Why Topix.net is different - John Battelle tells
There’s a story today in John Battelle’s Search Blog on why the new service, Topix.net is different from the others in the field. Its apparent goal is to focus on the local news, and become your local paper, so to speak. It does a pretty remarkable job. For example, while on a large scale I consider myself living in Spokane, WA, technically we are not served by Spokane post office and thus are known to the world as Veradale, WA. And would you guess that Topix has a separate news page for the events related to Veradale, WA (warning: local news from my area are pretty boring and are generally Spokane-related anyway).
An interesting discovery from Battelle’s blog was that Topix does its own crawl of about 6,000 sources. I always thought they were getting their data from Moreover or someone similar. No, they have their own technology, so kudos to them. They have an RSS feed for each topic they cover, and I have about 2 or 3 plugged into my RSS reader. Moreover, its topical pages are more interesting than its local pages and are much more widespread than Google News - they have Computer Science, KDE, and peer-to-peer specific pages.