Don Tai (Canada) Blog

The year 2009 was marked by significant news coverage of Al Qaeda attacks, soldiers and civilians getting blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan, much stricter airport security and, here in Canada, increased wariness of those from the Middle East. In the middle of this morass was the news agency Al Jazeera. Most people here in Canada actually did not recognize the agency until tapes from Osama Bin Laden were released only to Al Jazeera.

I really love Drupal 6′s feed aggregator. It has the ability to aggregate numerous RSS (Really Simple Sybndication) news or blog feeds, categorize them, and keep them current, all in the effort to save you the trouble of going to each news source and hunting for relevant news. All you have to do is chose a category, read the summary and click the link for the article you what you want.

I‘ve now spent some time playing with Yahoo Pipes. Now I have a couple of great Pipes that aggregate and filter worldwide sources for news on China and Japan. As well I have also found a huge number of blogs about China. They are all aggregated on my website DonTai.com. To put all these worldwide sources, filtered by keyword, into one simple web page, for each a linked title and a small description, is great. It saves so much time. You read the title and the small description and you decide to delve in deeper or to pass. It is brilliant.

Overwhelming is an understatement when I describe available news on the Internet. Just get on Google’s news section and search for something. If it is anything remotely general, mountains of pages of links will topple out of your monitor and cascade onto your head like a pile of bricks. You then grit your teeth and dig your way out.