In the last few days we have seen rumors about Ask.com working with Digg to create a white label Digg like site. The project is “BigNews” and is not a Digg clone but rather a Google News/Techmeme like news tracker.
What is Ask BigNews on their own words,
Ask BigNews is a search and browse service that helps you find and track the most important and most talked about stories in the news. You can:
- Use the BigFactor to quickly find the hottest stories to follow
- Track stories automatically and follow their progression over time
- Check out the Top Videos in the news and the most Popular People
- Apply your own spin on the news with News Source Filters
- Get additional facts and background material on searches using Ask.com’s heralded three-panel interface
- Dive into a deep, rich array of videos, images, blogs, and articles as they become available for a wide range of stories
- Be the First to “Digg” a story using our unique Digg module that identifies the most interesting stories with no “Digg” counts yet
BigNews presents the breaking news with a “BigFactor” (something like news score). News is arranged in 5 categories including Business, Entertainment, Sports, Science & Tech and Health.
BigNews tracks stories from different news sources from all over the world and ranks them based on factors like, the freshness of the story, other articles linking to the story, associated media like images and video with the story and the discussion around the story.
Top page shows stories from all the sections, but the individual categories show stories with BigFactor.
Although initial rumors suggested Digg involvement in the project, all you now find is how many digg’s the bignews stories got at the moment and the stories which are yet to be submitted to digg. So if you are a digg user you can submit or vote on these stories. Source: Silicon Alley Insider
I was rather surprised to see the result was not another social networking site, but I do however like the layout.
While I have only browsed through “BigNews” for a few minutes, my initial thoughts is that this will be a nice news collaboration site.
Yeah, I also think it has good potential. I wish they would explain more in detail how the algorithm works, mainly how Digg’s article ratings are factored in.
@Jonathan
It looks good that they didn’t come up with a digg clone. This looks interesting and has the potential to grow in my opinion
Looks good. I think it has a good chance of growing.
@Jonathon
I don’t think they will explain that in public
@Brown
It looks good initally, but we have to see how it grows over time