From Vianice to Newzadig…

Nice Première found a native of Nice who had opened a breach in local information on the web.

Gilles d’Elia was one of the founders of the web journal Vianice which later took the name Journal de Nice and today redirects its internet users to Newzadig.

He explains to us the journey of a child of Nice and the web to Paris.

Nice Première: So Gilles, how would you define Newzadig?

Gilles d’Elia: Newzadig is a news search engine combined with a portal that aggregates hundreds of French-language information sources at every instant. But unlike products already on the market, like Google News, we believe that classifying news into broad themes (Culture, Economy, International, etc.) is outdated: newzadig technology automatically creates “clusters of articles” – what we also call “clusters” grouped by keywords. It is these keywords that structure, based on the importance of their occurrences, our selection.

The assurance for the internet user is always having the most accurate overview of the news. So, if you look at the newzadig homepage, you have in a few seconds a complete, accurate and perfect overview of all current events. All you have to do is compare the result with the news portals you already know… And we’re only at version 0.1! 😉

NP: How many information sources feed Newzadig?

GE: Nearly 400 sources for the test version, including Nice-Première of course! And over a thousand currently being indexed. Our project is not to limit ourselves solely to official or influential sources. Without wanting to impose a vision, I think that tomorrow, journalism is a profession that will have evolved enormously: blogs will take considerable importance, and a good article from an intelligent blogger is well worth an editorial from Colombani or July. What traditional media have in addition to news analysis is the source. But we must not overestimate this importance of the “journalist on the ground”: in 80% of newspaper articles, they are not special correspondents but news agencies like AFP that provide the raw material.

Tomorrow, these agencies will have major bloggers as clients, and traditional journalism will have disappeared. To this, I am often countered: “but how will readers find good media in all this jungle?” And my answer is very simple: “you’ll go to newzadig!”

NP: What are the projects of Gilles d’Elia and Newzadig?

GE: Improve newzadig, every day: we are in a marathon to impose on the market a stable, non-beta version of newzadig, hopefully before the summer. It’s a lot of work, and even though we have a unique product in the revolutionary way it hierarchizes information, the aggregator market is also hyper-competitive: winning leadership in this context is like driving a Formula 1 car on a mountain road – it’s exciting, but you can’t devote yourself to anything else!

For now, the “newzadig France” site serves as our experimentation: many users send us their feedback. And if Nice-Première readers want to participate in the experiment, it’s welcome! Once we reach version 1.0, it becomes easy to launch the concept on foreign markets, UK, Italy, Spain, Germany… Europe, to start!

NP: You were at the origin of Vianice, the first web daily in Nice. What are your memories of this concept?

GE: “I regret nothing,” as the song says. “That’s the past let’s not talk about it anymore,” as the same song also says!

NP: What do you think of the local press on the Côte d’Azur now that you are a Nice native exiled in Paris?

GE: I don’t like the new format of Nice-Matin, I find it confusing, heavy, poorly laid out, it looks like a free newspaper, except that it’s paid.

But anyway, the future in Nice belongs more to media like Metro and soon 20 Minutes, which is also an excellent free newspaper. Here in Paris, I prefer to read 20 Minutes, I find it to be a really quality newspaper.

And then there’s the Internet: in my opinion, that’s where it will be decided. Not necessarily on the web, but on emerging media: I’m thinking of e-ink, the “Plastic Logic” product, Sony’s “Librié” which is a hit in Japan, and probably also i-Pods, which can become an excellent medium for reading the press. When these media become less experimental, I can imagine launching an e-newspaper on Paris!