San Francisco based Newroo, founded by Brown University graduates Brian Norgard and Dan Gould in 2005, is just two weeks away from launch.
Like Megite, Newroo is ultimately addressing the same market as Memeorandum. However, they have a number of squidoo-like features (this is meant as a compliment) to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service.
The basic engine is like Memeorandum – they index and group blog posts based on topics in order to show emerging news in near real-time and to show distributed blog discussion in a single place.
Newroo is launching with a number of verticals, including Brin Rank (Google news), Series C (Venture Capital news), Jockzilla (edgy sports news) and Celeb Trash (celebrity gossip). Pictured here is JockZilla, although all verticals currently have a similar look and feel.
Soon after launch Newroo will allow users to create and customize their own sites, starting with a clone of an existing site. The revenue model is based on presenting amazon affiliate links for items related to the news, and eventually they plan to share this revenue with the creators of the sites.
I know the founders but am not affiliated with them in any way. Nevertheless, I appreciate the link to TechCrunch on their current landing page.