The MOG Music Network (MMN) includes music-related news from the company's network of 1,200 music blogs plus in-house news, reviews another other features. According to MOG, its network of blogs now generates more than 20 million monthly unique visitors and its goal is to become the largest music network online.

You may know of MOG only as one of the many new "cloud"-based streaming services which are poised to overtake iTunes as the preferred way to listen to music while mobile. For low monthly fees - $10/mo. for MOG or its competitors Rdio and Rhapsody, and only $3 for the questionably legal (and now disappeared) Grooveshark - you can stream unlimited tracks to your mobile handset. No longer is disk space a concern and you have access to the majority of new releases too, as well as older albums, thanks to online catalogs of tunes numbering in the millions, regardless of which service you pick.

While the merits of each service are varied, MOG is clearly hoping to differentiate itself by being known not just as an app, but as a brand associated with music content. In fact, music related content came first in its case, not the apps.

MOG, the Network

Originally, www.mog.com was a network of music blogs on the Web prior to its launch of the music-streaming service in December 2009.

Now the MOG Music Network will serve as a digest of this content, at a separate URL from MOG.com: MOGMusicNetwork.com. In addition to the news, reviews and interviews you would expect, MMN will also deliver exclusive MP3s, explains a company blog post.

However, in checking out one of these exclusive tracks here, it didn't appear there was an easy way to download the tune - it was accessible for playing online only via a Flash-based widget. We couldn't find it in MOG's streaming service, either. Instead, the track just served as a teaser for an upcoming album, and the only way to hear it was on MMN. For dedicated music fans, that level of access may be a big selling point for the new online portal.

It may be a key selling point for advertisers, too. MOG CEO David Hyman told MediaWeek that the site aims to serve as a central hub for advertisers. "Think of this as like Glam.com is to the Glam Network," he said, referring to the women's content portal which uses the same model. Monetizing digital music has been a difficult business so far, but Hyman believes his advantage is that he's monetizing content, not the streaming itself. "This is a real network of readers," he said, "not just listeners."

So why even bother covering yet another Techmeme wannabe? Because competition is important. Techmeme may do a great job, but innovation can still be found elsewhere.

So who's the new contender? It's a site called TechNews.AM, "your morning dose of tech news." Given that tag line, it's clear they know just who their target demographic is: the geeks who start their day, coffee in hand, browsing through the latest stories from across the blogosphere.

Before you get too judgmental about the site's shortcomings, take note of their other tag line: "SSSH, NOT EVEN IN ALPHA YET." In other words, what we see now may not be the final product. Your complaints and feature requests could still be resolved by the time it goes gold.

The Layout

The first thing you'll notice about the site is that its structure is very different from that of Techmeme. Instead of headlines and "echoing" links, each article is its own headline and standalone post. The posts are sorted into two main columns: "Popular Today," which seems to look back on the past 24 hours, and "Upcoming," which features the breaking stories, all of which are time-stamped for freshness. In a sidebar, the popular stories and topics (tags) of the week are featured as well.

The thing that's most appealing about TechNews.AM's layout, though, is the sub-categories across the top which feature tech blogosphere niches like gadgets, marketing, mobile, search engines, social media, UX, web development, startups, jobs, management, and opinion. This is a pretty accurate reflection of precisely the kinds of categories we already have set up in Google Reader, so it looks like TechNews.AM could almost function as an alternative to RSS, at least for the more casual news consumer if not for the pro bloggers hunting for stories. It's also going to appeal to people who are generally only interested in tracking one or two niches, as each sub-page tracks the headlines, the popular tags, and the most read stories of the day and the week.

More of an Aggregator than Memetracker

Beyond that, there isn't much more to this news portal just yet. It's clear that it currently functions more as an aggregator than a memetracker, so Techmeme may have nothing to worry about. The sources for the news at TechNews.AM also seem limited to the top blogs you would expect and the site doesn't appear capable of highlighting the serendipitous B-List and C-List blogs that occasionally break news on Techmeme.

TechNews.AM is powered by memeriver, a social media strategy and web development agency that also runs a similar site called queensspeech. That "sister site," if you will, features gay news, views, and opinion and may hint towards where TechNews.AM is headed in terms of features and structure. (Note: queensspeech may be NSFW depending, as language is uncensored).

As it stands now, we don't see TechNews.AM killing Techmeme by any means, but we like its clean layout and sub-categories for tracking niche tech news. That said, we're not sure if it will become a daily read of ours unless they add in more sources.

When browsing through the available videos, you can choose to view the most popular or the newest, and you can narrow your selection by category. Currently, those categories include business, design, documentary, education, entertainment, film, humor, music, politics, sports, and technology.

As you surf through Nizmlab, you're more likely to find videos of unique animations, artistic inspiration, or - let's be honest - those offbeat and odd art films that frankly don't seem to have much of a point, but are pretty to watch. That's not to say that there aren't humorous videos on the site, but they're more likely to be a dub of a Billy Mays commercial, a comedic work of art in and of itself, than, say, the latest beauty queen to bomb when giving a speech.

Of course, here and there, some less sophisticated videos slip into the mix - like this one of a soccer ball to groin and face - ouch! But, we suppose even sophisticates need a little base humor sometimes, too.

Still, our overall take on Nizmlab is that it easily fits right in with the other sites for visual inspiration, like We Heart It, FFFound, Vi.sualize.us, and others. In fact, we would even consider adding it to our list of sites for finding wonderful things.