Newgie.com vs Digg
Saturday, November 04, 2006
I've been looking at a new site lately called Newgie where an experiment between traditional news and Digg/Web2.0 user submitted articles is taking place. Newgie.com is still in beta but it hold some promise. What it does is take feeds of news stories from many popular websites like ESPN, Engadget, Entertainment Weekly, etc (they have many categories of sites to choose from) and give each story an Intellirank.
An Intellirank is given to each story based on the source the article is from, aka an article from CNN will get more basic Intellirank than an article from a blog, and based on time passed since the article was released. They use that rank so that after 24 hours an article will pretty much have no Intellirank. I like the idea of a score, but after 24 hours each story having 0 Intellirank kind of defeats it for me, maybe if it made it longer to 2 days I'd like that more.
The Intellirank of an article also takes into account the activities of the Newgie.com community. So if an article is viewed more, or send to other users, or recommended, etc, then it'll get more Intellirank. This is a good idea since community involvement should drive a site and help the score of each article. Pretty decent web 2.0 idea there.
The other good thing on the main newgie page is the section for my communities. That's the section which has the most promise in my opinion. You can join a group that adds stories based on their preference, kind of a like a personalized Digg, which is very neat. So that you can join a Nintendo group and have all the Nintendo stories all in one section. I joined by default the News For Geeks and it's pretty good, except for some CNN article which suck.
Overall when I compare it to Digg it does some things better and some things worse. Digg users have more say in the voting process as compared to the site it's from, so a good article on a blog will get votes and reviews as opposed to a lesser metascore from newbie due to the lesser metascore of the blog. It can be a much better way to manage all your news scores in one window, something Digg cannot do for you. Digg is all about user generated latest news, whereas Newgie.com is a news aggregator with some web 2.0 user input. I'd personally like to see the users get more weight in the system, but that's just me. I'll keep giving it a shot see how it ends up, since it's in Beta, and if anything new pops up, I'll let you guys know.
Here's their logo, not too shabby I guess, lol
Check them out,
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 7:03 PM
