Peter Griffin: Bright new player boosts news site competition

If you're a news junkie like me, you're probably using several of the available news aggregation websites to get your daily fix of international affairs.

My morning starts with visits to news.google.com and Bloglines.com.

The former works just like the Google search engine but trawls only news sources, displaying the big stories of the day on its front page.

If it's breaking news, you'll find it on Google News, which trawls thousands of news websites and web logs written by commentators on everything from politics to pop culture.

You can change the layout of Google News to suit yourself, but Bloglines is more easily customised, letting you pick the publications or sections of publications you want to read on regularly, and delivering a constantly updating list of stories from those publications.

Bloglines works on the RSS (really simple syndication) standard, which pulls feeds from compatible websites so you don't have to visit individual sites to get the news you want.

Bloglines has completely changed the way I consume news on the internet and saved me the hassle of loading up several different news sites each day.

But a new player, Inform.com, is taking on the news aggregators with a system it claims is more intelligent than anything out there. I've been trying out Inform for two weeks and I partly agree with the claim.

Inform.com, not unlike other aggregation services, uses "meta-tag" technology to trawl news sources. The difference with Inform is the range of options available after you've clicked on a story of interest.

A panel of the Inform client called "Discovery" lets you tap deeper into the story and related topics and track your research paths.

Inform has a good way of displaying the webpage of the news site within the client, with superfluous code stripped out. You'll need Internet Explorer 6.0 to take advantage of this, though Inform also supports the Firefox browser with lesser functionality.

The use of the display pane means you don't have to click the back button or move between websites. You click once on a story link and it is displayed in the pane.

But there is a noticeable lag in search times that you wouldn't experience on Google News and which will frustrate some users.

The "Discovery" area on the right side is useful in adding context to stories.

For instance, clicking on a story about the discovery of thousands of birds that died of bird flu in northern China brought up links to the World Health Organisation, China's Xinhua News Agency, and a discovery path on "contagious and infectious diseases".

You can then create a news channel to track all news on the bird flu.

The Discovery pane takes you deeper and deeper into the news, the results spreading like the branches of a tree. It is more like using an online encyclopaedia like the popular Wikipedia.org than a regular news aggregation site.

I don't know how much patience web users who are pushed for time will have in creating discovery paths and conforming to Inform.com's methodology.

But while the features that allow you to dig deeper and explore related topics form the most intelligent part of the site, you can simply receive a stream of news articles based on the topics and publications you plug into the My Channels and My Sources categories.

What underpins the site is all very mathematical. Articles are scored on relevance to one another. But it's not all database number-crunching behind Inform, which has an editorial team of humans selecting sources as well.

Inform.com so far mines 1000 news websites and 100 blogs, with a strong North American focus. No Australian news sources appear to be tracked, but Inform claims to be adding sources every day, so maybe its global reach will soon expand. It will also add video and audio feeds.

In some ways, Inform.com reminds me of those 3D web browsers touted during the dotcom boom that would supposedly change the way we surfed the internet. They didn't. Most of us are still using Internet Explorer in 2D, even though the other way gave us more information.

I like what Inform.com is trying to do, but for the moment I'll stick with the simplicity of a search query on Google News and the familiarity of Bloglines.com.