The Social Networker

NewsCred-u-lous (an online newspaper source site review)

by Chris Miller at 08:20:00 PM on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

I ran across NewsCred quite accidentally from an article on TechCrunch a couple days ago. When I first went into the site, I was unsure what to make of it. Another news site? Yet another place for people to get their blogs listed and then get their friends to vote on it (a la Digg)? Another test of my patience in trying to set up some semblance of a proper newspaper reader? Well, no it wasn't so far.

Upon first glance, you are a bit confused why there is just a listing of articles on the screen with no apparent order reason, yet the outline looks vaguely familiar. It is a newspaper folks. They draw in, and I quote:

3 Tbsp - We took the 100 biggest newspapers by circulation worldwide and extracted all the English language ones.
1 Tpsp - We then took the top 50 US newspapers.
2 Cups - We combined that list with the top 100 blogs ranked by Technorati

From there, the next step is where you take control. You are able to select the news sources you want in each category (ie: world, business, technology, sports, etc) and have those show each time as a custom newspaper. Sources are ranked with credibility scores that has an apparent algorithm behind it. The author of the posting as well as the news source posting the article is accounted for in this mathematical matrix. The matrix then pushes out a graph of credibility by many categories, even with a RSS feed to follow as shown here:

If that is not enough sorting and ranking, each individual article has it's own unique credibility number

So for the layout, newspapers on the left, blogs in the middle and your sources on the right. After about a day of letting it sit and testing it out, I am back and here is what I think the good and the bad is:
Good

Multiple well known and defined sources of articles from major newspapers
No way for you to randomly submit feeds as to blow up a site with crap authors and articles
A relatively simple interface that has some basic cleaning up to do, mainly in the selection area
Very few ads that disrupt the whole page flow
The ability to customize each section of the newspaper to your liking
I can get feeds in all my categories from RSS, yet that stops me from rating the credibility
An integrated sharing pop-up (but see below)
Email to is integrated into their site instead of launching your mail client
A decent user giude, FAQ and 90 second tour, freakin hooray!!

Bad

No apparent way to mark something read, how does it go away? How do I save it for later?
Credible ratings are not visible on the summary news page, you have to open the article. Showing the number would not kill real estate
It isn't clear why some articles are discredited, and confuses me if I should read it.
Even though I do not read the sports section, having more direct sports related sites would benefit them
I mentioned it above, the RSS feeds are cool but it takes me away from the site, why come back to rate?
The integrated sharing pop-up is nice but why not let me put some of these social bookmark sites into my profile for easier cross posting. It seems to utilize AddThis.com without any apparent warning, I did not like that since those preferences get stored outside of NewsCred and it is not highlighted in my eyes it was doing it.
Have the ability to hide my news and blog source selection area to give me back screen real esatate. Wait, then they have to move the simple ads they have, hmm, sounds like a UI design issue here

Overall, a site that I will watch grow and try to use for a while and see if I can get my daily newspaper headline fix. I have some other sites I use regularly, but that is another posting.

Location: St. Louis, MO

Category: Site Reviews
Tags :NewsCred Site reviews View blog reactions

1) NewsCred-u-lous (an online newspaper source site review)
Created by Shafqat at 05/15/2008 6:39:05 PM email | website

Hey Chris - thanks for the great review. You've obviously taken a lot of time taking a look at our service, and your feedback is great. We're already working on a few of the items in your list of things to improve, so do keep an eye out. One of things we've tried to do is keep it simple, intuitive, but meaningful to our community - a tool to help find the highest quality news without any fuss. From your summary, it looks like we're on our way to achieving that goal.

Re: the credibility, I should point out that NewsCred's goal is simply to let news readers make their voices heard. We've built a site to let people express their opinions about the news they read. We think news readers have the right to do that. Our algorithms merely aggregate that information and let others make informed decisions based on the collective data.

Thanks again for the writeup.

Cheers,

Shafqat (cofounder of NewsCred)

www.newscred.com

2) re: NewsCred-u-lous (an online newspaper source site review)
Created by Chris Miller at 05/19/2008 12:05:52 PM email | website

@Shafqat I am glad you found the reivew. I will be visiting and using the site often, I tis working well in what I was looking for. Let me know if you want me to ple around any new features as they come out!

Discussion for this entry is now closed. Please email me instead

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Also Known As: Chris Miller (when awake)

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Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5 - Team Collab and Messaging
Domino 7 Certified Security Administrator
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Yes, I write some of those dreaded admin cert exams you take. I won't say which ones so you don't come looking for me, but I will say they are the real good recent ones that have been coming out.

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At work an IBM 2 GHz
At home a plethera of 6 machines with various Windows versions and Red Hat on a wired/wireless LAN
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One dog, a Pug. He has been on this world before and seems to understand slippers and a fine cigar. Mind you that is him in the chair and not me.

Let us now also add a deranged cat that is in the process of being toilet trained. Update: Toilet traning was very very close.

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Non-stop. At my desk, in my car, walking to work and back to my car downtown. In the house there is a crazy zoned set-up for you home automation geeks.

I am a self-proclaimed MP3 fiend, to which I have tried rehab 4 billion times to no avail. Next is the MP3 hard-drive for the car that I found. Now what kind of music you ask? I will never tell.

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Get back to you here

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Hershey’s Stomach of Holding: Jess and I are fighting over who eats more chocolate. TWDUFF can help me out and vouch for me.

Character Bio:

This will take far more time than I have today. I will start with I was born and still live in St. Louis, MO. Even though for a couple years I was never, ever here and always on the road, this is smack in the middle of the US. Everything is just a few hour flight. That part is nice. No beach/ocean/coast isn't the best. But with the travel I make up for it.

Looking to find me in person? Here is where I will be.

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delayed	customer visit	Minneapolis, MN
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