technews

What This Skill Does

The TechNews skill for OpenClaw is a powerful information retrieval and synthesis tool designed to keep users at the forefront of the rapidly evolving technology industry. Instead of requiring you to manually scan through dense news aggregators, this agent automates the entire process: it scrapes TechMeme for the top 10 daily headlines, crawls the underlying source material to extract core content, and uses AI to generate concise, readable summaries. Beyond just providing text, the skill cross-references social media platforms like Twitter to provide a "buzz score," letting you know which stories are actually generating conversation in the community. By maintaining a local history file, it prevents redundant notifications, ensuring your feed remains fresh and relevant to your professional interests.

Installation

To add this capability to your OpenClaw agent, ensure you have Python 3.9 or higher installed on your system. You will need to install the required dependencies using the command: pip install requests beautifulsoup4. Once the environment is ready, run the installation command within your OpenClaw environment: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/kesslerio/technews. The skill will automatically configure its directory structure, including the necessary memory file located at <workspace>/memory/technews_history.json to cache your feed and avoid duplicates.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for busy tech professionals, developers, and product managers who need to stay updated without spending hours browsing. It is particularly useful during morning briefings to catch up on overnight developments, or during busy workdays when you need to maintain situational awareness of industry shifts. Because the architecture is modular, it is an excellent starting point for teams looking to build customized news dashboards that combine multiple sources.

Example Prompts

1. "/technews - give me the top tech headlines for today."
2. "OpenClaw, check the latest on TechMeme and summarize the most trending story for me."
3. "/technews - what are people saying on social media about the latest AI hardware releases?"

Tips & Limitations

For the best results, ensure your network environment allows access to TechMeme. Note that the quality of the summary depends on the accessibility of the linked articles; websites with aggressive paywalls or JavaScript-heavy layouts may sometimes return limited content. You can extend the functionality by adding the optional tiktoken library if you want more precise control over the summary length and token usage. Always check the history file if you feel the feed is repeating stories, as clearing this file can reset your cache and fetch a fresh batch of headlines.