Could NewsTrust be a Digg Killer? (More layers of content filtering)

(Left: Fabrice demonstrates the application in the pleasant Miami afternoon.

The most interesting thing to me at WeMedia wasn’t the conference itself, it was NewsTrust.net a non profit news aggregator. I ran into Rory and Fabrice the creators of NewsTrust at the WeMedia conference. It’s got at three layers or content filtering to bring you the news that you want, as I understand it, here’s the three layers that I know of. Update: I just noticed that the Blog Herald is calling for transparency in news reporting. I believe that NewsTrust may have some of the features that could help here.

Rather than relying on just one Social Feature to provide filtered content, NewsTrust deploys at least three methods to sort out what’s important. To me, this looks like best of breed.

Layer 1: Content Pull
It’s a bottom up news site that aggregates content from blogs, traditional news sources. The pull content from TechMeme, news sources, and the wire. I hope they pull the categorized PodTech feeds as well.

Layer 2: Validated Editors and Submissions
The second layer has a real persona of editors that can vote and submit stories. Unlike Digg submitters, these users use their real name and have a real personas. There’s several attributes per editor that help to confirm the trust of the editor such as Activity, Experience, Ratings, Transparency, and Validation. Check out this example page of one editor.

Layer 3: User rating
The users of the site can vote up and down content as well as provide reviews.
Users of the site (as well as editors) can review the content, vote it up and down to find content. Check out the Science and Tech Channel to learn more.

While still nascent, (A good user experience designer could really do wonders) this model to me contains some features that may be more effective than Digg, which recently removed their top 100 diggers due to corruption and payoffs. (Sounds like politics right?)

Being in Miami, the event demos were in the beautiful University of Miami’s campus, under some palm trees, with a flowing fountain in the background, with a backdrop of young beautiful tone and tanned college students.

Here’s some of the ’screenshots’ from their presentation and research. Note the graphs around ‘trust’.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 5:11 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.