Plugged In: Aggregator Newsflashr.com is a zippy route to headlines worldwide

Accessing news on the Web just keeps getting easier. Newsflashr.com, the latest entrant among news aggregators, went live this week, based on new technologies that give users ways to get to the world's headlines quickly and easily.

Newsflashr.com founder Gal Arav, based in Bedford, Mass., says he is going after Google and Yahoo with a site that provides more interactivity and faster access to stories and blogs from the world's major media organizations.

Users have a choice of viewing news by topics or feeds. By clicking on feeds, you'll access news sources ranging from the New York Times to the BBC to the People's Daily of China, with a series of news headlines under each source. Click on the headline to read the story or click on the news organization to bring up its Web site.

Under topics, you'll find major news categories such as world, business, sports, show business, health and science. The politics and technology categories add blogs to the array of news stories. When you click on a headline, the article comes up almost instantly.

Arav said the key to the site's speed is the technology he took a year to develop as a software engineer.

"Basically, the site is preloaded," he said Wednesday. "Every 15 minutes, the software analyzes keywords in headlines and preloads the story. The page itself is prepared in such a way that when you click on those topics, there's no need to go back to the server. There's no wait at all. There are layers upon layers of topics, and you're just peeling them away."

There is no advertising on the site during its launch, and Arav vows not to clutter it up once he does start selling ads.

"I won't go overboard," he said. "I've made an effort to keep the interfaces as clean as possible."

Economic Web site rolls on

A U.S. government Web site that provides quick links to major economic reports was set to disappear on Saturday until public clamor put the kibosh on the move.

"Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008," read a note atop the site, which provides easy access to regular government data on such things as retail sales, economic growth and the trade deficit.

The Commerce Department, which runs the site, backtracked after a brief storm of protest.

"We have approximately 8,000 e-mail subscribers," said Clark Reid, a spokesman for the Economic Statistics Administration, an arm of the massive Commerce Department. "Since 2002 the platform for that e-mail subscription component has become older, antiquated. The system can't add new subscribers, can't delete invalid e-mail addresses. The system was breaking down."

He said the agency decided to simply scrap the e-mail program, which was linked to the Web site. When it made the announcement, however, many of those 8,000 e-mail subscribers screamed, and the department listened. It now plans to rebuild the e-mail system and keep the Web site humming, Reid said.

The note about the disappearing Web site disappeared late last week and was replaced by one saying the site will continue after all.

Reid noted the information was still available at the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis Web sites but acknowledged the difficulty of navigating through those sites for specific reports.

In case the Commerce Department changes its mind again, a private site is coming to the rescue. OMB Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to clarify the murky world of federal budget issues, is linking up to the reports.

Go to www.ombwatch.org/article/archive/530.

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