

Eureka Science news - automated science news aggregator startup - FiReaNG3L
http://esciencenews.com

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FiReaNG3L
My new startup - a news aggregator for science, akin to what Google News does
but better as it also find and publishes related press releases directly on
the site. Science is the first vertical we chose to use the platform we
developed on, but we plan to adapt it for general news (if we can get funding
to aggregate AP news for example) and other verticals. Comments / criticism
welcome :)

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pierrefar
Is this an aggregator of press releases? If so, it's hardly science news:
there is no critical thinking reviewing the results. It's more like science
spin. At best, it's will be a good source of story tips for bloggers. I'm
talking from experience as a science blogger. Please correct me if I'm wrong
about your sources - I don't mean to offend.

Also, your name is very similar to an existing science "news" service from the
American Academy for the Advancement of Science (the AAAS). They call theirs
EurekAlert ( <http://www.eurekalert.org/> ), and the title of their home page
is "EurekAlert - Science News". Because of this, you'll have a tough time
ranking in the search engines since eurekalert.org is such an established
site.

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FiReaNG3L
It's indeed targeted at non-scientific people; bloggers, highschool students,
etc. It`s a press release aggregator, but it also cluster news from other
sites, giving more sources for each story.

However, the big plus is that it ranks stories in order of importance.

And as for search engine ranking, Eurekalert is a public non profit service,
so they dont market much. Science daily use their press releases and is #1 for
'science news', even if its horrible in usability / design. Of course, we
intend to change that ;) But we know the competition is fierce in this niche.

~~~
pierrefar
Have you seen PostGenomic and BPR3.org? They're doing something very
interesting.

~~~
FiReaNG3L
Aware of PostGenomic (great initiative!), gonna check out BPR3 thanks for the
link :)

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shafqat
Very nice... How did you do the clustering? Did you use an open source tool or
build the algorithms yourself? I like the niche you picked - science news!
Good luck.

~~~
FiReaNG3L
Clustering is a 2 part process - calculate scores, then cluster. For the
second part we used an open source perl API to a C library (very fast) for
hierarchical clustering : <http://search.cpan.org/~mdehoon/Algorithm-
Cluster-1.38/>

I picked this niche because Im a scientist, mainly ;) I built the now #1
biology news website on the web (biologynews.net - #1 according to search
engines) 3 years ago - Eureka Science News is the logical continuation of this
effort.

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motoko
This looks very nice, I like it a lot. How much work did it take to make this?

~~~
FiReaNG3L
Considering that I'm doing my PhD (Retrovirology, I work on AIDS - I'm posting
from a level 3 bioconfinement lab right now ;)) and that I could work only
part time on it, it took me about a year (working at night - thanks
insomnia!). Much longer than I previously thought, but it required lots of
tweaking to get good clusters along with good performance / scalability. Im
very satisfied with the result and plan to adapt it to other news verticals as
well as add functionality (comments, voting, etc) in the future. Glad that you
like it! :)

~~~
motoko
Are you looking for help? I may be interested, and this is something that I've
been working on, too.

Where are you located? Are you in the SF bay area?

