Newsviking is an online news and newspaper harvester - a program for news and information gathering, analysis, sociopolitical commentary, and summarized redistribution. It allows the user to download news from around the world via the Internet, store it in a database, and redistribute summarized versions of the article along with commentary that the user creates and stores for easy re-use. Newsviking is a great way of collecting and organizing news stories and sharing ideas in a public discussion forum. Newsviking has the following features: it uses MySQL as a database, it allows for simple and complex news story searches via SQL and graphically interfaced queries, it allows for creation and insertion of pre-canned commentary and sociopolitical analysis, redistribution of quotes and summarized articles via NNTP Usenet Newsgroups, it features automatic calculation of which are the most appropriate newsgroups to post to based on the news article content, it allows news stories to be compiled and exported into an html web page 'news digest' of up to 3 full weeks of news stories categorized by region, finally it has a rating review system that allows the user to score each individual news story in terms of importance and relevance.

Newsviking 3 is free Opensource software which was made as a public service to encourage people to become aware of current events and to be active participants in the fate of the world. Newsviking collects news from Europe, Canada, The United States, Africa, Asia, New Zealand and Australia, South and Central America and the Middle East. It may be used with Windows, Macintosh and Linux-based systems. There is a complete install for Windows users (Macintosh and Linux users must first install some prerequisites on their own for Newsviking to work).
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Time line:

Current Version III Java Beta



• 2004
- now in beta stage. new installers written. many new features.
• 2003
- complete rewrite of newsviking. This time uses java. This is version three alpha.
• 2001-2002
- newsviking 2 - written as a perl cgi program. reason for rewrite was two-fold: 1 - because perl tk was never developed robustly enough to allow web browser widgets (as a result of lack of development in this otherwise excellent language). 2 - because the news feed changed their protocols completely causing this version of newsviking to cease to work. Because of the need for a major overhaul, the decision was made to use java because of it's more developed GUI classes, and compatibility amongst OS platforms in that regard. The drawback of course is Java is not as fast as Perl so there is a little bit of a speed difference.
• 1997-2001
- newsviking 1 - written in visual basic. worked very well but was forced to rewrite a different language due to M$ licensing issues. Another problem was that it was not cross-platform and it was necessary to develop something functional for Unix, Linux and Macintosh.

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FAQ - Why Newsviking is better and other Q&A's:

Q: What is Newsviking3?
A: Newsviking is a program which makes reading and organizing news and current events easy and fun. It also allows for easy insertion of one's own comments into the stories and public discussion of those news stories on the Internet. It is intended as a tool for those who want to keep track of current events, or trends underlying the news. It's also very useful to keep track of past events that might relate to current events. It allows for complex database searches within your own news database. For re-occurring comments - such as to illustrate a social or political trend, Newsviking allows for comments to be saved to a database to be easily reinserted into related stories without having to type them all over again. Please respect the copyright laws and follow the summarization guidelines of the various news agencies before reposting an article to a public Internet forum (remember you can only quote the article not redistribute the entire thing as the full dissemination of information word-for-word has now become illegal within pre-approved permission of the news agency which originally published the news story).

Q: Which Operating Systems will Newsviking3 work on?
A: Windows, Macintosh with OS X, Linux. Max/Linux users must install the prerequisite programs on their own or through the third party installation suites mentioned in the Downloads section. Windows users may either install the full install (which comes with Php Apache MySQL and Java) or the partial install which is Newsviking3 alone (and then they must install the prerequisites using a third-party installation suite mentioned in the downloads section.

Q: Why not just read the regular newspaper or a news web page instead?
A: If you want to save news articles for future reference it will be very difficult to organize them, and then even more time consuming to pull them up again - and what if you want to do a word search and pull up all the news articles containing that word? You aren't going to be able to do that with a file cabinet full of newspaper clippings, or a hard-drive full of locally saved news web pages. Finally, what if you want to discuss the story with the community at large? The only way you can is by manually copying and pasting the story or worse - to use a web-based discussion board or web log (blog) that is under the control of someone that can monitor and censor what you say or worse - suddenly close down over night and vanish with all of your past words of wisdom! Another reason to use newsviking3 is that you don't have to sift through a bunch of advertisements while reading the news and finally - it's free.


Q: Does Newsviking read the news for me? Does it speak?
A: Newsviking's 'read news aloud' button will copy the contents of the story so that most speech programs will read it but you have to have a speech program already installed and running in the background. Newsviking works well with Speakonia on Windows platforms. With Speakonia running in the background, Newsviking will read the news to you. Click here for more information on Speakonia.


Q: Why Usenet Newsgroups? What are the advantages over web-based discussion forums, and web logs (blogs) such as those found at CNN, Yahoo and others.
A: De-centralization, and freedom of speech, are the two reasons why Usenet Newsgroups are better. Firstly, unlike any web-based discussion board or "blogs", your posts do not become the property of a private company or individual who can censor what you have to say. In most cases censorship really isn't an issue however when discussing sociopolitical issues of an seriousness, especially when one wants to talk on a thinking adult level without regard for what is Politically Correct, one's options on free speech become few indeed. Even though there are some discussion boards and blogs that are web based that allow questioning of mainstream viewpoints, whatever you say then becomes property of the owner(s) of that web board and may be removed or altered at any time! This is not to mention the often intrusive registration processes that are required to be permitted to post to these boards. In addition, because web-based discussion boards and blogs are centralized on a particular web server, they are open to hacker attack -- and such has been the case with a variety of non-mainstream sociopolitical web-based discussion boards and blogs that were shut down due to this problem -- which Usenet Newsgroups is more immune to because it is decentralized.
Unfortunately, the powers that be, long ago recognized the danger of Usenet Newsgroups as an uncensored, open and free communication forum and attempted to shut it down. Initially, unable to do so they instead popularized the use of private web-based discussion boards and slowly via heavy marketing, drew people away from Usenet to the point that Usenet Newsgroups today remains a medium mostly for technical discussion threads and pornographic picture sharing. As a result of this stagnation by the mainstream computer user, many Internet companies ceased to provide Usenet access as part of their Internet plans. In some cases your Internet company does give you access to Usenet Newsgroups but you will have to call them on the phone and request they set your account up for you (usually this is free of charge as part of your monthly Internet plan). In other cases, Internet companies do not provide Usenet Newsgroups at all and you may either sign up for an individual Usenet News service or post to it via a web-based interface such as http://groups.google.com or http://www.usenet-replayer.com. In the case of Google's Newsgroup service, their license agreement seems to indicate that they will censor certain posts and that any post made through their service is copyrighted to them - ie: their property.
Usenet Newsgroups also went through a period where the powers that be attempted to silence people from sociopolitical discussion by spamming and impersonation. Often the spam would be of a vary vile and off-topic nature and the impersonation would often designed to confuse and incriminate people legally. Although these tactics still exist as methods to silence people from open discussion, they have taken a 'back-burner' to simply drawing the masses of people away from Usenet Newsgroups altogether.
Despite these drawbacks, Usenet Newsgroups survived probably due to "Moderated Newsgroups" which are forums in which each post is reviewed by a moderator as being on topic. Unlike moderators of web-based discussion boards however, creation of a moderated newsgroup is open to any group of 10 or so people who agree to create a forum to discuss a particular topic.
As mentioned before, unlike web-based discussion boards, Usenet Newsgroups are decentralized and therefore better protected from censorship in the form of hacker attacks to shut it down. Traditionally, each Internet company devotes a server to store copies of all of the Newsgroups and their posts -- usually for up to two weeks of content. When a person posts an article to Newsgroups their post is copied to servers around the world and distributed into the public domain, unlike with a web-based discussion board in which it is often stored on a single, privately owned computer. After approximately two week's time, Newsgroup posts are deleted from most Internet-Company Newsgroup servers and archived on large historical sites such as http://groups.google.com. Only the text-based posts are archived in publicly accessible sites, the 'binaries' usually pornographic images, are more likely to be archived by private commercial companies who will charge their subscribers due to the cost of storing millions of photo images.
A final note should be mentioned regarding privacy. Usenet Newsgroups are more private and anonymous than web-based discussion boards but in fact not completely anonymous. The days of anonymous Internet use ended in the late 1990's so although one can have more freedom to discuss different viewpoints on Usenet Newsgroups, a prudent investigation into the erosion of personal freedoms is necessary before truly speaking one's mind anywhere -- So it is recommended to do a bit of self-censoring in one's posts -- not enough to change what needs to be said but enough to avoid being harassed by the powers-that-be.
Update: A well known company G**gle, has a virtual monopoly over newsgroup postings and as a way to prevent it's use - has now blocked the ability of replying to articles older than a certain amount. This effectively terminates the discussion of a topic that might be of interest to a searcher of usenet archives. So unfortunately, even this arena has been locked down - still, even with this new totalitarian stomping out of the ability of people to freely share ideas, newsgroups are still more decentralized than other discussion formats such as blogs. This is because even though G**gle owns what it stores in it's own archive, you can still go to other smaller archives or else keep your own and presumably not be affected with G**gle's copyright laws which they put over the posts of other people (amazing isn't it?).


Q: What is the single most important reason to use Newsviking?
A: To underscore and display sociopolitical which are either ignored, under-reported, or demand attention due to the veracity of their nature. How is this done? With comments. When a person reads indepth news stories about world events day after day one begins to see trends and reoccuring events and cycles. Most of these trends and cycles tend to be indicative of a very few taking advantage of the many with a total disregard for what most people call 'ethics' or a sense of goodness. Because of the nature of power and competition, truth, just like any other commodity must be wrestled from it's captors; Newsviking allows that truth to be assertained more easily by the use of daily events as self-evident examples. These self-evident examples totally defy all the spin and propaganda that is put on world events -- it even defies the spin that is in the news articles themselves as one eventually gains the ability to read between the lines with enough practice. Newsviking is *the only* news program that was specifically designed with this in mind that the author is aware of.

Q: Is Newsviking an RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader?
A: No because it was developed before these formats became popularized however it could easily be converted to be one. RSS newsreaders are certainly a step up from reading a newspaper web page or worse - a printed newspaper - but have certain drawbacks - one being their vulnerability to spam and advertisements since they just provide links to the news web pages (often with embedded browsers). Also, the one I tested (RSSOwl - an excellent program) didn't seem to provide archiving or database functionality.

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Download Full Program:

(The independent server which houses Newsviking is often under attack and can result in errors in the installer program. Please see the Troubleshooting, Disclaimer & Final Notes section for notes on what to do.)

Full Windows Installer(w/ php/mysql/apache/speech)

Newsviking3-FullWindowsInstall-08-05-2004.exe

Advanced User Install Zip 1.2MB (w/o php/mysql/apache)

Newsviking3-version-08-05-2004WithoutMySqlPhpApache.zip
For Mac & Linux users: You need to download & Php Apache MySQL Java separately (Or users who already have these packages existing on their system and don't want to install another).

Note: Windows Users seeking to install PHP/Apache/MySQL on their own may try checking out www.sourceforge.net for 'Uniform Server' or 'PHP Triad' which assist in installing these. Linux & Mac users (on OSX) may try searching for 'FoxServ'.
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Download Program Update:

Newsviking Program Update

Newsviking3-version-08-05-2004UPDATE-04-02-05.zip

(Make sure you have the latest full program installed and that the date of the update is newer)
Updates can occur very frequently so check back often. When newsviking suddenly stops working it's
often because the web-compatability has been broken. When this happens check back in a few days
for a new update patch to fix it.
When a lot of updates have accumulated a new release is usually made (a new installer).
To run the update simply unzip the contents into whatever directory newsviking was installed to.
It should overwrite the existing files.
The update zip file usually contains 2 files - newsviking.jar and newsvikingcontrolcenter.exe.
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