From today, news aggregation will be archived, and no longer updated.

The decision was made as the amount of work (6 hours, 3 days of the week) required to read and review news stories, was too much to justify the benefits of maintaining the service. This was the workload before the stories were added and organized within the forum.

There are obvious benefits when multiple users are reading news stories and updating information resources such as the forum and NewgonWiki. In some cases, blog posts were written on the basis of information gleaned from these searches.

Ultimately, the burden was not being shared, though, with Jim Burton doing the entire search, AI training and forum posting required to keep the project alive and updated.

In the future, we will try to bring this service back, likely in a highly automated form, with AI doing the entire search and compilation of news articles. At this point, AI is incredibly good with workload, and determining prominence and consensus of knowledge, but very poor at determining relevancy according to fine-tuned criteria.

Running the service has provided us with more useful information about how much work needs to be put in to achieve certain goals, and how many end users see real value in different information streams.

A news aggregation service can go down on the long list of tasks we would complete if we had the capacity.