A few years ago, you couldn’t avoid seeing food-related sites. One of the biggest was the Sainsbury/Carlton joint venture Taste, which eventually closed. Now UKTV hopes to fill the gap with the launch of a site to support UK Food (www.ukfood.tv). UK Food, a joint venture between BBC Worldwide and Flextech Television, certainly does deliver something with promise, with a good selection of recipes and information on food. But one area lacking is news about food. While it is good to see a website that UK Food says is about "celebrating food", it would have been even better to see some news-related articles.
Google has enhanced its rolling news service with a new look. The leading site is taking a feed from 4,000 news sources – including Ananova, Reuters and the BBC – and integrating them on its news service. The news is sorted and arranged without the aid of editors and Google claims its technology allows it to deliver an accurate and fast service. It is divided into sections including world, sci-tech, sports and entertainment. While the service is not in direct competition with the UK-based and founded NewsNow or Moreover services, it does give media owners with websites an opportunity to get their news out to a wider audience. By allowing story headlines to appear on the biggest search service on the web, it means potentially more people will gain access to their content. At the moment, Google doesn’t appear to be charging anyone to have their headlines appear. The news service has a 30-day archive. At the moment, it is still very much US-focused, but expect to see localised versions in the next few months.
Related
From time to time I get e-mails from readers asking me to name my favourite bookmarks. The following five services have proved extremely valuable:
lYahoo Mail (www.yahoo.com) – The easiest and best free web-based e-mail service around. Even if you want to increase the amount of space it gives you, it only costs a few pounds a month. In six years of having an account, I have never knowingly lost any e-mails.
Content from our partners
lGoogle (www.google.com) – Simply the essential service for searching on the Internet.
lSourcewire (www.sourcewire.
com) – Puts you in direct contact with PRs and is great for getting information.
lDictionary.com (www.dictionary.
com) – Excellent dictionary.
lNewsNow (www.newsnow.co.uk) – All the news you could ever want, collated and indexed into hundreds of categories.
Leslie Bunder
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