IBU News (Germany) Edition 0.9.9

"A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer."-- V.I.Lenin (written in Munich and published in "Iskra", Nr4, May 1901)

Q: What is this site?

An aspiring user supported news portal with publishing, search, aggregation, discovery and commentary services. In a nutshell its an advanced functionality "News Search Engine" with blogging and commentary functionality.

News search is "synchro-contextual". News is continuously synchronized (we don't just update, add new stories but delete the old ones as soon as they are no longer "news") and drawn from a growing list of international sources including newspapers, magazines, weblogs and this site itself (as an independent community "newspaper" we also enable people to publish their stories as they happen).

We bring together numerous sources syndicated via various flavours of RSS (including RDF), IETF Atom and CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) and even "scrape" (extract content from Web pages) and "auto-tag" (convert into canonical RSS) a few screens of significant or relevant news sources that that don't provide a standard (or even non-standard) syndication feed.

As long as the story is syndicated (currently published in the Internet) we pull it in. As soon as its been dropped from their feed it gets dropped too by us. News is volatile and about breaking developments. Old stories are historical documentation but not news. We track and continuously synchronize our index to reflect the stories as they are being reported.

Stories live on when people comment upon them. These stories by being the object of discussion become persistent objects of content that temporally transcend the original news article. They have their own destiny. The content here is the discussion and not really the original story. This is what goes into our archive.

Q: What's so advanced about the search in this news search engine?

The search engine and its functionality. The engine supports structural search, the use of wild cards, phonetic search (but only when the user wants it), objects (such as date, numerical etc and operations upon them), sophisticated user interfaces (from a smart natural language search to feature rich boolean query languages) and a range of different information search paradigms from searching for content with specific words to searching for words ("Live Scan") and relevant feedback snippet search via "Clickless Search" interfaces.

Q: Is the news really sychronised?

More properly the system is Plesiochronous ( Plesio="near", Chronos="time"): Almost synchronous. Newspapers don't continuously update their pages but publish in discrete actions. The alignment (synchronization) with news (feeds) is asynchronous and periodical (triggered by a self-optimizing "chron" process). Not only is it not pragmatic to try to catch these as they happen but its asocial to barrage servers with these "if modified" (HTTP) requests. We try to find an optimal alignment cycle that minimizes the subjective latency (delay) for stories entering or leaving the main index corpus. The "cost function" of the spider/harvester is adaptive and designed with a "learning" heuristic towards the ideal of synchronized news.

Q: Why are there accounts? Must I register?

Registration is optional. Unregistered (anonymous) users are allowed to read, search and browse. Unregistered can publish comments and register but are put to an image recognition test to distinguish them from an automated SPAM bot. These messages may also go to an moderation queue to be approved before publication. Registered users are allowed to create content, write unmoderated comments and register new feeds. Due to spamming we've unfortunately had to restrict some features and/or add CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") and other (annoying) features.

Data privacy is held to the strictest standards and only used to control access to this site. See our privacy policy.

Q: What is its current status of IBU News?

Its a construction site that is open for the public to come in and play. Just watch out for the holes in the stairwells, hanging wires and missing fixtures. Its watch as we go.

Suggestions, Ideas or Comments? Please! See our Request for Comments.

Q: How is it best viewed?

Best, I guess, with Firefox(tm) but it should work with most other current browsers such as IE, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla. We're Unix (Solaris, BSD, Linux) people and platform independence is high on our development priorities. We also try to support PDAs and smart cell phones. This site offers user selectable interfaces (themes) and one is even for small screen mobile phones.

We use CSS, AJAX (available in Firefox, IE6, Opera8), Javascript, Cookies and provide Firefox-style live links. They are not needed but "as available" provide some nice added features such as our novel "Live Scan" and "Clickless Search" interfaces.