WeSmirch is a new celebrity gossip and news portal powered by Memeorandum. The technology behind Memeorandum will find the most popular stories from blog posts or news sites and cluster them together using a proprietary algorithm. What readers get is a single-page newspaper view of what the big stories are for a particular category and rank them accordingly, showing the stories as clusters of links from sources.
WeSmirch finds sources of news and aggregates the latest hot stories. WeSmirch picks up on stories relatively quickly, making it a good site to get your gossip fix without visiting a large number of seperate sites. It will also find stories that are potentially popular from much smaller sources and display them on the site. It has solved the problem of duplicates well and picks up those stories are the same or related even without the presence of links between the stories.
What regular Memeorandum readers will notice from tonight is that all three of the sites now powered by Memeorandum have included images within the story clusters. These images are taken from source articles and make the site look a lot better overall.
Tech.memeorandum has been a big hit in the blogosphere since it launched last November, and previously at Techcrunch we have written about Memeorandum and other sites in this category. Memeorandum has distinguished itself because it was one of the first in this field, and has managed to sustain a level of quality despite the best effort of others to spam the system.
Memeorandum creator Gabe Rivera’s policy to expanding the categories he covers has been to wait until there is enough interesting content for a particular category that people will actually want to read. The tech blogging community is very active with a large number of sources for stories and a constant news flow, but in other categories it is often harder to find what is popular algorithmically, to cluster a few sources together that are reliable and trusted and overall to keep a good flow of stories that are interesting.
This category is really heating up with more releases and more updates from the players in this field. The other sites that are tracking entertainment news at the moment are Megite and Blogniscient – I will leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which site does the best job of covering entertainment and gossip as it depends mostly on what your own preferences are.
I’m interested if they can move to the mainstream audience with this product. It has the potential.
FYI. Megite has two sections that are related to entertainment, one is entertainment, another is gossip. We see “Gossip” section is more interesting than “Entertainment” section.
Gabe, Congratulations! Nice site, and I like the inclusion of images.
The images are nice, though I suspect will be susceptible to gaming by bloggers. I wish Gabe luck with it.
Not many non-American names there, though. I’ll wait for Gnoos to get my Aussie celeb news fix.
I believe this has a lot of potential. My wife has been looking for something like this for a long time– every time I show her a gossip site on the web, she finds it a pain to read (too long, too much scrolling, too many uninteresting or repeating stories). Good job! It also ought to drive traffic to a lot of smaller providers.
My site http://www.staralicious.com built on the opensource pligg software has been up in this category for a little while now. While it is based on pligg code, I have been working on new features and a new design. The new design and site will be online in the not too distant future.
podigle
Megite also released the new design with images along with the story text. You can see Megite Gossip at http://www.megite.com/test.php?section=gossip
How’d you get throught this whole post without mentioning the word memetracker? Spread the buzzword, Nik!
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