The Freshman
Check out the latest entry in Juliana Stone 2012’s series on her first year at Williams. Click here for the entire archived series. Is this series being featured on the Williams admissions webpage? If not, it should be. Speaking of which, what ever happened to the virtual tour that, if memory serves, was supposed to be added to that page?
Eph News
Many thanks to all the comments and suggestions with regard to our Eph News project. Per usual, I have dropped the ball and done nothing. Until today! To the right, you can see a new link to Eph News.
For now, this doesn’t do much. All we get are the results of a search in Google News for:
“Williams College” OR “Chris Murphy” and Congress
Still, it is a start. Now, we need to convince someone like Ronit Bhattacharyya ‘07 to take ownership. He (or someone else) can easily redirect this link to a more full featured solution.
Eph News
This is a shout out to all the technically sophisticated Ephs out there, people like DeWitt Clinton ‘98, Evan Miller ‘06, Ethan Zuckerman ‘93, Eric Smith ‘99 and Stephen O’Grady ‘97.
We want to create an “Eph News” feed with the following characteristics:
1) It would present a feed of news stories (or blog posts or whatever) which mention specific topics. Duplicate items would be deleted or aggregated in some way. There should be a pretty interface for users, along with an RSS feed. Google News is a nice example. Consider a search for “Williams College.”
2) Although the UI for Google News is fine, the substance is not. For example, there seem to be many important sources that Google News does not (or, more likely, can not) aggregate. A current example is the New York Times. Note the articles which mention “Williams College” but which do not appear in the Google News feed. So, Eph News needs to search more than one source.
3) An interface for the maintainers (i.e., Eric and me) which allows us to easily maintain a list of text strings that we want stories about. Google News is fine, but it is not easy to simultaneously search for stories which mention either “Williams College” or “Morton Schapiro” or “Bethany McLean” or “James MacGregor Burns” or several dozen more strings.
Any ideas? DeWitt’s involvment in Open Search is clearly relevant while Ethan’s recent work is too complex for me to follow, much less implement.
