Towards a Single Environment for News Streaming - Relevant FreePint Resources
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

As we announce the launch of the upcoming FreePint Topic Series: Making Information Visible, Robin Neidorf provides a summary of FreePint resources on news streaming, discovery and managing & aggregating alerts from both paid and free sources.

Item

We recently responded to a query we received from a FreePint Subscription customer:

'I received an inquiry from an employee in another department of our business about tools that may aggregate various alerts which a typical employee receives. Some are paid-for resources, while some are freely available. I told my colleague that I would run it by you to see if you had run across something like this in the marketplace.

'I believe he would like something that could be delivered via email. We are on SharePoint, so we have the ability to set up My Sites with RSS feeds from the various vendors. Our employees, however, tend to revert to email as their platform of choice for managing their information.'

We then highlighted the most relevant content for this query:

Systems that can do what your colleague is asking for:

Linex and Attensa are both technologies designed to pull a range of sources (both licensed and no-cost) into a single environment, and then enable users to define what they want to see from that pool of information.

Both were last subject to full review in 2012: 

• Product Review of Linex Systems
• Product Review of Attensa StreamServer.  

Both are on track for updated reviews in the near future.   

• We also published a Q&A with Attensa last autumn, which can be found here.   

InfoDesk: my understanding is that InfoDesk can do similar aggregation and delivery, in addition to supplying some licensed information directly. We've reviewed elements of InfoDesk in the past - most recently its InfoMonitor tool - and we are working with them to secure a future review.  

Towards a Single Comprehensive Environment

It's also important to keep in mind that users have to be trained/encouraged/nudged to continue to add new content to the system and not simply subscribe to additional alerts or newsletters on their own. If users are adding their own subscriptions or alerts, that's always going to stand in the way of a single, comprehensive environment for news streaming.

It's a common question these days, which is part of the reason we're focusing our efforts on a FreePint Topic Series: Making Information Visible which focuses on discovery, which this falls into. We'll be running case studies, Q&As, Communities of Practice and other resources as part of that series.  

Do you have a question for our team of analysts? Contact Robin Neidorf, director of research, at robin.neidorf@freepint.com, or use our online contact form.

Editor's Note

The FreePint Topic Series: Making Information Visible runs from January-March 2015. Register your interest now, and you'll also get a free PDF report with selected premium articles when it's published in March.

Order your FreePint Subscription and gain access to the full archive of FreePint Articles and Reports, plus have the ability to share these resources with anyone else at your organisation.

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