London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

New ! Korean NewsWire service

NewswireFor a while now I’ve been really frustrated at the time it takes for Korean websites to load. When browsing the news sites while eating a lunchtime sandwich at my desk I’ve got better things to do than wait for those infuriating animated adverts for scary gas-powered kimchi-fridges to load before I can read the actual page — which as often as not doesn’t contain any news item that interests me anyway. In fact, I’ve been compiling some statistics on page load times and other objective measures in respect of the Korean news websites, and one day I’ll get around to naming and shaming the worst offenders for bloating the bandwidth with unnecessary rubbish (imponderable mystery # 1: why, on a site designed for English-speakers, would you put adverts comprehensible only to Korean-speakers?).

Anyway, as a time-saving device I’m starting a news aggregator service, similar to my BlogWatch service. Obviously I’m restricted to those websites which provide a Korea-specific rss feed. The New York Times provides one – but you need to cough up hard cash to read the articles. The BBC claims to provide one, but I can’t get the URI to work with my feed-reader. There’s a couple of news aggregators which provide feeds, which is handy, so I’ve grabbed those. And a couple of the Korean sites are tech-savvy enough to provide one. These includes the Chosun1 and OhMyNews, so I’ve ripped those too. As other sites catch up, I’ll provide those headlines as well.

I’ve added the Chosun’s “culture” feed to my Celebrity BlogWatch page, and while I’ve been playing around with feeds, I’ve added a couple more feeds to my more serious “Broadsheet” BlogWatch, and separated out the Film & entertainment blogs onto a separate page as they were getting rather buried in the Broadsheet page.

Finally, while exploring (without success) how to crack a Korea-specific RSS feed from the BBC site, I came across the BBC’s accumulated Korea-related audio & video archive. So I’ve added a link to my sidebar under News2. Enjoy.

Links:

  1. ignore their irritatingly Microsoft-tunnel-visioned instructions for subscribing to their rss feed. What planet do these guys live on, and what century do they live in? Who on earth needs to install .Net in order to subscribe to RSS feeds? Presumably those who only use Microsoft products on their Wintel boxes []
  2. One day I’ll fix the sidebar so the blogroll appears on pages other than just the front page! []

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