NY Times Outline screen shot on Flickr

Mr Noded says:

not working quite right on Safari. (Tiger will latest stuff). When expanding the keywords do not move down and expanded text lies underneath. Worked one time that failed. Not clearing screen completely when contracted
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

obstructionist says:

I like it, but it's sad that, as you said, it's 'news'. I wonder why THEY never did this?
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

amybellinger2003 says:

This has a lot of wrinkles to it, but one aspect I like a lot is its putting readers in charge of deciding what's important to them. It takes away the paper's editorial staff's page-one meeting that ranks consequence (or, as often "what we want to push"), which has been picked up pretty much unaltered by news sites.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

rsholin says:

I think I'm missing the 'new' part of this. Doesn't this just break up the River of News into little editor-induced ponds?

While I'd love to subscribe to RSS feeds of specific keywords from a news site, I'd also like to tag the news myself, as a reader, and be able to build pages and subscribe to feeds based on the more diverse taxonomy that would create.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

scriptingnews says:

Amy, that's right, and that explains why the Times would resist it.

They have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking. I got an example of this when I suggested that collaborative filtering would be an obvious addition to the Times movie reviews site. Why would you want to know what anyone other than the Times reviewer thought of the movie? was the question I got back. It wasn't a joke.

Given that, it's pretty amazing that the Times provides us with their news in RSS and has put the keywords in the HTML source. THey could have kept all that to themselves and stuff like this would not have been possible without scraping.

So to think they're of one mind on anything is to miss the point that they're a large, fairly old (for the U.S.) organization that has been quite successful.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

petersmagnusson says:

Very cool David. NYT has indeed been extremely successful in their business, which always makes for inertia. Given that, they're not adapting too badly, I think; opening up their archives, comment sections on their blogs, these keywords.

Rsholin, the point here I think is that the rivers are becoming more and more accessible, with increasing amounts of metadata. Exactly what to do with that new level of freedom is the challenge, which is what David is playing with here.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

obstructionist says:

I would add, though, that I think I'd rather have it alphabetical then by number of items. Otherwise, sports will always be on top and names of important figures, for the most part, will be at the bottom. For the high number of items, I'd like to be able to browse it like an index.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

Mickeleh says:

Why reverse alpha-sort within a keyword frequency group? Seems counter-intuitive to me. (Is it because names that begin with, oh, say, "W" would rank higher?) What I'd really love is an easy was to get to columnists, esp. Rich and Krugman. I don't mind not being able to get to Brooks and Friedman easily.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

i8code says:

Dave - "Why would you want to know what anyone other than the Times reviewer thought of the movie? was the question I got back. It wasn't a joke."

I assure you it was a joke. Comedic skills might be lacking but I promise you it was meant in jest. We encourage users to submit ratings and comments about movies. And we are looking at ways to that contribution even more useful/valuable

As Dave wisely points out we are not "of one mind".

Go forth be merry. Tell the nytimes of your adventures. Let us know how we can be a meaningful part of them. open.nytimes.com | open@nytimes.com
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

scriptingnews says:

Mickeleh, because it's a work in progress. :-)

And maybe obstructionist is right that it should default to listing alphabetically.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

harrisj says:

What Derek said. It probably was my idea of a joke, but I have a pretty sarcastic sense of humor that could come off as institutional pomposity in the wrong setting...
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

scriptingnews says:

Derek, quite the contrary, you have GREAT comedic skills! :-)
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

nr1814 says:

A cool side benefit is that in Firefox you can quickly search the list for news of interest. Try doing that as conveniently on the Times main site.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

scriptingnews says:

Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

pwallroth says:

I would like to see frequency as well as alphabetic... so maybe a toggle switch? Also I think it would be interesting to see what items are new which would provide some temporal context. Definitely potential in this!
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

whalesalad says:

I have a suggestion. You could weigh the "tags" based upon the number of items in each, so that heavy categories stand out. Also, I like pwallroth's suggestion of giving an alternate view to sort by weight rather than alpha.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

bbebopr says:

this outline view is cool. i'd love a way to select all the keywords i'm interested in and subscribe to a customized feed, maybe via OPML.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

tenetteludlow says:

I just went to look at it and it is alphabetic and I don't like it. There seem to be so many keywords, maybe of people involved in business details whom I've never heard of, and I get no sense of what's important.

Looking at the structured pages of a regular newspaper site beats what I'm looking at right now. Do you have the ability to build an organisational tree so that first up things are grouped into more conventional groups (domestic news, international news, politics, sports, business etc)?
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

jonplummer says:

Since you updated the sort to be alpha, you should probably update the explanatory text as well. (The mismatch suggests that something is broken, when, in fact, it is not.)
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

tstitt says:

Thanks. Very useful. Agree that a org tree or flow chart view of the data - based on timing, subject, source, etc. - would be useful to accompany the text outline. (I'm thinking of Vadim Yasinovsky's product from a while ago - allClear.)
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

mkrus says:

fancy, but there's one think I can't figure out. Where do you get the keywords from? I see no markup in the official NYT feeds...
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

aegrumet says:

Neat stuff, Dave. I read the blog post in my newsreader, which said the sort was by frequency. Now I can see the from the discussion why it's alpha sorted. Flickr and other sites found a neat way to combine the two types of info in their "tag cloud" pages. Items with higher score are rendered in a larger font. See for example the section labelled "All time most popular tags" on this page: flickr.com/photos/tags/ . It's nice and compact, which I like (no scrolling). However, expand/collapse would not work the same way, you'd have to do an overlay or sidebar.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

ron_jeffries says:

Dave,

When an outline item has only one child, I'd like
an option that simply displays the child text.

Nice work!
-ron k jeffries
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

WebSeitz says:

I rather like the previous rev, with the histogram. You could mouse over to get a very short opener (title?) for each story.

Hmm, maybe that's another fork: beneath each keyword, just give the list of titles, letting them link to story. If there are dupes, just show once with (1, 2) having the links.

Of course, that assume titles are descriptive.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

derekl00 says:

I like the comment about sizing the links based on their frequency a la del.icio.us. Something like their tag view is what I would envision. You could get rid of the inline expansion and have a click on this tag like display open the corresponding links in a different panel or something.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

knackeredhack says:

The entire news output is determined by editors making choices about how to allocate their limited resources. So even your news river reflects those original resource allocation decisions. But this further commoditises news, from what I see here.

While it does not matter for the BBC in the short run, I'd suggest this weakens the ability of the NYT to monetize its content while its cashflows are hit by the fall off in print readership. So I'd suggest this is a real option the exercise of which could be deferred, unless there is an irresistible customer demand.

I suspect where attention needs to be paid is in the way editors and reporters collaborate in-house, what tools they use to achieve this, and how they can interact with the usage data of the website in a dynamic and yet mature way to improve story assignment and selection. If that process is optimised people like amy would experience more value from the newspaper because journalists would be telling a better story with each story. But that is a management process that is much harder than engineering.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

colin.faulkingham says:

Great Work! However, this seems like a large page to load.

This would be a great app to add some AJAX to. You could easily do it by rendering the html fragments (stories) on to a directory on your server. Then just generate the topics page and call the AJAX fetch from the expandCollapse javascript function.

I have some code I could give you to do that if your interested.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

pacificpelican says:

Very cool to see all the keywords in order, but I'd really like to see an option for sorting by frequency order too.
That would make even a quick glance at it very informative.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

Arnþór Snær says:

It would be nice to see a tag cloud view of this.

People will probably be talking about how this affects NYT ad revenue. The truth is that if a third party interface to the NYT news content noticably affects the revenues of NYT, than they probably have a big problem with their site anyway. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

p.s. seeing this I want to subscribe to certain NYT keywords RSS feed.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

kathleen wiersch says:

Despite being right brained, I still needed the alphabetic structure for the major subcategories. Unfortunately, like any segmentation, I miss out on the "catch my eye" affect of an old fashioned front page view. Sometimes I want the editors, not the masses, giving me the nudge in a particular direction especially when the source is the NYT.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

sbjg says:

I like it. Reminds me of browsing through the library. A Dewey-like system for news. But is there a thoughtful system behind the top-level of the taxonomy?
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

ilteris says:

I like Marcos Weskamp's newsmap a lot in this sense. First it's good because it gives you broad view of what's going, plus it gives you an idea of what news are more popular right now. it also lets you browse through less frequent news as well. I can see this implemented for NYT.
marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

crafterofcode says:

I know I commented on this previously, but for each story it would be good to see all the tags associated with it, preferably as links. That way, I could jump elsewhere on your page to see the stories hanging off a different tag.

That way, I could look at the stories under tag A, and see that one of those stories was also tagged with B, which is more specific (or more general). Interest piqued, I could then click on B, and see the stories tagged B... and so on.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

deannie40 says:

What a relief! Just Great. Thank you.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

cwestberg says:

I liked the numeric rather than alphabetical sorting. For one, I see nothing wrong with sports at the top as 'regular news' always has it at the end. Also as a guy with a last name starting with 'W' you should understand why alpha sucks. Perhaps the answer is to do both or at least allow the user to resort.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

JeffHenderson says:

Dave, it would be great if you could add an option to sort the keywords alphabetically also. Otherwise, this is a great summary tool for quickly scanning the vast amount of news put out by the NYT. Thanks!
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

buzzby says:

I agree with JeffHnderson and some others.

Add different sorting so people can change the order
Sorty - by most volume
Sort - by keyword
Sort - by topic
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

MattTerenzio says:

At first glance I wasn't sure if I liked it.

As you've said in the past, humans are great at scanning and this is why I adopted "riverofnews" feed reading over "huntandpeck" or "inbox"

However, if the outlines showed up as related stories in my river at the bottom of posts, I think I'd love it.

That said, it also took me a few weeks to warm to the river style of feed reading.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

i8code says:

If any of this is interesting and you are thinking about doing something similar - I suggest you go read Jacob Harris's excellent post about the meta data available in all the news articles for the nytimes at open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/messing-aro und-with-met...
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

The Archers says:

I agree with a couple earlier posters - this cries out for a tag cloud for a couple of reasons. Scrolling is painful and a tag cloud allows you to see a lot of stuff on one page.

Then perhaps, to add a twist, you could color code the words green for tags (key words) that are gaining in importance or newness and red for tags that are decreasing or aging. Kinda like watching stocks. Green and red might not be good for the color blind folks - but really just two other colors.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

Jay Tamboli says:

The link to www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/world/americas/04v enez.html is showing Ch‡vez instead of Chávez. That is, double-sword instead of a-acute.
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

blntechie says:

Hi, A very great effort. Please check the "Outline" link in bbcriver.com home page. Shouldn't it take to bbc outline rather that NYT outline?
Posted 20 months ago. ( permalink )

blntechie says:

I would be delighted to have "Search" feature too
Posted 20 months ago. ( permalink )

jason_la says:

The site is great on the Blackberry Dave, thanks. I think it would be great to have the ability to browse right to a section of choice rather than have to scroll all titles and descriptions of all sections one section at a time. I tried nytimesriver.com/outline as well thinking that might do it, but on the handheld it seems to show all the headlines and descriptions also.

Right now my only other good option for reading news on the Blackberry is setting up a Netvibes account configured specifically for display on a wireless device. If I stick with a single column display the page renders really well on the Blackberry (http:m/netvibes.com).

-Jason
Posted 20 months ago. ( permalink )

vasudhaivakudumbakam says:

Wonderful. A search feature , if included, will be an added attraction.
Appreciate,
mpr.
Posted 19 months ago. ( permalink )

stvn_elliot says:

A newspaper has to have photos.
Where is your photo for this rag??
Part of the fun of reading a paper is to look at the photos.
I see no photos anywhere on this web site.How cheep con you be?
A good paper is not just words.
I hope you will start to add photos to this web site.
UNHAPPY READER
Posted 19 months ago. ( permalink )

tommyproductions says:

Nice outline for quick picks of stories. Might be nice to have the stories also sorted by topic.
Posted 19 months ago. ( permalink )

vebtodayphotogallery says:

hi scripting news i would like to know NY Times Outline screen shot and how can i get a link for my web page
Posted 6 months ago. ( permalink )

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NY Times Outline screen shot

Comments

Mr Noded says:

obstructionist says:

amybellinger2003 says:

rsholin says:

scriptingnews says:

petersmagnusson says:

obstructionist says:

Mickeleh says:

i8code says:

scriptingnews says:

harrisj says:

scriptingnews says:

nr1814 says:

scriptingnews says:

pwallroth says:

whalesalad says:

bbebopr says:

tenetteludlow says:

jonplummer says:

tstitt says:

mkrus says:

aegrumet says:

ron_jeffries says:

WebSeitz says:

derekl00 says:

knackeredhack says:

colin.faulkingham says:

pacificpelican says:

Arnþór Snær says:

kathleen wiersch says:

sbjg says:

ilteris says:

crafterofcode says:

deannie40 says:

cwestberg says:

JeffHenderson says:

buzzby says:

MattTerenzio says:

i8code says:

The Archers says:

Jay Tamboli says:

blntechie says:

blntechie says:

jason_la says:

vasudhaivakudumbakam says:

stvn_elliot says:

tommyproductions says:

vebtodayphotogallery says:

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