* Newgie aims for collaborative news
There comes a point when trying to keep track of the news that you just become overwhelmed.
You’re subscribing to several dozen RSS feeds with a newsreader such as FeedDemon (the filtering feature helps a lot); you’ve got Google News, as well as Google’s News Alert service, but it is too much – you simply can’t find enough time to read everything. (This is not surprising considering how often you read something, click on a link, and fall into a two-hour wormhole of “interesting” links that take you halfway across the Internet.)
A new Web site, Newgie (catchphrase: “News for Grown Ups”) aims to address this problem by making your news consumption more streamlined and effective. Created by Jason Windebank and Jacob Rheuban, both reported to have several other Internet start-ups under their belts, Newgie is a newsreader combined with a collaborative filter and organizer.
Like Google News or Yahoo News, Newgie has a large database of news that is continuously updated from feeds covering a wide range of news sources. After you have registered with Newgie you can organize your news by:
* Source – The “traditional” way of finding news, for example, by subscribing to Network World’s daily NetFlash newsletter.
* Categories – Aggregated news feeds filtered by topic according to Newgie’s own taxonomy.
* Communities – Feeds contributed to by a group of users who add and discuss new items they discover.
The concepts behind Newgie are interesting but at present, the service has some way to go to prove its value. For example the subject taxonomy is very “shallow” which means that a category such as “Technology & Science” is broken down into “Computers” and then further into “Internet” and that’s it. The result is that many categories are overly broad.
Community filtering is a great idea and in theory, you can add a news item to a community feed, vote on items to promote their ranking, and comment on them. In practice, there seems to be a few bugs lurking in the system. For example, the community “Philosphical Thinkers” (that is how it is spelled) lists an article titled “Big Tobacco Wins Big-for Now” (I have no idea why this is philosophical) but when you view the article and attempt to comment on it you wind up referring to an article titled “Midland: We will improve car for Oz.”
Newgie plans to make three types of community available: public and completely open, public with moderated membership, and private. So far only completely open public communities are supported.
Newgie embodies some potentially interesting features, particularly in collaborative filtering (something that today is the province of e-mail based lists), but in its current form fails to deliver on its hype.
Keep an eye on what Newgie does as well as others that go down the collaborative news track – someone will get it right. While Newgie has good ideas the question is can it develop enough momentum (and better code) to not become an “also ran.”
