ClariNews live electronic newswire/newspaper feed.
Brad Templeton
delivered to your computer system in Usenet B news format.
ClariNews is part of the ClariNet series of products. For more
details on ClariNet, see a previous posting or request information
directly from ClariNet.
ClariNews is gathered live from 10 newswires. These include:
United Press International (UPI)
Reuters
Agence France Press (AFP)
Deutsche Press-Agentur (DPA)
Kyodo News Service
PR Newswire
Business Wire (BIZWIRE)
... and others ...
Professional editors scan these wires to build the ClariNews
"electronic newspaper." Each item is headlined, heavily keyworded
and converted into Usenet form by ClariNet. The live feed is collected
on a vax in Virginia and fed to UUNET on a regular basis -- at least
each hour. You can pick up your own live feed out of UUNET.
ClariNews articles are broken up into about 30 newsgroups, based on
their keywords. The keywords provide further classification. Each
article is crossposted to the appropriate groups.
While you can pick and choose newsgroups, you may also wish to use
ClariNet's NewsClip programming language to select news based on
keywords. All articles have keywords for all individuals named in
the article, (Such as "George Bush" to pick a common one.) all places,
companies and major topics. Each company named is also keyworded with its
stock ticker symbol for investors.
ClariNews is derived from the "NewsGrid" service you may have seen on
Compuserve and Genie. It is a slight modification of this service, as
we have asked the editors to give more computer industry related material
to us. Special newsgroups exist for technical sections. There is no
denying that this service is oriented towards business news, but there's
plenty of news out there of all types.
Here are the ClariNews Newsgroups and some of the things they feature:
Headline News:
clari.news.headlines - Umbrella group for regular news
clari.news.gov - General government news
clari.news.capitol - Washington Items
clari.news.election - USA and World elections
clari.news.military - Military actions, wars, spending
clari.news.bulletin - Special group for urgent breaking stories
Business News:
clari.news.business - General business news
clari.news.corporate - News about corporations
clari.news.market - Stock market info, closing indices
clari.news.economy - Economic indicators
General News & Features:
clari.news.features - Feature and human interest articles
clari.tw.medicine - Medical technology and business
clari.news.people - Features on individuals
clari.news.religion
clari.news.misc - All non-categorized stories
clari.news.weather - Weather related news, plus weather
facts from around the world.
clari.news.entertain - News from the entertainment world.
Rankings of movies, videos, pop music,
TV shows & more. Network TV listings
up to 2 weeks in advance. Daily
almanac.
Sports:
clari.news.sports - General articles not specific to a sport
clari.news.sports.baseball - Daily reports including standings, game
reports, player statistics and box scores
clari.news.sports.basketball - Information and statistics
clari.news.sports.football - Information and statistics
clari.news.sports.misc - Information on sports not covered above.
Industry Specific News:
clari.tw.computers
clari.tw.electronics
clari.tw.aerospace
clari.tw.aviation
clari.tw.education
clari.tw.telecom
clari.tw.nuclear - Includes cold fusion wirestories
clari.tw.misc - Other tech industries (less science oriented)
clari.tw.science - Technical Industries not covered above.
Plus general science stories
Caveat: Many of the articles in the industry specific groups are
drawn from company press releases on the PR Newswire and
Bizwire. These are marked so you can delete them, or
not even get fed them if desired. Of course, if you look
in most industry magazines, you will find that they also
consist mostly of reworded news releases.
Press releases can be filtered out of your feed, or you
reading, using NewsClip.
Regional News: - These groups contain cross-postings of
all stories that mention these locations.
clari.news.canada
clari.news.europe - (Not including France, Germany, UK)
clari.news.uk
clari.news.germany
clari.news.france
clari.news.asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan)
clari.news.mideast
clari.news.australia
clari.news.un - United Nations
(Note: This list is subject to change as news patterns and the editors'
keywording policy changes.)
TechWire:
The "clari.tw" technical groups can be purchased without
all of ClariNews, for half the price of ClariNews.
Standing Stories:
You can use ClariNews as a source for many standing stories
you wish to check on a regular basis. These stories are marked
with a special header that you can check and filter with
NewsClip.
First of all there are a variety of market stories. These
include closing indices and information from various stock, bond
and commodities markets -- the things you see on the news
each night. You will also get foreign exchange rates and
a variety of regular economic indicators, such as housing
starts, unemployment etc. Market summaries are given daily,
and also at the end of the week.
In Sports, you will find box scores for baseball and basketball,
plus listings of scoring leaders and standings. The NBA,
NFL, AL, NL and NHL all have regular stories.
In the winter, ski reports are given for NY, Colorado and New
England.
In weather, you will find regular reports of world and USA
temperatures and conditions.
"Our Top Story Tonight"
We regularly broadcast control messages listing the top stories
in the following major categories:
USA News
Business News
Sports
Features
Economy
With special software (provided free) coming shortly, you'll be
able to pop up a quick menu of the top stories in each category,
or get a custom .newsrc made with the hour's top stories.
Hours of Operations:
ClariNews is fed on weekdays from 5 AM to 11 PM, and on
weekends and holidays from 8 am to 5 PM. If you're getting
a live feed, you'll want to call in every hour or two for
new stories. Night recipients should call in after rates drop,
and again just before 8 when they go up again.
Volume:
The volume of ClariNews is around 500K per day. Compressed this
should run about 250K, which can be transmitted by a Telebit in
4-5 minutes.
How to Order:
Order from ClariNet by Mail to or...@clarinet.com or
in...@clarinet.com. Please see the general ClariNet description
for other important information.
[ use uunet!clarinet.com!xxxx if clarinet.com is unknown at your site.]
For info or to send confidential information, call 1-800-265-2782
or 1-519-884-7473. 10-5 Eastern Time.
Special Feed Information:
For a live feed, UUNET is your best bet. We are looking for
sites to pick up live feeds from UUNET and feed other sites semi-live.
We will reward you for doing this, so that if you feed enough
sites, your subscription is free.
A limited number of sites who must have a truly live feed may
connect to the feed vax in Virginia. Contact us for details.
More is Coming:
We plan to add to the ClariNews product as time goes by. In
addition, we will create newsgroups to match the demands of
our readers. Starting mid-summer, ClariNews keywording will
improve even further, and new groups will be added.
Cost:
The Cost of ClariNews is quite low. A two person
subscription costs about the same as many daily newspapers,
at $10 (USD) per month. The more readers there are on a given
machine, the lower the price per reader. ClariNews costs
the same as a newspaper (plus com charges, which may be NIL
if it's a local call or internet feed) but it is not full
of advertising. As such, it's actually a great deal cheaper.
Shouldn't you have at least one source of news in your life
that's not advertising supported?
Here's how the cost breaks down, by the true or estimated
number of readers on your site:
1 - $10/month
2 - $10/month -- the second reader is not charged for.
3-6 - $6 per additional reader
7-20 - $3.50 per additional reader
21 & up - $2 per additional reader
Contact us for sites with >100 readers.
TechWire has a base price of $5/month for 2 readers.
We can bill by invoice or major credit card. Payment should
be in advance. The minimum payment is $25, so single subscriptions
must be purchased on a quarterly basis.
Free Trial:
ClariNews and other ClariNet products may be tried free for
14 days -- you pay only the communications charges. You can connect
to UUNET, or contact us for a feed site near you.
Special Terms:
ClariNews customers may not re-sell ClariNews, nor use it as source
for a newspaper or clipping service. You may charge for access to
your system, but there must be no specific charge for ClariNews.
This is not the complete subscription offer. Prices subject to change
without notice to non-subscribers.
--
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
David Herron -- One of the vertebrae
First Brad/ClariNet isn't "making use of Usenet" in order to distribute
this -- at least not in the traditional sense. Read it carefully, he's
assuming control over ALL ClariNet links. These links don't have to follow
traditional Usenet links. Getting ClariNet is an entirely seperate deal.
Now, I wonder about enforcement? How does he plan to enforce his control
over this network? The only thing which comes to mind is to somehow
watch the Path: lines at lots of places and report back, somehow, ones
which look strange. Well, he could also send out sendsys messages
and look for unapproved links. Hmm...
Second, the list of services is useful. Having access to the news
wires directly on my home computer -- if desired -- would be a very
very very very nice thing. And if, as he says, the newsgrid-dy stuff
is really useful for broadcatching -- well, this could be a neat
experience.
"Broadcatch" is a term invented by people at the MIT Media
Lab referring to a style of news reading where you get a stream of
information in which carries keywords around with it. Then you
have a filtering program which extracts out what you're interested
in from the stream.
We do a similar thing now with Usenet, but very primitively. The first
level of the filter is the newsgroup hierarchy. The second level is
the subject line and kill files in rn.
It's very very primitive since the subject lines make an EXTREMELY poor
source of keywords -- considering how little relation subject lines
usually have to the actual subject of the article. And for that matter
the newsgroup name -- sometimes.
The service has useful features and doesn't cost a whole lot.
--
<- David Herron; an MMDF guy <da...@ms.uky.edu>
<- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, da...@UKMA.BITNET
<-
<- New word for the day: Obnoxity -- an act of obnoxiousness