Google News ignores the Balkans

Google News offers news from an impressive number of countries. It even honors the linguistic divisions of some countries: there is Google News België and Google News Belgique. The latter one extensively uses French media, like Le Monde, but that should only please the francophone Walloons. Google News België, in turn, also has articles from the Dutch press. The same goes for Suisse and Schweiz (Switzerland).
Something like that could perfectly work in the Balkans, or in the Serbo-Croatian speaking countries. There is a vast array of media, papers, portals and other "news" sites. Maybe not as much as in the rest of Europe, but still enough for Google News Balkans. After all, there is Google News Czech Republic and Hungary. How many people speak Czech anyway? 12 million, according to Wikipedia. Far less than the approximately 20 million speakers of Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian of whatever alternative name you want to give to the language of the Western Balkan peoples. Google News Croatia will be called "Google Vijesti", Google News Serbia "Google Vesti". By drawing from a variety of Balkan sources (from Vreme to Dnevni Avaz to Jutarnji list) Google could naturally confront its readers with different, dissenting, neighborly opinions. Serbian papers and magazines are almost absent form the Croatian market (and vice versa, I believe) so foreign news is an online affair anyway. Do something with it, Google people.

4 reacties:

Katja R. said...

Found this by way of a friend's blog, and it looks interesting

Mark said...

Thanks. I'm trying hard...

Unknown said...

Google Balkans is a great idea.
All my support!

Igor said...

srb.time.mk and cro.time.mk and bg.time.mk time.mk and times.si