictomatic Creates Inst ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+0)

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