Newsfordev - news aggregator platform for agricultural development practitioners

Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 28 April, 2008 - 16:23.
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I received the very interesting announcement below from the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA). The announcement regards the new http://www.newsfordev.org news service for agricultural development professionals.
Initiatives like this in various sectors in Africa present a powerful opportunity for Africans to address the "information overload" issue while keeping themselves informed and connected with events and happenings in their fields. RSS Feeds and e-mail digests such as those provided by CTA are particularly relevant for those lacking regular access to the Internet. Check it out and let us all know how it works out for you.
CTA is pleased to announce to ICT Update readers the launch of the news aggregator platform, www.newsfordev.org<http://www.newsfordev.org/>, NewsforDev employs RSS and e-mail news technology to bring knowledge and information to agricultural development practitioners in ACP countries thereby improving access to information. A beta version was successfully showcased in Rome at the web2fordev conference last year.

Drawing on a reference base of more than 630 newsfeeds and an articles database of over 400,000 articles, Newsfordev editors have selected the most pertinent newsfeed sources to create a number of thematic dossiers, updates of which you can receive as newsletters, either by email or on-line. You can track your favourite sources by setting up a personal news page, and even incorporate your own newsletters based on customised searches of the ever growing database of articles cached from all sources. You can also share news with other users using social bookmarking tools.

The 13 dossiers currently available are as follows:

* ACP-EU;
* Agriculture;
* Biodiversity;
* Biofuels;
* CTA;
* Climate change;
* Development;
* HIV/AIDS;
* ICT; ICT4D;
* S&T; S&T4D;
* Trade;
* World News (Africa, Asia Pacific, Caribbean, Europe, Middle-East)
The 15 Feature newsletters (from the database of articles) are as follows:

* Bird flu
* Connectivity
* Drought
* EU-Africa Headlines
* Gender issues
* Genetic resources
* Globalisation
* Information society
* Millenium Development Goals
* Microfinance
* Mobile Phones
* Nanotechnology
* Traceability
* Urban agriculture
* WiFi

You are warmly invited to explore features of the site and register to create your own home page and receive personalized newsletters. Any feedback you may have will be most welcome.

We hope you find this a useful tool in your work for keeping abreast of the latest developments. In the next phase of the platform development we aim to add more French and Portuguese sources as well as expand the number of dossiers and add new functionalities.

The developers of newsfordev would like to take this opportunity to thank all the helpful inputs and advice received from numerous colleagues and partners throughout the development of the platform.
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