I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo.
The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users.
It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.
My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting.
The List:
- Blogniscient
- Blogrunner
- Blogsnow
- Chuquet
- Megite
- Memeorandum
- Newroo (pre-launch)
- Tailrank
- Technorati Kitchen
- Tinfinger (pre-launch)
- Topix.net
- TruthLaidBear
The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services.
And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines.
Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe.
From the sites that I have seen and used none of them come close to memeorandum in terms of style, relevance and categorisation (sometimes less is more).
Don’t forget mike that most of these are just a ‘me too’ attempt at what memeorandum has established.
For what it’s worth, I built a similar feature for the new version of Flock (it’s been in the hourly builds since early December – look for the “sort by topic” option in the feed viewer).
Not surprisingly, it’s a bit different than most of these, since it does the clustering on your computer on demand. Instead of pulling clusters from across the web, you can get a clustered view for whatever RSS feed or feeds you are currently looking at (as far as I know, none of the other sites allow you to specify exactly what sources to cluster). Another nice thing is that it’s good at finding clusters when there aren’t any links, such as if you want to view nytimes.com and cnn.com with all of the articles on the same topic displayed in groups. It also can be useful if you create a view with all of your feeds in it and just cluster everything, so the Web 2.0 Workgroup “echo chamber effect” can be kept under control.
Unfortunately, while the clustering works reasonably well, Flock’s feed reader still has some growing up to do so don’t get your hopes up too high yet
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I prefer a combination of Technorati, Technorati’s top searches and Technorati Kitchen. They don’t cover anything as fast as Memeorandum, but it’s a huge network, and bundled on one, nice website.
My two favorites are News Bump and Memorandum home page. I’ve been to all the others and rarely come back to them. The reason? Quality of content. That’s the news aggregator killer feature. The rest is just techno-fluff that only those interested in “features” could get excited about. Whichever site provides the most interesting and relevant news is the one that gets my vote, and I suspect everyone elses.
I’ve also heard News Vine is excellent, but it’s still in beta and I haven’t got an invite.
Mike, Chuquet is at http://www.chuquet.com (you’ve got Tinfinger’s URL in the link).
I wonder if there will be as many Memeo clones as there are Digg clones (60+ at last count). Probably not as the technology required is harder to build. Although maybe someone will build an open source version, and hey presto, insta-commoditisation.
I haven’t found any of them to be useful – I read enough stuff that I’ve usually seen anything interesting before it’s picked up.
I’m not sure being a “clone” is such a big deal in media, as long as you have something different, even if it’s small.
After all, every newspaper in the world is basically a clone of the world’s first – The London Times. Every TV station a clone of the BBC. Every magazine a clone of “The Gentleman’s Magazine, first published in 1731″ according to Wikipedia. Every printed book a clone of Gutenberg’s Bible etc. etc. etc.
The similarities between these when you’re talking about technology make them all virtually identical, yet many are successful.
Even the content is often very similar. How different is Newsweek to Time, for examle?
It’s execution and above all content that are the killer feature. And in the news race so far my money is on Memo as a sure winner. News Bump as the most interesting (content wise) outsider so far, and News Vine as the most promising I’m still yet to see.
I think you’re all getting too hung up on Web 2.0 bells and whistles and forgetting what most people visit website for – excellent content.
Paul,
Well, as you say, building something like Memeorandum is much, much harder than building a Digg clone. And even though the Digg technology has been commoditized, it’s virtually impossible to clone the mindshare and huge community that Digg has established. So while we’ll see lots more memetrackers springing up soon, Memeorandum will maintain its edge for the foreseeable future.
Technorati Kitchen is the name of our beta-like site. Technorati Explore may be the name of the product you meant to reference.
I was lucky enough to get a pre-launch look at Newroo, the site launched by Dan Gould and Brian Norgard of San Francisco. I have to say that I’m very impressed with the way Real Estate information is condensed and at my finger tips.
I’m a very active San Francisco Realtor with most of my clients coming from the Tech area of business. I write a blog, http://www.reyestate.com and if you have any new technology that could potentially help my industry, I’d be more than happy to give you my opinion and feature you in ReyEstate.
Please see my write up on Newroo.
http://reyestat...eal-estate.html
Yeah… I think there isn’t much of a competitive advantage to running a service like Digg other than the size of your user base. Granted Digg is *huge* so they might be able to pull it off.
Also Digg’s user base is really loyal and really identifies with Digg so they might be able to pull it off (at least for a while).
We’ll see. Expect Digg clones in other spaces though…
If anyone wants to contact me about a TailRank clone feel free
Kevin
Nik – I really never set out to be a memeorandum ‘me too’ (don’t know if you were referring to chuquet.com in your comment above).
I was building chuquet at the same time Gabe was doing an excellent job on memeorandum. He deservedly got online first. His approach and mine aren’t really that similar under the skin, although the net results are sometimes akin to one another.
Monsterman – Send me your info and I give you an invite to Newsvine so that you can check it out. It’s quite nice!
Is it possible to use their engines (or something similiar) to compile blog posts?
OK, bit of a late comment but: in the life sciences field I’ve been working on Postgenomic (www.postgenomic.com), which is an aggregator a la Memeorandum but which focuses on items of interest to research scientists. It does this by leveraging semantic markup in posts (where available) and by making use of the PubMed database of life science scientific papers.
I’m interested to see other specialist memetrackers like this. News aggregators / clusterers are great, but in terms of adding value to content I don’t know how far you can go…
As far as news aggregators go I can definitely recommend Blogrunner. It has a very simple user-interface and functional layout.
Hi,
There is one more blog aggregator in the Indian blogosphere.
enewss.com aggregates blogs by Indians and blogs about India.
eNewss.com has attempted to showcause blog posts as regular news items.
As of today, only 4 among the 12 are active. Sigh.