Talkings of a Tyrant

I’m going to be messing with the CSS and theme of this website. It might look a bit weird here and there.

Hang on a bit until I find something I like…

Update Finished! It is easier to look at, and prints better too!

There seems to have been a recent trend in news aggregation sites. By that, I mean there are a lot of them all of the sudden. They range pretty widely, from standard news sources to blogs, from showing the most recent news to showing the most relevant to you, etc. Don’t know what a news aggregation site is? Check out Google News. It was probably the first (or, at least, the first successful) news aggregation website.

But recently, more have been cropping up. There are four I’m going to discuss here.
Findory, Memeorandum, CommonTimes.org, and Blogniscient

Findory

Findory is a good news aggregation site. There isn’t really anything special in how it displays news, but it is very good at what news it displays. It has a good algorithm that tracks what news you read (from their site, of course) and uses that to show more and more relevant news to you. Basically, it personalizes the news it shows to your tastes.

It did this very well, and quickly learned what types of stories and what topics I’m interested in after a few runs with it. It applies this to both blog posts and general news sites, so you get the best of both worlds (in two separate columns).

The only problem, is it doesn’t really have a good overall website design appeal. It is very good at what it is intended to do, but it is rather difficult to look at a wall of text. Also, the snippets it pulls from the articles aren’t all that effective at telling what it is about. If it wants to personalize it to my tastes, it is going to need to ensure that what I’m clicking on is what I want to read. As it is, I end up just clicking on it just to find out what exactly the article says. Luckily, I can edit my viewing history.

Memeorandum

Memeorandum gets the prize for the hardest to spell name (and URL) of them all. I always get it confused with memorandum.

Memeorandum has two categories: politics and technology. It shows the hottest and most recent topics of the day, and also shows the network of blogs that have commented on those topics.

As Michael Arrington of TechCrunch so exceptionally states:

Here’s how it works: A post is written. People start to link to it. If enough people link and it becomes very popular, it goes up in the “New Item Finder” area in the top right. If more people link, it will go up in the main area. If a link includes conversation and discourse (substantial text in addition to the link), the linking blog is noted underneath the popular post.

Memeorandum has exceptional quality, mostly because it only shows posts from a select number of blogs. It is simple to view, and easy to tell what the article is about. I would highly recommend this.

CommonTimes.org

CommonTimes.org is another news aggregation site. However, instead of searching the article and finding key words in order to categorize it, it instead uses tags from the web to categorize articles.

An interesting idea, but since they only show headlines, I’m not too big of a fan. (Headlines don’t really tell you anything!)

Still, this is probably the most Web 2.0-ish news aggregator out there.

Blogniscient

There is currently a large debate about whether Blogniscient or Memeorandum is better. Personally, Memeorandum has better stories, though Blogniscient does have some redeeming factors.

First off, Blogniscient, like Memeorandum, is hard to spell.

Blogniscient has 5 categories to Memeorandum’s two - U.S. Politics, Science and Technology, Sports, Entertainment, and Business. It even divides those categories into smaller (but still general) categories. In the U.S. Politics category, you can tell if it is a left-wing point of view, or a right-wing. Sports are divided up into, well, sports. Entertainment is divided up into music and gossip (which says something for all of those Entertainment blogs out there).

To Sum it Up

They are all good for their own reasons. Personally, I like Findory and Memeorandum the most, but the others are good, too. With the rise of several competing news aggregators, we should be seeing some quality features being created between them over the next few months. Stay tuned…