NewsScape

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”     14JULY20 Google famously wrote their own motto: “Do no evil”   …and have struggled to live that down.   At this time in world affairs, there is no need to create anything new as the one above has an awkward resonance. It is generally attributed to the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke and has been tragically true at far too many points throughout history. It is a close relative of the "line of least resistance". The UK is presently an example of what can happen when good men are not doing enough. A democratic vote of the British people dramatically confirmed their wish to leave the European Union, and recover their ability to govern themselves through directly elected representatives. This means leaving the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats of Brussels to focus on maintaining the EU as a protected trade area designed and maintained (mostly) to ...

NewsScape has been around as an idea for the past 25 years. All the obvious variations of the domain name were gathered to “ring-fence” the brand, and NewsScape began work as a story “scraper” that scoured the web and news sources for content. NewsScape used intelligent agents to sort what it found, to create the most comprehensive news aggregator as long ago 1999. When this service was suspended in 2006, it had collected more than 6 million de-duplicated and classified stories in MS SQL Server databases. The proposition was - and remains - that “ NewsScape reads the news, watches the TV, listens to the radio and scours the internet, so you don't need to ...” But there was no suitable business model, and user numbers were not enough to warrant devising an advertising-funded strategy. And we expected that the idea was going to be taken and developed by one of the 800 pound gorillas, so when Google News duly showed up we were not surprised; and any further development of ...