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About

Just Samachar is a news aggregation site for an Indian audience.

Features

Apart from the obvious Just Samachar offers the following -

Different views
Apart from the normal view which displays the news by source, two other views are provided.

Tag View - We don't always have the time to go through the news from all the sources in different categories.Tag View We need something which allows us to quickly learn what's happening around us. What's hot and what's not? The Tag View is the 'In the news' section on steroids. View all the news as keywords (tags) on one page with their font size and colour determined by how big a story is at that moment. If any theme interests you, just click on that tag to get a list of headlines right there. The biggest news in the last week and month is also just a click away.

River of News - Not everyone prefers the normal 'news boxed by source' view. River of News I'm partial to it sometimes, but I also understand the argument behind the River of News approach to reading news. What's that? To me, it's consuming news with an emphasis on time and not the source. Whenever you visit this view, you get a long list of the latest news items. You can also see the top stories of the moment and related items. Read what the person who coined the phrase has to say about it here. Although it originated with reference to RSS Feed readers, it has been widely hijacked now.

Set default view - Since different views are available, you can select the one you like and make it your default, so that on every visit, your preferred view is loaded. Please note that cookies need to be enabled to use this. They usually are, but if Just Samachar does not remember your preference, just enable it.

Headlines added since last visit are highlighted with the icon.
This I believe is an important feature that no other news source I use provides, and I really don't know why as it's not very difficult to do. It's very irritating to go through the same headlines on every visit to a site. To prevent that, in the normal view, Just Samachar puts a next to every headline that has been added since you last visited. So, it's easy to just read those headlines and move on. If a headline has a icon next to it, it means that it was present when you last visited the site and you've (probably) read it.

But, remember that if you visit the site only once every few days, all the headlines will be new. So, it's probably useful if you're the kind who refreshes the page once or twice a day.

Additional tools

Every time you click on a news article, Just Samachar provides additional tools. They can be found at the top right hand corner and look like the image below.

Frame Options

Read Later - Click on this link to save the news article for later reading. The last 50 saved articles can be accessed at http://justsamachar.com/my This feature requires cookies to be enabled.
E-mail to friend - No matter which site you are reading the news article on, Just Samachar allows you to forward the link to your friends or family. So, you can easily share articles that you find interesting even if the source site doesn't provide the facility. Also, Just Samachar does not ask for your e-mail id, so you don't have to worry about being spammed.

If you don't want the additional tools, just click on the Cancel icon and you will not see them again.

Stats Stats
Interesting statistics are available based on data collected from the time Just Samachar was launched (February, 2006). For now, you can see the most popular topics by month across categories. The most popular topics by category is also available. This is an attempt to capture what was in the news at a particular point in time. More statistics will be added in the future. If you are a stats junkie like me and would like to use the data in interesting ways, do drop me a line.
Search
Just Samachar archives all the news articles for a month and all of it is searchable by time and category. If available, related search terms are shown to help you narrow down your search. Boolean Search is supported. To know more about boolean search and how it can be used on Just Samachar, read this (technical documentation alert!).
Most popular news for every category
Most popular news for every category, and also a single page with the most popular news from all categories is available for the day, past week and month. This is generated based on the news articles visitors read.
RSS feeds
For people who live in their RSS readers, Just Samachar provides RSS feeds with the popular news articles for all the categories, and one feed for all popular news combined. The icon denotes an RSS feed. If you're not familiar with RSS, here's a good introduction.
In The News
This section shows keywords that represent what's hot in the news in the last 24 hours. The font size of the words corresponds to the popularity of the story among the news sources Just Samachar tracks. The tag cloud (as it is also called) shows what's happening in a glance. Clicking on the keyword/tag will display all related news stories in the past month.
Archives
All the headlines from the past month specific to a news source can be viewed at once on the archives page. The archives page can also be accessed from the normal view by clicking on the Archives icon next to the name of each source.

Copyright

Copyright of all news content belongs to the content providers. Everything else is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (?) license. That basically means you can do whatever you want to with the data available from Just Samachar.

Acknowledgements

Contact

If you have any suggestions or spot any bugs (especially if you spot any bugs!), please write to me. Thanks!