Newspond is like an automated Digg 2.0

Newspond is a web news aggregator that scans the Internet for news and publishes them automatically on their website. That's actually a major difference to Digg where users contribute the articles. The benefit of the Newspond system is that it is less likely to be gamed as much as you are used from Digg even with their latest algorithm change.

Newspond uses a sophisticated algorithm to compute news popularity which will determine if an article will make the frontpage or not. Popularity goes up and down and this is considered in the algorithm, each article has a popularity trend that goes either up, down or stagnates.

Users can comment on stories and the comment function looks a lot nicer than that of Digg. Comments are threaded and the comment section uses Ajax to display everything without reloading the page. Nice and clean.

Talking about design. This site does look fantastic and it uses the latest technologies to increase usability. I'm not that of a design freak because I think that content is far more important but this design sticks out.

A major feature that I wanted to see implemented at Digg for a long time is the bundling of sources for a news story. If something important happens in the world you see dozens of stories at Digg that are all related to the same subject. Newspond lists all those sources under one story headline which is far cleaner and better. Some stories have more than 50 sources and users can really read some or even all of them to inform themselves.

The only thing that I would criticize at the moment is the lack of information. The about page is not really revealing lots of information about the algorithm, how articles are found, how and which websites are used as sources and the like. More information would be crucial for success. Oh, and I was not able to register. It told me that I would receive a confirmation email but I did not receive on until now.

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