NewsCred – Now News Comes with Credibility Assurance
NewsCred.com is a news aggregator that collects news and ranks them based on it’s source’s credibility unlike Digg based models where the news stories are ranked by their popularity among readers. NewsCred is a startup based out of Sweden, Switzerland and Bangladesh; launched it’s public beta in August this year.
Basically, NewsCred’s algorithm takes into account the quality (credibility voted by readers) of articles, authors and news source and ranks them in order to qualify them to appear on home page. An analytics keeper module on NewsCred maintains a track record of writers, bloggers, jounraliststs and news sources. The module also records industry trends in order to further empower the algo.
As a signed user you can also customize your view of your default page. In NewsCred terminology they call it ‘your newspaper’ because you can personalize your page by selecting the news sources from which you want to read and create your own newspaper page.
NewsCred vs Digg
Although NewsCred is an excellent tool to get quality news, I really haven’t understood the need of such an algorithm. Shouldn’t we get news based on the popularity of the content inside instead of how good or bad the news source is?
With the current NewsCred algorithm a reader can only view news based on credibility (quality) of the news source. The algo takes a myth for granted that only popular sources will provide good news stories which is not totally correct.
In such a scenario, the news a reader is more likely to see on NewsCred would be from popular blogs and newspapers’ sites. This means as a reader you are less likely to spot a news story that may be good and worth reading but from a less popular source.
Digg is immune to such apartheid because if your content is good then you can have your “1000 Diggs of fame” no matter how popular or credible a source you are. Ranking on Digg is purely based on the likability of the news story’s or blog’s content and the likability here also is expressed by votes (diggs) casted by readers.
And then once you are famous on Digg then you might even make it to NewsCred’s list of credible sources which would in turn get you more visibility and more Diggs.
Being credibly famous, my friend, is a virtue 
Both the sites rely on cumulative social behaviour towards any content and this makes both of them a neutral & unbiased tool to explore interesting information available on the web.
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