Newsle is a news tracking platform that allows users to follow news about the people that they care about. Whether they are friends, colleagues, competitors or celebrities, as long as they have a name, Newsle can track them through their “disambiguation algorithm,” which is able to filter relevant news from people who may have the same name.
I had not heard about Newsle until I received two tweets from their @NewsleAnnounce Twitter account (I did some research on the company first before I clicked the link because I thought it might have been a spam bot). Newsle first launched its beta in January, 2011. The current version of the website has been live since February, 2012.
So, how does Newsle work? Like many other “aggregation” platforms, like paper.li, Newsle collects publicly available content over the internet (in this case, articles and blogs) and organizes it. In Newsle’s case, the content also has to be indexable by search engines. I never made an account with them, and they were able to construct a Newsle profile from my Twitter account and pull press releases that I had been quoted in. For some reason their algorithm missed the numerous blogs I’ve written across multiple websites, so my profile looks oddly empty.
For better or worse, Newsle has certainly gotten my attention. Depending on your views about internet privacy, you may be alarmed to find out that a website you never authorized can collect information about you in a centralized location for anyone to access. I do not mind (anything you publish publicly on any social media platform is fair game in my opinion), but I did not find a feature where you can request your name be taken down.
Do you think Newsle is an interesting platform from a content perspective? How do you feel about its use of publicly available content – is it genius or do you think it invades your privacy?
