Reuters Insight Beta Project

3 comments March 27th, 2007 David Bush - Iasta

I was recently sent log in information from Maud Larpent, of Reuters, who have developed a new beta-project for information consolidation named Reuters Insight. Naturally, this would be a good product to create from one of the world’s largest media companies. According to the information I saw inside:

Reuters Insight - Insight exists to help you when:

**you want to track what’s happening in your overseas markets
**you need to find new contacts
**you are researching new markets to source from or distribute in

Reuters Insight is a community of international business people who are sharing information, connecting with each other and keeping abreast of key events impacting their supply chains, their regulatory environments and their markets.

Key features of the website you may want to try are:

**Searching the news for key topics of interest
**Researching a country
**Connecting with other individuals on the site who may be interesting to you

Personally, I think this is an interesting idea and I have seen a few things like this recently for blog and article consolidators. This site has potential because of the vast resources coming from Reuters itself and is early stages, so it will improve. There are little things that can be corrected, such as: no log in/password help and some navigation/settings are not intuitive, but I expect that right now. Since I registered last week, I did set up some quick preferences which then started a daily email stream about the topics I expressed interest in.

Conclusion: Wow! Slow down, I am getting a daily email with hundreds of stories from Reuters that are classified to my topic settings. However, I felt like I started a nuclear chain reaction that is in runaway mode. This is obviously my fault by not defining the filters more specifically, which I was able to finally change after poking around enough. Again, there was not enough explanation on how to do this or definitions of categories that I am subscribed to. When I am potentially going to get 1-1000 articles on everything I selected, I would like to know a profile of what type of story is coming.

All in all, I think this could be interesting and will continue to look in and review the emails. When dealing with this much information, setting my profile correctly will be the key. This is where I think Reuters can really improve, by giving the users the visibility into the categories. Great, I am subscribed to Sourcing and Procurement - what does that mean?? I am sure they will start subcatogorizing these which will make it even more useful to the reader. I commend Reuters for productizing (I have no idea if this is free) their deep wells of information and my critiques should be taken from the aspect of this beta release with improvements clearly coming.

If you know the information you have interest in, Reuters Insight will be very useful. If you cast a wide net, be prepared for endless reams of information that are essentially unusable. Now that I have begun refining my search more, I am interested to see the results.

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