At first, Google Alerts seems like a huge time saver. You temporarily cease to comb the Web’s exponentially growing depository of news sites and blogs. But then your alerts seem to grow out of control. And then you need an alert for the alerts. Or a blogger to sort out the best blogs. When does it end?
Help might be on the way.
It’s called Parse.ly. Yes, it is another clever, cutesy name for a startup website, but this one is useful, simple and actually provides meaningful information from the thousands of news sites and innumerable blogs that pepper the online landscape. The information you used to have to manually weed out in your Google Alerts is presented in an ordered way, just as if some helpful person in your office (your intern) presented you with a folder of relevant newspaper clips and blog printouts for you to peacefully read in the morning as you sip your double tall vanilla non-fat extra foam latte.
Kelley Vance is a PR professional with The Hodges Partnership in Richmond, and among the many companies she represents is SnagAJob.com. Vance has to monitor the news to see who is saying what about her companies.
“I use Google news alerts,” Vance said “I also use Twitter. And of course, traditional methods of monitoring the news still apply.” Which means that (shock and awe) she picks up a newspaper and reads it.
“It’s certainly very important that I know what is out there about the companies I represent,” she said.
Enter Parse.ly. It is a news tracking system that orders, filters and ranks incoming news feeds. It orders them by asking you from the outset to rank your interests. The rankings range from most important to somewhat important. If you represent SnagAJob.com like Vance does, you would rank SnagAJob.com as most important, and you might list some of SnagAJob’s competitors, such as Monster.com, in that field as well.
In the “extremely important” box, you might put “Hourly employment U.S.,” or “job listing web site.” In “somewhat important” you might just put things that you are interested in. I put “Philadelphia Phillies” in my “somewhat important” box.
When you open your Parse.ly account in the morning, the application has already ordered your stories based on the interest level you assigned it. A score is then assigned to the article. A story that matches several of your interests would get a higher score and therefore appear higher in your account.
I’d need more time to play with it to judge how consistently it delivers quality news and how comprehensive it is – it took me a few months with Google Alerts to figure out that they frustrated me – but from first impressions it seems as if it delivers the same kind of comprehensive searching as Google Alerts but with a greater ability to sift through the junk. And of course it probably requires some fine-tuning of your interests and which categories you file them in to get the most from Parse.ly.
The price tag is about right: free. The beta version is free to try, but the developers say that there will be a premium service soon, but details are sketchy.
Parse.ly is incredibly simple to use, and what I like best about it is the lack of features. There are not 100 things you can do with it; it simply orders your news and blog posts for you. The news appears like an email system where the headline is the subject line. When you click on a story, the headline and intro paragraph pop up.
The site is still in beta, and there is a bit of a long turnaround between when you sign up for the service and when you get access to it — several days if you sign up before a weekend.
And the system isn’t perfect. You still get some irrelevant things surfacing in the top ranks. Just like that intern, it goofs every now and then. But it is a long way better than Google Alerts, and it gives your inbox some welcome relief from the stream of junk that fills it up so often.
David Larter writes about technology for BizSense. Please send news tips to [email protected].
At first, Google Alerts seems like a huge time saver. You temporarily cease to comb the Web’s exponentially growing depository of news sites and blogs. But then your alerts seem to grow out of control. And then you need an alert for the alerts. Or a blogger to sort out the best blogs. When does it end?
Help might be on the way.
It’s called Parse.ly. Yes, it is another clever, cutesy name for a startup website, but this one is useful, simple and actually provides meaningful information from the thousands of news sites and innumerable blogs that pepper the online landscape. The information you used to have to manually weed out in your Google Alerts is presented in an ordered way, just as if some helpful person in your office (your intern) presented you with a folder of relevant newspaper clips and blog printouts for you to peacefully read in the morning as you sip your double tall vanilla non-fat extra foam latte.
Kelley Vance is a PR professional with The Hodges Partnership in Richmond, and among the many companies she represents is SnagAJob.com. Vance has to monitor the news to see who is saying what about her companies.
“I use Google news alerts,” Vance said “I also use Twitter. And of course, traditional methods of monitoring the news still apply.” Which means that (shock and awe) she picks up a newspaper and reads it.
“It’s certainly very important that I know what is out there about the companies I represent,” she said.
Enter Parse.ly. It is a news tracking system that orders, filters and ranks incoming news feeds. It orders them by asking you from the outset to rank your interests. The rankings range from most important to somewhat important. If you represent SnagAJob.com like Vance does, you would rank SnagAJob.com as most important, and you might list some of SnagAJob’s competitors, such as Monster.com, in that field as well.
In the “extremely important” box, you might put “Hourly employment U.S.,” or “job listing web site.” In “somewhat important” you might just put things that you are interested in. I put “Philadelphia Phillies” in my “somewhat important” box.
When you open your Parse.ly account in the morning, the application has already ordered your stories based on the interest level you assigned it. A score is then assigned to the article. A story that matches several of your interests would get a higher score and therefore appear higher in your account.
I’d need more time to play with it to judge how consistently it delivers quality news and how comprehensive it is – it took me a few months with Google Alerts to figure out that they frustrated me – but from first impressions it seems as if it delivers the same kind of comprehensive searching as Google Alerts but with a greater ability to sift through the junk. And of course it probably requires some fine-tuning of your interests and which categories you file them in to get the most from Parse.ly.
The price tag is about right: free. The beta version is free to try, but the developers say that there will be a premium service soon, but details are sketchy.
Parse.ly is incredibly simple to use, and what I like best about it is the lack of features. There are not 100 things you can do with it; it simply orders your news and blog posts for you. The news appears like an email system where the headline is the subject line. When you click on a story, the headline and intro paragraph pop up.
The site is still in beta, and there is a bit of a long turnaround between when you sign up for the service and when you get access to it — several days if you sign up before a weekend.
And the system isn’t perfect. You still get some irrelevant things surfacing in the top ranks. Just like that intern, it goofs every now and then. But it is a long way better than Google Alerts, and it gives your inbox some welcome relief from the stream of junk that fills it up so often.
David Larter writes about technology for BizSense. Please send news tips to [email protected].
Thanks so much for the write up David. We’re working on speeding up the time between when a person signs up and when they are provisioned with an account. We put a lot of thought into the design as well. As you noted, we wanted to keep the design somewhat minimal, so that the content would be able to speak for itself.