Introduction to

News Portals

Eqentia’s real-time news portals make it easy to scan the news and to dig deeply.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how to use some features of Eqentia portals.

As an example, we’ll be looking at one of our public portals, Future of News.

The ‘Viewing’ menu

The default view of a portal is All Headlines, which shows all articles, with most recent on top.

Clicking the button reveals other viewing options, such as...

• Top Stories by Social Attention (popularity)

• Top Stories by Relevancy (rather than recency)

To save time when jumping between these two views and the All Headlines view, you do not need to return to the drop-down menu. You can instead use the 3 buttons near the top of each page

Viewing: Latest Stories by NewsgroupThis view shows the most recent content, grouped by the type of source, such as:

• topic-specific blogs• general blogs• mainstream media, etc.

Click on any Newsgroup’s name to see only the articles from that Newsgroup.

Viewing: Semantic Map

This view ranks the frequency of each connection (or ‘tag’) within its broader entity, e.g. ‘Advertising’ within ‘Business’. Button size corresponds to frequency.

Viewing: Semantic Map

• Click any connection button to see related content.• You can view rankings from past 24 hours or month.

Viewing: All Annotations

If curators of the portal have annotated any articles (adding their own commentary or information) this view will show you their annotations with links to the articles.

Viewing: Twitter Leaderboard

• This page ranks today’s top tweeters (people whose tweets have appeared on this portal)

• Tweeters are ranked by the number of times they have tweeted and been retweeted

• Their latest tweet is shown

• To the right of their rank, you can see the change in their ranking since 11:59 pm yesterday

• The page displays up to 100 top tweeters

Change in position since 11:59pm yesterday

Real-time ranking (tweets and retweets)

Viewing: Preferred Sources If the portal owner has designated certain news sources as Preferred, this view will show content from those sources only.

Refine by Semantic Connection

Click on the red button beside a portal’s title to explore semantic connections. To find a particular connection, you can jump straight to its entity (e.g. People, Region) or scroll left and right to see all connections in all entities.

Cascading refinements

You can apply more than one refinement.

Example:If you go to the connection page for “Jay Rosen”, and then click on the connection for “New York Times Company”) you will see all articles that relate to both connections.

Canceling cascading refinements

If, for example, you want to change from viewing all articles related to Jay Rosen to viewing all articles referring to the New York Times Company, you must return to the portal front page and restart the refining process by selecting “New

York Times Company”.

Folders

Every Eqentia user has two or three folders for saving articles.

These are accessed by mousing over your photo or name at top right and clicking on My Folders.

Personal Folder

The Personal Folder is for long-term storage of articles. 

To put an article in your Personal Folder, click on ‘Save’ below an article. Then choose Personal.

Read Later FolderThe Read Later Folder is for articles you plan to read and delete (although you can always move them to your Personal Folder later).

To put an article in this folder, click on ‘Save’ below the article text and choose Read Later.

Group Folder

The Group Folder is only available to corporate license customers with 10 or more users per organization.

This feature allows users to share articles via a commonly accessible folder that is visible only to users of the same domain. In essence, it functions like a private social bookmarks repository.

Please email support@eqentia.com if you are interested in upgrading to a corporate licence.

Semantic search

• The search box is at the very top of each portal.

• Your search can include the Boolean expressions [and, or].

• To search for a phrase, place the phrase within quotes.

• Hit the “Enter” key to start searching.

Search tip

If you pause before hitting the Enter key, Eqentia will propose various search options, and show existing connections and portals related to your query.

Quick Browse

• Use this feature to go directly to the most recent articles in a portal, then page through them using the arrows at the top of the screen.

• If you are already viewing a connection, Quick Browse will only show articles related to that connection.

Follow buttons

Buttons near the top right of portal pages allow you to “follow” the portal or any of its connections.

When you follow a portal or connection, its articles appear on your Personal News Page.

Twitter widget

• The Twitter widget appears in the right hand column of the All Headlines view.

• It shows the most recent tweets related to the portal topic.

3 tabs of the Twitter widget

• TWEETS shows the latest tweets

• TOP URLS shows the most-tweeted links to articles in the past 24 hours

• TOP USERS shows who has tweeted the most on this topic in the past 24 hours

Social media and sharing tools

Some or all of the above tools appear on each page of the portal, enabling you to:

• Follow this portal’s Twitter account (if it has one)• Get a widget of content from this connection• Subscribe to an RSS feed for this connection• Share this page via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.

In addition, there are tools for each article...

Article tools

• Facebook: Shows number of Facebook “Likes”

• Twitter: Shows number of Tweets of the article

• LinkedIn: Shows number of posts of the article

Find out who is sharing an article

For recent articles, you can click on the Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn icon to see who has been sharing the article on each social network...

Then, click on any of the profiles to learn about the person...

Each person’s social media influence is indicated by their Klout score [>K]

Share

• Tweet the article

• Post it to Facebook or LinkedIn

• Email the article

Save

Enables saving the article to a folder (see Folders section for details)

Related

Read more articles in related connections or portals

Curate

If you have administrator privileges for this portal, you will see options to remove the article, annotate it, or cross-post it to another portal for which you have privileges.

Thanks for watching!

For addition information or assistance, please contact us at support@eqentia.com

Copyright © 2011 Eqentia Inc.