NewsTron: News Aggregator

NewsTron is high school student council elections applied to news – a popularity contest. News is voted to the top by its peers (other articles). Sites that base popularity on the number of viewers who go to an article create their own positive feed back ensuring that those articles remain the most popular.

NewsTron displays articles that make the most connections between topics being discussed today. It tries it’s best to find the top five topics of the day and list 5 relevant articles for each.

Improvements

Implement a better parser
Automatically update site every 15 minutes
Display source of article – ex Blah [AP via NYT]

Future components:

Today: A 6th topic header, featuring the top 2 and bottom 3 articles of the day.
Local: Feed local news feeds and weather information without user input
Word Track: Compile word use in headlines.

Display sparklines along side topic headlines
Create a .jpg chart on the fly for any word over any duration
Allow users to be alerted if a word is used more than X times in a day

Magnetic Poetry: Create your own headlines with today’s word list
Transfer Exchange: Allow people to post commentary