How to Use Mark Radar
Mark Radar presents things a little differently from a typical news site.
Most sites list articles one by one and leave it to you to judge which ones matter and which are just repeats. Mark Radar makes that pass for you first, and then shows you the result. So the first time you use it, what you see may not look quite like what you are used to.
This page explains how it works, and how you can use it.
Every Card Is an Event, Not an Article
On Mark Radar, the basic unit of information is the “event”.
The same story is often covered separately by a dozen outlets, with much the same content. Mark Radar groups that coverage into a single event, so one look gives you the whole picture — no opening five similar articles to work out what happened.
Open an event and you’ll see two short editorial passages first: what happened, and why it’s worth noting. Below that are all the outlets covering it, with links to the originals, so if you want to check how a particular outlet put it, you can go straight there.
Further down is The Backstory. A single news story is usually just one node in a much longer arc, and this section lists the related events that came before, so you can see cause and context instead of an isolated headline.
Topics Gather Related Events in One Place
If an event is “something that happened in the last few days”, a topic is the long arc that event belongs to.
Stablecoins. AI chips. Digital payments. A company you watch closely. Each of those is a topic. A topic page collects every related event in chronological order, so you can see in one place what has happened and where things stand now. There’s a short editorial introduction at the top explaining what the topic covers.
One event can sit under several topics at once, and topics keep taking on new events. So think of an event as “what happened”, and a topic as “what it belongs to”.
On topics with a clear main subject, the events are split into two kinds. In one — what the site calls core events — the topic is itself the subject of the news; in the other, the topic only gets a peripheral mention while the story is really about something else. Peripheral mentions are collapsed by default and open up when you want them. The split is there so that following a topic doesn’t flood you with stories that only mention it in passing.
Today’s Signals, Ongoing Watch and the Weekly Index Measure Different Things
Events on the home page are not ordered by time but by how much attention they are getting. And attention can be read in three different ways.
Today’s Signals looks at the last 24 hours, but it ranks on growth as well as volume. So a story few people were talking about yesterday that ten outlets picked up today shows up here, even if its total coverage is still modest. This is the section for catching a signal as it forms.
Ongoing Watch looks at the last 72 hours: the stories covered by the most outlets in that window. If you want to know what the big news has been lately, this is the quickest section to read.
The Weekly Index takes the last seven days as a whole and pulls out the stories that mattered most — good for catching up at the weekend, or for checking whether you missed anything this week.
As for the ranking itself, what counts most is how many outlets are covering a story and how spread out those sources are. Ten different outlets reporting once each carries more weight than one outlet reporting ten times in a row: the first means the story really has drawn broad attention, while the second may just mean one newsroom cares a lot.
You Don’t Need to Recall the Exact Term
The search box at the top of every page covers both events and topics.
It matches meaning, not just wording. So a search for “central bank digital currency” will also turn up coverage written as “CBDC”, without you having to recall the exact term first.
Once You Sign Up, the Radar Can Scan Only What You Care About
Sign up for a free account, and you can follow the topics you’re interested in.
On any topic page, clicking the plus sign next to a topic adds it to the ones you follow. For now, a free account can follow three topics.
Once you are following something, My Radar becomes a page of your own. It shows only what is new in the topics you follow, so you don’t have to go digging through everything on the site; events you have already seen fold away by themselves, so the next time you come back you can tell at a glance which ones are new; and Key Moments picks out the important developments in the topics you follow, newest first, so that even if you haven’t been here for a few days, you can catch up quickly.
Later On, There Will Be a Paid Plan
Everything you can see at the moment is free; later on I’ll add a paid plan.
The difference lies mainly in two places. The first is how many topics you can follow, which goes from three up to thirty, so you don’t have to drop something you’re already following just to add a new one. The second is a personal digest email, which sends the important developments in the topics you follow straight to your inbox, so you don’t even have to come to the site to keep up with the changes in the topics you really care about.
If any of that would be useful to you, you can register your interest on the account page now, and I’ll let you know as soon as it opens.
A Few Details You Might Want to Know
All times shown on the site are Taipei time.
The site has a Chinese and an English edition; you can switch between them in the top right.
Crypto, Fintech and AI at the top narrow the view to a single field, so you see only the part you care about.
You Don’t Need to Learn How to Use It
In the end, the problem Mark Radar exists to solve is that there is too much information. If using it took time to learn as well, that would rather defeat the point.
All you need to remember is this: a card is one event, a topic gathers the related events in one place, and once you’re following topics, the radar scans only those for you. The rest, leave to the radar.