PalmAddicts has a
post this morning on a new application called
NewsRaider. The Proporta/Tomeraider guys advertise it as:
A revolutionary application for Windows that allows any News, Reviews or Magazine site to have its articles "raided" and converted into a single rolling news service. NewsRaider is free. We guarantee that no other product or service can give you so much news in such a distilled format. NewsRaider is fast. The articles are downloaded before you want to read them (It sits in the background taking up little system resources but huge amounts of news resources). NewsRaider does not use RSS or other syndication. It goes straight to the source. This means that you get the news content you want, whenever you want.
Really sorry, but I don't see the benefit in
scraping news over using official RSS feeds. NewsRaider has scraping scripts for CNN, BBC News, and Guardian, even though each one of them already offers feeds for various sections of their site. And if you really have to scrape content, wouldn't it be better to learn how to do it with Regular Expressions +
Sitescooper instead of studying an incompatible "Raid Script" language?