Filed under: Newsdesk features
Google Reader, a flexible RSS reader beloved by its users, recently came to an end. Everyone from casual consumers to business people made use of it. For business users who were pushing Google Reader’s limits, Newsdesk may be a great solution.
While Google Reader allowed you to view chosen RSS feeds, Newsdesk gives access to millions of articles and posts across News sources, private content licenses, blogs, forums, video, and other social media sites. Being search-driven, Newsdesk gives you the option of following individual sources, searching for keywords across all sources, or exploring content using our categories.
Newsdesk takes information discovery to the next level and puts power directly into the hands of corporate communications and information professionals. Beyond discovery, Newsdesk is designed to help deliver targeted business news across the organization. over intranet, email and handhelds.
Read more here, or contact us to learn more.
July 2, 2013
Newsdesk Newsletters can now show the companies and people mentioned in the articles. This enhancement was released on Tuesday and is available to clients with access to Newsletters.
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By giving newsletter recipients more information at a glance, you increase the value of each article. Readers can get a better understanding of what they’re about to read. This can be invaluable for Newsletters containing many articles.
To enable Companies and/or People to Newsletters, open the Newsletter in Newsdesk and click “Edit Template.” Each can be enabled separately by ticking its box and clicking “Save.”
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We are planning to add this option to the main search results view in the future and welcome your feedback on this new feature.
June 14, 2013
Yesterday we unveiled a Newsdesk enhancement that is the culmination of months of planning, development efforts, and collaboration with clients: Article Tagging.
Uses include:
- Adding sentiment scores to articles and posts
- Applying your own editorial classification to content
- Setting up tag-based searches
- Organizing editorial workflows
Article Tagging allows you to add a layer of qualitative analysis to the data, giving professionals in your organization deeper insight into the articles they receive.
Manual or Automated
Tagging specific articles one at a time after manually reviewing them ensures that each one is relevant. You can also add tags to articles automatically by setting tags at the feed level. This can be used to complement a manual tagging effort, where a search result is sufficiently reliable that you always wish to add selected article tags to the articles going into that feed.
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Search Using Tags
You can drill into search results by combining keywords and article tags in the same search. Combine searches by using two searches for the same automated tags. Search an entire tag hierarchy, a specific tag, or in any combination.
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Clients that purchase the optional Article Tagging feature will have another tool for managing content in Newsdesk. Tagging articles manually or automatically based on search strings lets you create searches that can feed to your intranet, website, or Newsdesk emails.
Contact us to get started today.
May 22, 2013
A topic that has been growing in popularity is “crypto-currencies” with the most common of these being Bitcoin. Bitcoins are a digital currency that are bought on an exchange and then used to anonymously buy and sell goods online. If you haven’t heard of them, check out this video.
Bitcoin’s pricing has proven to be very volatile. For example, on April 10th the exchange rate of one Bitcoin dropped from $230 to $165. With a 28% plunge in just one day, wouldn’t it be useful to see if there are any indicators of whether Bitcoin will rise or fall over the next days? To get some insight, we pulled data from our media monitoring product, Newsdesk, into Excel and matched it up against historical data for Bitcoin’s exchange rates.
Unlike gold or a publically traded stock, Bitcoin’s pricing is not tied to any physical assets so it is vulnerable to fluctuations not normally seen in stocks.
Digging deeper with Newsdesk, we wanted to see how much the media’s hype about Bitcoins seemed to impact its price. As the graph below shows, trading volume seemed to lag after media mentions. This makes sense since a lot of the people using Bitcoins aren’t necessarily professional traders, so there is a disconnect between the information available and the market’s pricing; often a full day lag from media mentions to a spike in volume.
As shown here, simply using media mentions to determine the increase or decrease in Bitcoin’s exchange rate is an imperfect model.
As we move forward in an increasingly digital world, it will be interesting to see what role Bitcoins continue to play; whether they will be considered an investment or simply someplace to flee when traditional currencies have problems. Until then, if you’re a Newsdesk user and want to follow Bitcoins, or to delve deeper into your company’s online mentions, here is a simple way to download an analytics feed:
- Click the Search Tab
- Click New Search
- Select News only
- Search term: bitcoin*(* is a wildcard that searches for bitcoin, bitcoins, etc)
- Default search settings: English only, 60 days, all languages
- Save
- Click Analytics Tab
- Line graph, 60 Days by Day
- Drag Bitcoin feed over, Click “View Analytics”
- Download -> Feed Statistics (Excel)
For the examples in this post, we copied the Bitcoin trading data from here and put it together with the exported Newsdesk coverage in Excel. Excel allows us to easily dig through both sets of data to identify any hidden trends we wouldn’t see otherwise.
Can you think of any topics you’d like us to mine for in Newsdesk?
May 14, 2013
We’ve been hard at work improving Newsdesk to bring our clients more of what they need. Here’s a rundown of what’s new in the April 11th update.
Table of Contents Options in Newsletter Templates
You now have a new way to customize your newsletters templates more fully. The Table of Contents is automatically generated and included at the top of email Newsletters.
You may choose from:
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Table of contents (default)
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No table of contents (new)
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Table of Contents with article headlines (new)
Clean Layout
To make it easier to scan through the search results, the headline now appears below the source, author, and publish time.
The Twitter and Yammer icons have been updated and extraneous lines have been replaced by whitespace.
Rich Atom
For our “Rich Atom” feed format, we will now include a link to an XSD file that you can use to validate the returned XML. This brings us in line with industry standards.
If calls are made too frequently, a 429 “Too many requests” error will be returned. Calls for content should be spaced at least 60 seconds apart.
Enhancements to the “Add Articles” Feature
Articles that you manually add yourself can be translated directly from saved searches and Newsletters using Google Translate.
The language is set after clicking “Add Article” from a saved search’s drop-down menu.
Other Enhancements
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To help manage large source lists, in the Advanced Sources tab, we have made the selection area larger and added sources are sorted alphabetically.
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Further improvements to duplicate detection for similar articles.
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Wildcards now work with case sensitive searching and Power Searches.
Log in to Newsdesk to see them for yourself and tell us what you think.
April 11, 2013
Our team has been working on our latest round of improvements to Newsdesk and here is what’s new this week.
Save directly to Shared Content
When collaborating and sharing saved searches with your company or department, you can save them directly to group of your choice. Previously, you’d have to save a copy to your own account and then share it. Now, that extra step has been eliminated to prevent any confusion stemming from multiple copies.
Newsletter styling fix
We fixed a bug where some users would see an incorrect font size in the header and footer text of Newsletters.
Coming Soon:
We’ll have more information on an all-new set of features allowing users to create, edit, and mark content with custom tagging. Be on the lookout here for details as they become available..
March 19, 2013
Good morning! These are the styling changes you will see when you log into Newsdesk today.
The Email Tab Gets a Facelift
The Email Tab has been improved with a sleeker look and more user-friendly layout.
Gone are the grey spaces and lines. The Edit Template button now appears in the upper right corner and the name of the Newsletter or Alert being edited appears at the top of the screen.
Search Results in Expanded Mode
To facilitate future design upgrades, the Search results now only appear in “expanded mode”. The grid view has been removed.
If this is something that you would like to see reinstated, please contact us.
IE Improvements
To ensure continued compatibility with Internet Explorer, several behind-the-scenes changes were made. The Expanded View was made the singular display for search results and some minor display bugs have also been fixed.
Bug Fixes
- Analytics: You can set the colors for charts again.
- Dashboard: The “User Comments” widget now updates automatically.
- Email: The Last Send Time always shown for Alerts and Newsletters.
- Search: Clicking the “Clear All” button on the Refine Panel resets the Relevancy Slider as well.
We always want to know how we can improve Newsdesk. If you have any ideas, let us know in the comments or contact us by email.
November 29, 2012
This week’s enhancements give you even more control over the precision of your search results and help you share the latest news more effectively with improvements to the Newsletter, keyword highlighting, and article extracts.
Precise Search Results:
Under the “Extras” tab, there are options to set which keywords get highlighted and which keywords the extracts center around. This is most useful for searches that use AND.
New search Parameters:
Start of article searches, START/x:(word1 OR word2)
Use the start option to specify the first x words of an article that your keyword(s) must appear in. This helps to improve the relevancy of your results as it ensures the search terms are mentioned early on in the articles.
search: START/150:(OECD OR “World Bank” OR IMF)
- Returns articles that contain the words OECR, “World Bank”, orIMF in the first 150 words.
Near searches, (word1) NEAR/x (word2)
Use the near search to specify the maximum number of words between your search terms. This allows you to qualify search results by specifying relationships between the keywords in your search.
search: (Vodafone “T-Mobile” O2) NEAR/10 (iPhone iPad)
- Returns articles than contain Vodafone, T-Mobile or O2 within 10 words of iPhone or iPad.
Multiple occurrence searches, MULTIPLE/x:(word1 OR word2)
Use the multiple occurrence search option to specify the minimum number of occurrences of your keyword. This is especially useful in avoiding single passing mentions of keywords, thereby boosting the relevancy of the articles.
search: MULTIPLE/5:(ScotRail)
- Returns articles that contain at least five mentions of ScotRail.
Wildcard searches now work for phrases:
search: “flu vaccin*”
- Returns articles that contain the phrases “flu vaccine”, “flu vaccines”, “flu vaccination”, “flu vaccinations” etc.
A More User-Friendly Newsletter
We redesigned the Email section to give you better control of the way that Newsletters can be formatted. There is now a larger area to edit your Newsletter contents, and you instantly see the effect of styling changes on your email such as turning on keyword highlighting and user comments. Expect further enhancements in a few weeks time!
You can now hide or show:
- Paragraph Breaks
- Highlighting
- User Comments
It works great in conjunction with the custom highlighting and extracts above.
Contact your salesperson or Client Service to learn more.
October 30, 2012
Newsdesk now in German and French. Commensurate with our growing presence in international markets, we are very pleased to announce that Newsdesk now comes in 4 languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. You can switch to your preferred language via the Settings page which is in the dropdown menu top-right of the screen.
Much improved article clippings feature. It’s considerably faster to copy (‘clip’) articles from one feed to another, thanks to Newsdesk now remembering which feeds you have recently clipped to. The Clip/Email/Delete buttons now also stay visible on the page as you move down the list of articles so you no longer have to scroll back up to the top of the page to email, remove or copy an article.
Cleaner User Interface. The links that appeared top-right on the screen are now inside a neat dropdown menu, so the screen looks much less cluttered.
Enhancements and bug fixes.
- We have updated the feed dropdown menu so it no longer remains visible after moving the mouse away.
- The analytics download button now appears for all browsers again.
- Articles can now be clipped over to regular, non-clippings feeds.
- When you hit enter after typing in keywords, it runs the search as opposed to producing a carriage return.
Let us know what you think about the new features in the comments.
October 3, 2012
Do you use Newsdesk’s clippings feeds? Upcoming changes are about to make your life much easier. If you don’t use them yet, here’s why you should give them a try.
Clippings feeds are manually-managed collections of articles that can be created from any number of automatic searches. The problem with “any number” is that lists of saved feeds can get very long and unwieldy.
With this latest update, it’s just a simple click to add an article to a clippings feed. No more having to drag and scroll through the list.
While you can still drag and drop like before, the clickable list of recently used feeds gives more flexibility.
Why Clip?
For those of you unfamiliar with clippings feeds, they are a good way to editorially manage which articles get distributed by RSS or Email alerts. While Newsdesk lets you create tightly-focused searches, occasionally there will be bad articles that get by. A trusted source could be hacked or slang could cause previously innocuous words take on new meanings. By using automatic searches to cut through the chaff and clippings feeds to manually select the best, you know exactly what your clients or colleagues are going to see.
This feature idea came directly from customers. We are always interested in hearing about how Newsdesk can be improved. If you have any suggestions, please contact us.
September 28, 2012
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