A quick and easy way to get news (newsnow.co.uk)

Member Name: dippykitty

Product:	newsnow.co.uk
Date:	15/06/09 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's quick and easy to use, simple navigation

Disadvantages: Only pulls together headlines in the feeds so headlines need to contain certain keywords to show up

This is one of my must-read websites for keeping up with the latest news in areas that I am interested in. It is basically a news feed that pulls together news articles from most of the big newspapers and websites from around the world and posts the links in a regularly updated feed. The feed is usually updated somewhere between every five minutes and every day depending on how often news related to the area in question breaks.

For example, I frequently visit the news feeds for Tennis, Formula One and my local football team (a Championship side) to keep fully up-to-date with news in these areas. The links in these feeds tends to be pulled together from various broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, as well as prominent websites relating to the areas in question. For the Tennis and Formula One news feeds, the feed tends be updated at least every couple of hours, although it varies if it's a slow 'news day'. Most of the time, the majority of the links will be about the same thing, so different takes on the same topic.

Newsnow has areas for most types of news, from Hot Topics (such as immigration, Swine Flu or whatever the big news topic of the moment is) to Celebrity gossip. As well as the Sports feeds that I've already hinted at, there are Business feeds, Health feeds, Arts & Cultures feeds, Music feeds etc so pretty much everything is covered somewhere.

All in all, it's my one-stop place to catch up on the latest news at a glance, especially if I don't have time to trawl through various newspapers and websites to find things out that way.

The most popular feed items in each individual feed (for example, the Tennis feed) are displayed down the side of the page in a "Top Feeds" list. Off the top of my head, I think that this covers the eight most popular feed items from the last 24 hours. Beneath that is a list of feed items that were previously the top feeds, and this is labelled the "Previous Top Stories". Again, it covers the eight most popular (or previously popular in this case).

Navigating between the various categories is simple as there is a list down the left-hand side of the page in which you can select the broad category that you want to go into (for example, Sport) and then select further subcategories (for example, Football, followed by Premier League, followed by Manchester United) to get to where you want to go.

If you just want to search for stories about specific people, places or events, there is a search option at the top of the page in which you can enter your search terms. Bear in mind that this only searches the feed items for headlines that contain this search term so this won't work to find articles that contain the search term if it isn't also included in the headline too.

Another criticism is the fact that the news feed seems to search for specific keywords such as names and include feed items that contain these keywords. This can be problematic if someone has the same name as someone else but is unrelated to the feed in question. For example, the Manchester United feed may contain headlines relating to the Brazilian Ronaldo, as he has the same surname as (former) Manchester United player Cristiano Ronaldo. These can become a bit confusing as far as the headlines go as headlines tend to refer to them by surname only. This is only a relatively minor criticism though and doesn't seem to happen too often in the feeds that I regularly visit.

Summary: One of my favourite sites