brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (06/09/89)
Announcing ClariNews -- live news, hot off the world's major newswires, 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 order@clarinet.com or info@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@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (06/10/89)
A few quick points ... I'm packing & getting ready to go to Usenix .. 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 <david@ms.uky.edu> <- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <- <- New word for the day: Obnoxity -- an act of obnoxiousness