With plethora of news and blog sites mushrooming all the way, it’s really difficult to get rid of the information overload – so how do you judge the ‘most credible news or blog site?

Hop to Digg or news aggregators? Well, they are restricted to certain domains and in general, do not provide 360 degree view of the world.

Hop on to NewsCred, a mix of digg, news aggregator and most importantly – credibility system..

NewsCred is an attempt to help users find most credible content and aggregates content from newspapers as well as credible blogs. Users can pick and choose their news sources as well as blog sources and can credit source as well as discredit.

In their own words:

“NewsCred is digital newspaper that aggregates all the world’s most credible news, in one place. The NewsCred community then votes on the credibility of articles, journalists 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.

Access to credible and accurate news is a cornerstone of democracy and it’s absolutely essential that news readers can trust the news they read. Giving news readers a platform to voice their opinions and building an online track record for journalists is the first step towards restoring some of the news media’s lost credibility. We haven’t seen this level of transparency anywhere else in the media industry, and we’re convinced it will benefit both news readers and journalists alike.”

Few notable features:

• Filteration is done based on quality and credibility of the news source/journalist (and not popularity)
• Topics aggregate news articles/video/audio/tweets, i.e. buzz on any topic.
• Semantic technology automatically makes connections between topics, and also understands the topics that are discussed in any news article.
• Credibility Analytics: Trend report on most credible news/blogs:

Challenges/Suggestions

• Usage : A rating system like this can be easily short-circuited (esp. among rival newspapers/blogs). How do they plan to tackle this?
• Breaking news : TC pointed this and I do agree that sometimes the most credible sources aren’t the ones to break the news. How will Newscred handle these blogs?
• IP Targeting – Newscred needs to navigate to country pages based on user’s IP. For a content site, local relevance is very important.
  Infact, more global a platform is, the more local it should be for relevance – for instance, I may not be interested in what’s happening in US at this point, but I am more interested to know what’s up with bihar floods/delhi blast.
  Similarly, sources (both news and blogs) should be customized for each country.
• Blog Presence – Maybe, Newscred would like to have a credibility badge distribution for blogs as well as newspapers?
• The big question – Why?
  A very subtle question on why should a user visit Newscred every day (i mean, one can aggregate credible sources in myYahoo/Netvibes/iGoogle) – so where is the discovery part (if only I select my credible sources?)
• And a follow-up question:
  Why rate? Where is the user gratification?

Newscred has an interesting concept (and a very neat interface)- and it would be interesting to watch if they could expose the reality of media (which in my opinion, is sometimes very shallow) vs. blogs and bring out the most credible content players.

Infact, Newscred is quite a logical evolution of content business, i.e.:

News sites/blogs -> News aggregators ->  Credibility system.

i.e. Too many news sites gave birth to news aggregator concept. But then, too many aggregators also added to information overload – and hence, a need for credibility system.

What’s your opinion?

Give Newscred a spin and do share your comments.

Newscred is based out of Geneva/Stockholm and is started by two Bangladeshis, Iraj Islam and Shafqat Islam.

Tags: product review