Moreover ends free newsfeed

[perkoch]

It seems the news search engine and service Moreover has stopped offering free newsfeeds to commercial websites. Commercial user who has integrated Links created on or before July 10, 2001 may continue using existing integrated links until further notice.

It should be noted that the sites that deliver news headlines to the Moreover network pay as much as 20 USD a month to get their links distributed. Hence, Moreover has never been totally free.

Obviously, this is not enough. Like many content providers, however, Moreover will now target the business community.

The new terms and conditions can be found at [w.moreover.com...]

[rcjordan]

Thanks, Per. That's news to me and I use two of the moreover feeds.

[rcjordan]

Attention newshounds! Thanks once again to our friend Tara over at ResearchBuzz [researchbuzz.com] for this alternative to moreover for newsfeeds:

Another good place to find RSS feeds is NewsIsFree at [newsisfree.com] . They currently gather headlines from over 1950 sources.

[agerhart]

RC, I still have a free feed from Moreover......are they going to end all of them at a certain point in time?

[rcjordan]

According to Per, we're grandfathered in... but you know how that tends to play out in the long run. I suggest you bookmark Tara's info on RSS newsfeeds if that section is an important part of your site.

[agerhart]

Thanks Rc....

[webster2001]

It seems like alot of companies are cutting back on their free services as the economy slumps. Like for example another free service I use called human click is now being cut off for the free service sept 28. It looks like a growing pattern to be seen in the new internet as we know it.

[rcjordan]

Hey Webster2001, welcome!

[GWJ]

Hi,

I had been researching this for a friend last week. Here are a few free ones that I found. I have not moved forward to start testing any YET...

[newshub.com...]

[backend.userland.com...]

[amphibianweb.com...]

Brian

[rcjordan]

Newspro is a great script, are they offering a content newsfeed now, too?

[GWJ]

Whopops, so it is Bob. Sorry about that one.

Brian

[perkoch]

Here's another alternative:

[isyndicate.com...]

Not that easy to implement, though...

[Xmo]

Goodbye iSyndicate (featured in PC Magazine 02/01). Free is no longer available. I'm still looking for free feeds of National and World news. Loosing freebies is not just a trend. If I can predict the future, I think most businesses are going to try to charge for everything that appears before the viewing public including ads. The word is 'micro-payments'. Web services are going to allow this to happen. So, if I read an article, or anything else, I will be charged for it. Hmm. MyYahoo, MyNetscape, MyNewCharges? Correct? Guess it's to be expected. Another chance to become more like some of the myopic, egomaniacal twits who run this planet. News focused to the wallet. Next, tell me what I want to hear. It's much more therapeutic (and more profitable) than real news, and it's adjacent to telling me what you want me to hear, which will bring the dawn of PACS (as in politics) dominating internet content. It will be cheaper for the search engines because it will cut down on the time it takes to refresh a database, but it will require some time to match the news to the client. I would like NPR feeds for free. Think that will happen? If I am required to purchase news then 'support' sounds less callous than 'fee'. Support means it will be delicately slipped out of my bank account rather than snatched in a blind frenzy of profit taking. Right?

[chiyo]

There are many ways to publish RSS feeds for free which are used by many news organizations including the BBC, Guardian and countless others. It just takes a small amount of time. www.syndic8.com provides resources on how to embed newsfeeds in sites, and there are many scripts in Hotscripts for instance, which translate newsfeeds into HTML via javascript, cgi or many other ways. www.newsisfree is another great source for easy exports of news, and perhaps the most comprehensive.

I can post a more detailed and practical guide if there is interest from several months of testing and implementing solutions on our site.

[rcjordan]

>I can post a more detailed and practical guide if there is interest

I'm definitely interested in this, chiyo.

[engine]

Hi Chiyo,
I agree with RCJ - this would be useful to post in the Content forum:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Dan_Titan]

I've been trying to achieve a news gadget to my (non-profit) site for a day now. Maybe my requirements are a bit more specific than most, since I want news about Vietnam only.
The results so far are:

YELLOWBRIX: has a trial version that'll expires January 31st, 2002. After that, it's $500 (!!!) a month.

NEWSISFREE: I've encountered weird sites before, but this one beats most. Is there ANYONE out there that understands how to get news to your site from that one?

NEWSHUB: Appeared to be OK and even offering perl and HTML code for a search box. But the HTML code is wrong and the perl doesn't work either.

If anyone know how to make the search option for NewsHub work, please contact me or post something here!

Dan

[chiyo]

Hi Dan, thanks for your Sitckymail and also Engine, and RC for suggesting that I should post some sort of guide on the content forum

I put up some feeds from Newsisfree over the past 2 years of existance and it seemed fairly strightforward. Hoever they have grown a lot recently, and maybe the procedure is different now. Try this..

1. Do a search for the subject of the feeds you want ("vietnam" comes up with nothing I just found out but maybe a search for "asia" would come up with something related.)

2. You will then have a list of "related feeds"

3. Then click on the TITLE of a feed.. Lets say "Asia Week" that is on the list. The URL will have a numerical ID as the last part of the URL, or you can note it from just noting the link adress.

4. Go to [newsisfree.com...] and you can then indicate the format you want the feed in (most would want js for the simplest way), click on "show me the options", insert the ID you found in the earlier step in the code as indicated, and then you can them just copy and paste the js code displayed on that page to your web site.

5. Note their terms of use, which means it cant be used on a commercial site and you need to link back to them.

I agree with you, the process is not easy to work out as a new user. However I think they are trying to encourage people to use their commercial service. Understandable as it does take alot of work to provide this service.

Also note that some feeds including Moreover, will not work, as some do not give permission to dispay their feeds like this. Unfortunately that is probably the feed you want. (A dedicated feed on Vietnam news?)

Also newsisfree has a discussion forum where the owners answer your questions pretty quick. Click on the "forums" link.

There are other ways to display RSS feeds as I indicated before but need a day or two to document it in the "content" forum here.

However here's a quick tip and what we do at the moment...

Try the javascript RSS viewer at [piefke.helma.at...]
You need to know the actual RSS file URL of whatever you want. Just insert the URL in the box, configure how you want the "box" to look, check what the box actually looks like when you click on "submit" and if all OK, just copy the js supplied. You do have to rely on an external service, but this is the quickest and free-est way to display RSS feeds on your own site. My boss actually asked the guy whether he could set up CSS classes for the feed, - he did - and now you can do that also for extra spiffy presentation (diff fonts, colors etc)

How to find the actual RSS URL's? Go to syndic8 (syndic8.com) and click on "Feeds". That comes up with a database of all the 5,000 or so RSS feeds registered with the actual raw RSS URL for each one! You can also search via suject in the RSS title and/or description (some are scraped)

OK,, hope that solves most of your problems before i write my opus!

There are several other ways too, mostly script solutions which i cant use myself because they usually require PHP or Unix and we use a hosted a NT IIS server (oops don;t tell brett!)

I would show how we implement it on our site, but dont want to post the URL to our own site here as hate to seem self promotional, but will give to you via sticky mail if you want - you would be able to see the actual code and see what you can do with them.

[Xmo]

From what I read on the Internet it seems that wire services have terms of use (or service) contracts (not to mention copyright notices) attached to their services which are posted on their respective websites. AP, ABC, NBC, CBS, Reuters, PBS, you name it, all have those contracts. I have yet to come across a service that doesn't. Most of those companies do not offer any kind of free service (trial versions). So while I may be able to engineer a means to acquire that information that is free to me, it still does not excuse me from being subject to those contracts. News companies are in the business of selling news. None of them are giving it away for free to my knowledge. Of course, I could be mistaken. In that event, please send the URL of a news service contract that indicates that I may use the services for free. Again, I could be mistaken. I don't know enough about what you are doing to make a statement about it. I am asking the question: Are news services offering news from their wire services free to the public? I know that in years gone by that news was free in many of these businesses, but as they grew into the giants that they are today, they began spewing these contracts.

[Dan_Titan]

Hullo Xmo,

For clarification: Of course news are covered by intellectual property laws. No one here (I hope?) want to add entire articles to their sites.

We want LINKS to the articles.

[chiyo]

Hello Xmo,

News sources specifically provide news feeds such as RSS based ones so other sources including web sites can display their headlines and summaries. It gets them better exposure. You still have to go their site to get the full article.