About the news service in English / Pulling news from websites

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

Dear friends,

This message is to inform you of problems facing the news service in
English, our solution, and to ask for your assitance in implementing 
the solution.

Until now, Anh Ca and Son have provided VN-related news in English
by going to the vietsandiego website and pulling the news articles
available there. Vietsandiego is a relatively new website that provides
the most comprehensive and up-to-dated coverage of VN-related news.
However, starting June 1st, Vietsandiego site will be accessible only for
subscribers, who pay a monthly or quarterly fee. Thus, we need to work out
a plan to ensure the continuation of VN news service for vnsa after June
1st.

I have been watching Vietsandiego carefully for a while, and came to the
conclusion that about 95% of Vietsandiego news are pulled (free of charge) 
from the websites of major Asia-related newspapers, magazines, and news
agencies; about 5% of the news are pulled from some subscriber-based sites
such as Wall Street Journal, AFP, etc; but we can do very well without
this 5%, most of the important news in this 5% will appear one or two days
later in other newspapers that we have access to, or will be posted by
someone in some VN-related forums. 

So my plan for June 1st is basically what I proposed at the very beginning
of VNSA: We need to write a news puller which will pull VN-related news
from various websites; with this newspuller we will have a semi-automatic
news service of quite high-quality, and free of charge. Techninally,
writing such a newspuller is simple: We need to use the command-line
option of a net browser (such as Lynx, does anyone know if Netscape or
Microsoft browser has one?) to pull down the news, then use a program
(probably best a Perl script) to process the news (cutting out junks,
etc). But the writing could take two to three days, including debugging
and testing.

1) Unfortunately I can't afford two or three days at this moment, at least
not until around June 20, when my quarter is over. So are there anyone
out there who could volunteer to help us and other vnsa members with
writing this newspuller?  I remember some of you showed up when this
proposal was first put out in December. If you are still interested, and
have some spare time, we and everyone else would greatly appreciate your
help in this matter. Please contact me, anh Ca, Thanh, or Lam if you could
help. Thank you.

2) I would like to be able to read Vietsandiego until at least June 30, so
that I can compare the quality of the news we are able to extract with
that of the Vietsandiego news. In the case the quality of Vietsandiego
news is substantially higher, we shall work out a different plan to make
sure that we also get the comparable high-quality news service. So if
anyone of you are planning to pay for the Vietsandiego news service, would
you be willing to share that with me until June 30? If you would, please
contact me privately. Thank you. If no one shows up, what is likely to
happen is that someone from the admins will need to pay for the
Vietsandiego news service himself.

3) If you have any better idea, please contact us.

Thank you very much for your time and help.
Best, Hai.