The INFORMATION age (newsnow.co.uk)

Member Name: thehud

Product:	newsnow.co.uk
Date:	09/04/05 (226 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dead simple, Effective

Disadvantages: None

The advent of the ubiquitous PC has had an enormous impact on the way we live our lives, and chief among the features of this brave new world is the surfeit of information available to us. In the past, the problem used to be being able to find things out - these days the issue is rather how to organise, store and access all that information, so that we are not, quite literally, swamped by all that information.

News Now is a smart little portal like tool which helps with that devillishly challenging task.

According to the people themselves "Started in 1997, NewsNow's services include NewsNow.co.uk, one of the UK's most popular news portals. Our corporate services include online press cuttings, market intelligence, competitor tracking and web site and intranet content. Today NewsNow monitors breaking news in 15+ languages from thousands of the Internet's most important online publications, including international, national and regional titles, newswires, magazines, press releases and exclusively online news sources. NewsNow owes its success to a combination of sophisticated technology and experts who go the extra mile to understand each customer's unique business requirements. At NewsNow, we are continually "pushing the envelope" as we look for new ways to make the wealth of online news a manageable and cost-effective experience for our clients and web site users."

Now whether all that stuff is any more than just the usual hype or not, I'm not sure, but certainly News Now has an awful lot going for it. Basically, the service claims to constantly monitor almost 20,000 Internet news sources and allow you to easily access and keep up to date with that wealth of info.

Probably one of the greatest boons is for the footie fan, who can easily stay in touch with all the latest news of his favourite club. Visit the News Now site (http://www.newsnow.co.uk) and you'll find a search field at the top left of the page - type in a single word, say Manchester and see what happens.

You get a selection of matching newsfeeds - Manchester City, Manchester United, Football Results - Premiership Teams, Premiership Football and (for some unknown reason) Venture Capital. As a True Blue, I would click the City link, which accesses the following URL - http://www.newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=Manchester +City giving me ready access to all the latest news on the Blues in nice chunked sections of time, also allowing me to go back weeks for relevant stories - click one of the links and it opens the source web page so you can access the original article.

Now basically, there isn't a lot more to tell because News Now is extremely simple and effective and something which once you've used it you would never be without again, Stick the appropriate URL in your list of Favourites and you need never be without all the latest info again - a real boon.

It's completely free for the basic service, and that's all you're going to need, but you can pay for certain services

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