Firstly, apologies for not blogging for a long time, this week I’ll be getting back on track!I’ve contributed a few stories for the news site so far as crime correspondent. My audio and video pieces will be on the way soon! I just want to write a little about how I’ve come across my stories and the processes involved in finding online news.Do you ever think about how much news is out there, that never gets reported in newspapers and on television news? Obviously I realise that news organisations have only a certain amount of space to fill, time on television but so much is missed out. Online, is the perfect home for these sorts of stories, the ones that don’t make it on TV. There is loads of space and they’ll be read by people who go looking for them – people who are interested. One thing I didn’t know was, how easy these stories are to find on the Internet, UCE News Online has proved this. OK, so it’s run by journalism specialists and we know what to look for, but we don’t have money at our disposal and no PR agencies wanting us to promote them, but we’ve still produced good, original news.

To help me find new and original stories for the web, I’ve been using Wikio and Technorati, free internet services which let you easily search news sites and blogs.

Technorati, for me has been particularly useful. It’s so easy, especially for finding the ‘shocking statement’ story. I’m still a novice and probably not using it to it’s full potential but still, it’s helped me to produce some original articles. Pretty impressive for a search engine. You simply search for a keyword in the blog directory and you get a list of all the blogs about your search. Click the link and you’ve got a description of the blog, little snippets of the posts and you’re away!

Wikio should have proved to be even more helpful but I experienced some minor problems with it. Techcrunch.com sings its praises. In his article ‘Will Wikio challenge Google news and Technorati?’, Ouriel Ohayon describes it as a ‘smart combination of Digg+Technorati+Google news’ He says:

Wikio is a user managed news search engine. It watches, real time, thousands of news sources, gathers hundreds of thousands of stories every day and classifies them by their topics in a multi millions documents database. information classification is based both on its relevancy and on its members popularity who vote, discuss or even write new stories.

This it does, but I don’t agree that it will overtake Technorati. You add tag words and RSS feeds from a number of different sites. Wikio then gives you an updated list of all the latest news or entries from those sites which you’ve searched. It should be so easy, but I struggled with it. The problem I found was that I could only add feeds from official news sources such as the Express and Star. Feeds from blogs and other unofficial sites would just not add, despite me adding them in the exact same way as the official ones. This meant that most of the news I found on Wikio was second hand. Another, slightly trivial problem I had with Wikio was that when I entered Birmingham as a tag word, everything was about Birmingham USA, even if I changed it to Birmingham UK! A minor irritation, but still one which led me to feel that Technorati was a much better method of finding original stories on the web!