aggregators
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Hype Machine Adds New Features
Hype Machine, the much-loved MP3 blog aggregator service, has long been the place to go to find great tracks and music reviews on the net. In October of last year, the site got a big makeover, which included new social networking features like user profiles where you could list your favorite blogs, bands, searches, and friends. Now, Hype Machine has taken the social aspect a step further with their revamped Dashboard section, which introduces social scrobbling features, just like Last.FM offers, along with other new features and an updated layout.
The Lifestreaming Backlash
Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.
Swotti - A Semantic Opinions Aggregator
Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. With Swotti, you can learn from the good and bad experiences of others as the site gathers together reviews and feedback from across the web and categorizes them to provide you with more information about the product you're interested in. What's unique about this search engine is that it uses semantics to do so.
The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere
We've seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we've questioned whether they're adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.
The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren't on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?
ReadBurner is Gone
The popular RSS aggregator web site, ReadBurner is no more. Today, the site's homepage reads:
"I'm sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer availiable. The reason is that I just don't have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out. I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It's been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time. If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub."
Tiinker is the Anti-Digg
Whereas the social news service from Digg relies on members to select and rank
content, a new startup from Sydney, Australia, tiinker, does just the opposite: it treats
each member as an individual and learns what he or she likes. The service, an intelligent news aggregator, uses A.I.-like technology to determine your interests and then adapts to show you the news stories you will find most interesting. And since web 3.0 may be all about personalization, tiinker just might be the next big thing.
Vicito News: Personalized News Aggregation Via IM
Vicito News is a new personalized news aggregation service that operates over instant messenger using an IM robot. The service currently works with AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Vicito is something akin to Google News alerts for IM -- you tell the service what to watch for, and it updates you at preset intervals via instant messenger when it finds new news matching your query.
New York Times Adds Techmeme-like Feature to Tech Section
NYTimes.com has today launched a new version of its technology section, which includes more aggregation of news from around the Web. Of most interest perhaps is that its Techmeme-like news aggregator, Blogrunner, has been fully integrated into the Tech frontpage. It has the headline "Technology Headlines From Around the Web" and is positioned in the middle of the page. Blogrunner links will also feature at the bottom of NYT articles. Finally, two new feature content providers were announced today: IDG Media Brands and paidContent.org.
NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year." Further, Hansell said that "unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren't trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts."
Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the service since then - at one stage it was called "The Annotated New York Times". In February 2006 we wrote that Blogrunner offered an "interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations"; although we didn't think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.
It's taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs - such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb - to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social - and arguably much faster - news cycle of leading blogs.
Blogrunner itself still seems behind Techmeme in some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner's frontpage - you need to click the "related" link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).
So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release "enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day's top print and online coverage, all on one site." I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality - so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).
All in all a great move by NY Times - tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?
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