Last fall I wrote about Imooty, a site that aggregates European news feeds. Who would be interested? Anyone who must follow European politics and government; foreign currency traders; language students; European expatriates; others?
The other day a commentor from Italy wrote me to say: “EUFeeds is better!”
You be the judge. Visually the two sites are quite different.
Users navigate Imooty using a map to pick the country of interest. The site then offers eight tabs that represent attempts to filter incoming news into buckets: world, society, sciences, business, sport, leisure, star, media. So one could pick, Poland, Star, to see whether Paris Hilton has been partying in Gdansk — or whatever.
EUFeeds has a cleaner, minimalist user-interface. There are a row of flags across the top and yes, that means knowing the visual difference between the emblems of Slovenia and Slovakia. But the flags are arrayed in alphabetical order so it is possible to guess that Austria is first, followed by Belgium, and when in doubt, one can move the mouse move over any given flag to reveal the underlying word. Unlike Imooty, EUFeeds does not attempt, at least thus far, to filter country news into subject areas. Instead, when one toggles the country flag, the top headlines of its top newspapers flow to the screen. One can click thru the headline to the story but again, holding the cursor over the headline offers a brief glimpse into the article’s contents. Very neat.
I have frankly not used either site other than to toy around so I have no basis for a preference other than preferring the visual simplicity of EUFeeds. I think both sites are excellent windows into Europe –for those whose jobs or interests make them look to the Old World.