I spend a lot of time wading through press releases at the number of the dominate aggregate news outlets, looking for API news. I also have a number of scripts running, keeping an automated eye on the press sections for some of the companies I track on. The number of press releases available in corporate press areas vs. the number of press releases submitted by PR outlets, is much larger--which is a missed opportunity in my book.
Each day I look through PRWeb, PR Newswire, Business Wire and others trying to find the latest API stories. This is a process that will always be partially a manual process, as you just can’t look for API news without getting petroleum, education, pharmaceutical, and other API news—which has nothing to with my beloved application programming interface. In short, these sites suck. Their UI is crap, and their search mechanisms are shit.
The biggest problem with these news outlets do not usually even have RSS, let alone an API, requiring me to go to each site, each day, and sift through the search results. The world of press releases is like many other industries I engage with—needs a dead simple API driven solution. I want a press release API that allows any company to submit for free, but the problem is nobody will in the beginning, so it also needs to go out and find the direct corporate press sources as well, and scrape this long tail of the PR world.
I’d pay a monthly fee to be able to search this vast PR database via an API, and be able to integrate directly into my API monitoring system. It is something I could build, but I just do not have time, and as I do with my other ideas, I am putting out there for someone else to do. The API would be a very simple design, but the legwork to make it truly a rich, and valuable source of press, would take a significant amount of time.
This is one of the ideas I hope someone does not do, thinking it is a VC level start-up idea. It really is something that a handful of folks could bootstrap, and do very well in monetizing premium services, but if you go get VC money you will probably fuck it all up, and have to chase some unnecessary approaches to making money. If someone doesn’t do soon, I’m going to have to build an API focused version, because I am spending about 1-2 hours a day on this each day.
