NewsCred, a Credible News Dashboard Opens to the Public
NewsCred garnered quite a bit of attention in its initial private beta launch where ReadWriteWeb was considered by its users to be one of the most credible news sources to read. With less than 20% of readers really believing what their news sources are saying, NewsCred aims to be the solution to this particular problem. With plenty of sources to choose from, we're taking a look at what's new with NewsCred and why it may be the best news aggregator yet.
A Credible Dashboard
NewsCred aims to help users find the most credible content and news sources across the web. In doing so, the service aggregates content from some of the best newspapers such as the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist.com, CNN, The Washington Post and tons more. They also feature content from various prestigious blogs including ReadWriteWeb, CenterNetworks, BoomTown, Digital Daily, and more. You can select your choice of sources and have your NewsCred dashboard only display news from your selections.
To Credit or Not to Credit
All news is sorted by the source's credibility. To credit a source, simply head to the source's page by clicking on the name of the source, and you'll be presented with an option to credit or discredit the source. You'll also be able to get a graph of the source's credibility trend at the bottom of the page. Overall, it's relatively easy to credit or discredit a source with no limitations or regulations for doing so.
What's New
NewsCred has a ton of great new features. For one, there's a complete dashboard redesign with more content to consume. In fact, the homepage reminds me a lot of Feedly, an RSS dashboard. Other new features include:
- Search
- Topics (automatically generated news pages)
- Related Topics using Semantic technology (co-occurence)
- Breaking News section
Limited Quality
While we like that for once, things can be based off of quality instead of popularity with NewsCred, we're having a tough time overlooking the fact that it's a free for all ratings fest. I can credit or discredit a source or article on a whim and not suffer any consequences for it. There could be some serious brand demoralizing done at NewsCred with its new public launch. While we'd recommend adding some restrictions for crediting and discrediting sources, we honestly like the service. It's a great dashboard for your news and we fully agree that the sources that are available to choose from could be considered credible.
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Corvida,
# Topics (automatically generated news pages)
# Related Topics using Semantic technology (co-occurence)
Instead of just cutting and pasting the press release, shouldnt there be analysis of how they are doing it .. This is what I love about Marshall's posts .. there is analysis
Are they using open calais? How are they being generated.. and what is semantic co-occurence? is it even spelt right?
Otherwise this just becomes a relay of the press release!
My 2 cents!
@News Reader - I thought Corvida's review was fair, but I'd be happy to provide you with some information/details. Perhaps a very low level of detail is not appropriate for all of RWW's readers, so at a very high level:
-Topics are automatically generated news pages that aggregate news articles, audio, video, and Twitter buzz on any given topic. Topics can be events, people, organizations, companies or places in the news. We don't use Open Calais - we actually built everything in house, and will be building APIs to help other's out who want to use our service.
-Semantic co-occurrence is the idea of taking terms, concepts, words that co-occur more frequently and determining the relative strengths of connections between them. In our case, we can connect topics using this technology. Do a search of 'Olympics' in NewsCred, and apart from the obvious topics that match the keyword, the Dalai Lama comes up. See this link for a basic intro: http://www.miislita.com/semantics/c-index-1.html.
Please contact me if you want more details!
Cheers,
Shafqat
CEO NewsCred
Shafqat, Thanks for responding.
If my guess is right you are performing some kind of clustering ..(may be carrot) of news articles and based on the keywords you are figure out if its a person or place or event. Which is why when you click on Bono .. you also find the article "Drudge Retort's Retort To AP: Personal Issue Resolved But 'Larger Conflict' Remains" which has the word "pro bono". If you were using semantic extraction they would not be part of the same cluster.
If you are using internal apis they seem to be better than opencalis or twine :) May be you should consider putting out a semantic engine out .. You might make more money!
As for related topics thanks for the link! Much appreciated!
@News reader - we are not using any external services for clustering or connections. Everything is in house. For the clustering, we looked at Carrot (which was pretty good) but then built our own. Obviously, keywords play a part in the clustering algorithm, hence the Bono vs pro bono issue. The semantic technology is currently only being used for the topic connections...
Glad you are interested. Building all of this technology inhouse was challenging, but fun. Will definitely build APIs to share (and make money perhaps ;-)