My daily news sites

January 18, 2004 Off By leigh

I’ve been checking Juan Coles blog a professor of Middle East history who speaks Urdu, Arabic and other middle east languages. He has some very informed commentary, particularly his monitoring of Arabic news sources.


I’ve been checking Juan Coles blog a professor of Middle East history who speaks Urdu, Arabic and other middle east languages. He has some very informed commentary, particularly his monitoring of Arabic news sources.

I also check out Democracy Now the website of a syndicated radio and TV broadcast by the long time activist Amy Goodman. She covers a lot of stories the corporate media don’t pick up. I particularly like her interviewing style, allowing her commentators plenty of opportunity to speak, she also brings on the full spectrum of commentators from the right and the left.

I tend to use an RSS syndicator rather than just hit the sites with a web browser, it allows you to cover a lot more information sources much more quickly than just browsing the sites. I use Net News Wire, for MacOS X, which is a commercial product, against my normal practice which is to choose open source first. I tried RSSOwl which is in Java and looks promising but was buggy and a bit incomplete. Other ones I tried were amphetadesk which is a pain to use since several channels all end up on one huge scrolled window and BottomFeeder (in Smalltalk) which seems pretty cool but is more Windows like in operation and just didn’t look all that great on MacOS X. All of them would be great with a bit more work, but I couldn’t afford the time debugging them…I have enough work debugging my own code. I use OmniWeb which is a great browser, even though it isn’t free.