Monday, January 17, 2011

Beyond America - Google world editions with Google Reader and Google Share

Google News Editions

This morning, thinking of Brazil I wrote ...

I just wish I, and we, had a better way to share and understand the fascinating and terrible world that we live in. We see only slices and shards of it. My hope is that even though today's machine translation only works  for very closely related languages (ex: English, French, German) that it will improve dramatically in the next decade. When that time comes Google News (or the future equivalent) may reveal the invisible world. Maybe, one day, even Chicago.

This morning, reading the NYT on my iPhone's NYT.app, I was again annoyed by my inability to easily share my thoughts on what I read there. I want to create Google Reader Shared item notes on my shared item page/feed (and twitter reflection [2]), but that's not a NYT option. [1]. Google News gave me the same feeling a bit later. I wished I could read and share using Reeder.app with superb new "readability" integration.

This afternoon I realized I can take a step now towards all of these objectives.

Most of the NYT articles I'm interested in show up in Google News. Google News has editions for many nations (left). Each Google news edition or section has a unique feed.

So I've added a representative sample of Google News English language editions to my Google Reader feeds. Certainly Canada (my birthplace) and the US, but also India (english version) and Southeast Asia. I've grouped them in a single "folder" so I can easily mark the entire collection as read (this is a high volume collection).

I'll be tweaking the set, and sharing from this set.

Of course what I really want is integrated machine translation for Chinese sources, but we're not there yet. Machine translation barely works for closely related languages and it's computationally intensive.

-- fn -

[1] I've tried workarounds such as email to a hidden blog that I follow in Reeder, and sharing from there, but it's too tedious. There might be something I could do using Yahoo! Pipes, but, frankly, I'd forgotten about them.
[2] I'm seriously tired of Twitter's string length limits. It's darkly funny that some consider this a feature.

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