I didn’t really think I could be interested in yet another crowd-powered news aggregating website… Mixx, Reddit, Regator, Social Median,  Soshable, Propeller, Sphinn even… whether they’re the next Digg I have no idea… but it sure isn’t worth the time signing up in my opinion.

I was very interested in the announcement yesterday however, that a new service called ‘NewsCred’ was launching with the aim of gathering and aggregating articles based on their credibility over blind crowd popularity.

It’s a fantastic objective, one which anyone who has used Digg over the last few years would probably love to see… it’s all too common where completely bogus stories are Dugg right to the front page (and sometimes consequently removed by the "invisible hand’ of non-existent editors’).

Crowd’s usually vote based on personal preference and opinion as well… a story about Microsoft may be brilliant, well-researched and accurate… but is buried by Apple fans purely because they dislike Microsoft.

W ether or not NewsCred can get around that will be interesting to see, although it isn’t the first to attempt this strategy; NewsTrust has been around for a few years (although I had never heard of it before) and has had slow but steady growth.

The most useful and interesting thing about NewsCred is the analytics option… you can examine the credibility of a publication based on how it fared on NewsCred. Just one indicator sure… but with time it should really be a good measure of the reporting quality of various news sources.

You can also customise the NewsCred front page based on your interests and the publications you prefer. In many ways, even if the credibility factor doesn’t worry you, it’s still a good source of daily news much like Google News.

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