New Apps Promise to Find the News in All the News
Summary
Informed by experience and tempered by what their audience cared about, editors picked the front page of our daily newspaper, the lineup on the nightly network news, and the top-of-the-hour radio headlines. Google News tried, but its personalization algorithms seem stuck in the 90s, while voting sites Digg and Reddit (a sister company of Wired.com) are likely to highlight videos of cats and never-ending links to Top 10 lists. Its current worst drawback is that its oddly slow, seemingly lagging in showing new items when compared to sites such as Techmeme, Reddit, Slashdot and Digg. It takes a bit of explaining what you want, but it does a fine job of pulling up relevant news stories based on topics and company names, and it uses some of the same smart techniques as its affiliated search engine Kosmix. Most akin to MeeHive, the site asks you to tell it some interests, and then it attempts to find relevant content, which it then confusingly breaks into different tabs of news, blogs, twitter, webpages, videos and products.