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NewsCred Launches Cross-Web Newspaper With “Credibility” Indexing
NewsCred is a new cross-web newspaper site launching today in beta. What makes NewsCred different from the other "breaking news" sites like Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc. is that NewsCred uses a credibility algorithm for indexing the sources and determining what should rise to the top. Currently the site lists about 100 news sources.
I spoke with NewsCred co-founder Shafqat and I asked him how he describes NewsCred. He replied, "NewsCred is a digital newspaper that will give you all the world’s credible news in one place. We aggregate news from hundreds of mainstream media sources, as well as established blogs, and let our users personalize their digital newspaper within seconds, without any fuss. Our community votes on the credibility of articles, authors and news sources. Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity. The credibility data that we collects is an essential metric for measuring the quality of a new source, and the journalistic credibility and integrity of its writers. We are also building an online track record for journalists. So in summary, we give news readers a platform to voice their opinions about the quality of news and the people writing about the news."
Here’s my take – NewsCred looks nice and could be a good start page for breaking news across the Web. But it’s another full-feed scraper and if they even so much as attempt to put an ad next to the content, all bets are off. What is with these sites scraping full feeds lately? Same thing with fav.or.it. There’s no reason why NewsCred needs to scrape full feeds – they can easily link out to the sites that they are indexing. The scraped stories on NewsCred don’t pull in any formatting so they are very difficult to read.
The other concern I have is similar to one I have with the Outbrain rating widget we have installed on CN. With NewsCred, what makes a story "credible"? There are so many rumors that float around blogs everyday, do people really care what’s credible? From my conversations over the past year, the answer is no. In fact, if you look at some of the more popular blogs, stories that are factually inaccurate or biased have done very well for those blogs. What really makes a story credible?
I like the concept of NewsCred but they need to stop the full-feed scraping and define for their users specifically what makes a story credible.
Svetlana believes NewsCred has potential but the 100 sources will need to grow for the site to work at a broad level. Jason notes that the site has a better ranking algorithm than when it launched in private alpha last year.
Update: in a further conversation with Shafqat he notes, "Just wanted to give you an update on our policy. We do NOT believe in full feed scraping and actually took the view opposing Fav.or.it‘s policies. We strongly believe in protecting the intellectual property of the content provider and respecting the copyrights. With that said, 95% of the sources on our site are set up so we only display the first sentence or a brief excerpt (usually the first paragraph at most!). There are a handful of blog feeds where the feed owner has chosen to provide the full feed. We are individually reaching out to every single one of them to get their feedback on how we should proceed. We didnt have time to set up a automated script that will only store the first paragraph but will happily do that. For now, we simply display what we receive in the feed for those and hence the formatting hasn’t been improved. Most likely we will do away with the full feed or agree on a rev-share and then format the feeds. You bring up an important point and I just want to reiterate that we really don’t believe in taking your content for free and making money of it. As you have noticed, because we did not have time to reach out to everyone yet, there are NO ads being displayed"
Hi,
If the reader votes on the credibility of the articles, then it’s just a popularity index.
Cheers,
Alan
maybe now you see why some of the bigger blogs praise this site plus a variety of other similar services :)
I think there is a difference between credibility and popularity if you track the sources over time, even if the primary metric is reader votes. If you start to introduce other data points like comscore ranking or google page rank you could validate what your user base is telling you. To Alan’s point I do wonder how much we care in the Meme Meme whether news is credible or just HOT.
Amazing that NewScred have decided to choose us as a comparison and in fact decide to accuse us of ‘screen scraping’ in an article that is meant to be about them.
Perhaps they would like to make some more favourable comparisons,
E.g.
1) We have the ability to aggregate comments – and most importantly push comments back to blogs – this means bringing the masses is a reality (We aggregate in the region of 20,000 comments a day)
2) We examine the license on every single post we receive and change how we display it based upon the license terms.
3) We rank content on actual Attention Data from our own users, we care what our users think not anything else.
4) We allow users to log-in to our service via 14 different identity types – you can post links directly (one click) to twitter, delicious, friendfeed + lots more.
5) Our traffic is 75% Internet Explorer (WE are the people bringing this content to a new audience)
Hi Nick – as I have said to you before, we think you have a great service and the features you mention are great, and I’m sure your community appreciates them.
I’m not sure where you saw that we ‘accused you of screen scraping.’ Allen asked me to comment on our feed scraping policy. In essence, how do we treat feeds with respect to copyright. Your point 2 above is your policy, but we tend to think differently. I really think we shouldn’t be asking content providers to modify feeds or put in CC licensing in order to opt out. It’s their content, so they have a right to say no. And if they say no, we will simply listen without requiring to do anything else.
You have an approach with Fav.or.it that is different, but I commend that fact that you guys have put thought into the copyright issue. Everyone has a right to their opinion, and I certainly didn’t mean to accuse or use this thread to criticize your service. I was merely responding to Allen.
I wish you the best of luck. Please contact me at shafqat at newscred dot com if you wish to chat further or want to grab a beer at some point!
Hi,
I see, User votes + Comscore + PageRank + any other analytics = higher credibility.
At least, hot news is closer to front page news.
Anyway, I did not want to start any argument. It is just my humble opinion that it is a little pretentious to say that we decide what is credible or not.
Cheers,
Alan
Shafqat,
Apologies I had not read the article in context and the article itself was what mentioned screen scraping. We are certainly pushing the question on how content can be used but all will become clear soon when we launch the next phase of the platform and hopefully everyone will understand the value in what we are doing. Number one point for me is that I blog, and I wanted a new revenue model that I could not see at the time, once it is released myself, NewsCred and every other blogger will find themselves with a few more options.
Definitely up for that beer at some point!
Craig,
So, User votes + comScore + PageRank + any other WebAnalytics = Higher credibility
Well, that’s news to me…
Anyway, wish newscred all the best.
Cheers,
Alan
I really like NewsCred’s approach – though one thing I found sincerely ironic, and maybe slightly disheartening, was the inclusion of the Daily Mail in the UK section ;-)