When we reviewed CNN Interactive at its launch in 1995, we felt it was a solid effort that would only get better. It has, but so has the competition—especially MSNBC, which offers a personalized version of its own. But CNN Custom News is supposed to represent a quantum leap forward in personalized news delivery, and provide a service that's deeper, faster and "smarter" than anything else around. Much is therefore being made of Oracle's participation, as evidenced by the joint CNN-Oracle logo. In particular, an Oracle technology called "ConText" is said to be so proficient at text analysis that it can take the place of staff who would otherwise be needed to classify content.

Unfortunately, this is simply untrue. To cite just one example of many, when we clicked on "Gardening" (one of the CNN Custom News "Lifestyle" categories we'd selected), the service presented us with a story titled "Families Mourn Victims of China's 1989 Crackdown." Perplexed, to say the least, we clicked on the article to check its contents. The lead sentence began, "Carrying flowers and offerings of food..."; it contained no further botanical references of any sort. So much for ConText's superior classification abilities.

However, although its fundamental premise—greater precision in sorting and delivering personalized news—is unrealized, CNN Custom News is otherwise an able and attractive offering. It has a great many news categories and subcategories. It provides news from a very wide range of sources, with frequent updates. It features a spiffy, Java-based news ticker that can be detached from your browser and run on the desktop. It is, in many ways, a service we would like to use.

But it's a service we're not likely to use unless CNN and Oracle either cut the unwarranted marketing hype or improve the data-management technology—or, better still, hire some staff who can distinguish a tulip from Tiananmen Square.

(Reviewed June 8, 1997)