NewsCred Debuts Today To Offer the Most Credible News to Everyone

Today NewsCred opens to the public another news aggregation service that is based on the idea of credibility of sources that you receive the news from. NewsCred positions itself as a digital newspaper collecting content from various mainstream and new media outlets.

Any visitor can consume news here even without registration but if you want to add some credibility to your favorite news sources you will have to create an account here. And this credibility that is based on votes from users determines the position of all the news items on the homepage and the most credible sources will get the most favorable positions.

NewsCred was initially launched in private alpha back in May 2007 so what we see today is a public beta. For its public debut today NewsCred has introduced a number of new features to the site, including:

• Search (obviously, to perform the search for all the articles containing a particular search term)
• Dedicated pages (updated in real time) for specific topics automatically generated based on people, events, companies or countries that appear in the news items containing articles, videos, pictures and even Twitter buzz for the topic
• Semantic-based related topics so that when you are interested in one topic you could easily browse news on another topic that is related to it but often indirectly

Right now the site definitely lacks interaction with users because what you are offered to do here is basically to consume content while we all have gotten too accustomed to contributing to this content already - with our votes or comments. Here the only interaction that you are expected to participate in is in helping the service determine what news sources or authors should be considered reliable. But the co-founder of the application told me that in the future they are planning to allow us to comment on various news items and add links to them so this will improve the feeling of using a regular RSS reader that I am trying to customize a little.

Even though NewsCred clearly positions itself as a competitor to SocialMedian, there is a huge difference between the two sites: while SocialMedian focuses on news recommended by the people that you find interesting, here the news you get are based on credibility of the news sources - determined by you and other users of the system.

Right now with the audience of early users (who are most certainly geeks that get their daily share of news from various blogs) the NewsCred seems to favor blogosphere over traditional media. Even though mainstream media sources have a wider column here than that for blogs, the credibility that blogs get from user votes seems to be higher than that of mainstream media.

NewsCred actually allows anyone to view credibility for media sources - for the entire industry, traditional media only or blogs only plus the credibility charts for individual publications or individual bloggers and journalists even. And from what I’ve seen on the site, blogs seem to be the most credible sources here: for example, many of the top positions in the most credible news sources are held by the blogs that many of us read on a daily basis, including Allen Stern’s CenterNetworks (number 3 with proud 100 points of credibility), VentureBeat (number 6 with the same 100 points), Silicon Alley Insider (number 13) and many others. It will be interesting to see if the situation changes in the future when more mainstream users arrive that may trust Reuters a little more than TechCrunch.

What I am uncomfortable about is that NewsCred uses all the information available in an RSS feed of this or that publication without actually stimulating users to visit original sources so it will probably face the same criticism Shyftr received for moving content and encouraging discussion around it without sending people to the authors of this content.

Another concern I have is that currently the service only tracks 100 news sources - both traditional and new and I have not found any capability to add the sources that are most important to me personally - after all, to me certain sources may be more credible than they are for other users and I would want to give them more space on my homepage (you can already choose your preferred sources from the available ones but you can not add additional sources). But I believe they will be adding new sources because a content aggregator that only works with 100 sources is definitely something many people will believe to be strange.

But in general I see a great potential in NewsCred in the news aggregation field, it even has a chance of appealing to mainstream users given the very traditional (and definitely not web 2.0) look and feel of the site. If the guys behind NewsCred are able to ensure further customization of news for every user instead of making this particular user to rely on the wisdom of crowd, it will be a perfect news consumption destination both for those who want to get what they want exactly from where they want and for those who prefer to believe that what everyone thinks is good is actually good enough for them as well.

The video below demonstrates how NewsCred works in 90 seconds:

UPDATE: I have just received an email from NewsCred co-founder addressing my concern of the service keeping eyeballs to itself instead of sending them to the sources. He explained that the majority of their publishers already use partial feeds and the number of those using full feeds is small (so I must have been unlucky when checking some of the posts). And for those who use full feeds he mentioned that they will discuss it with publishers how to handle their feeds in order to keep a paragraph for NewsCred and send people back to the original article or post (or probably to obtain agreement from the content creator to keep it as it is). Of course, it the content providers are fine when they provide their content in exchange of some credibility ranking, I don’t think anyone will critisize NewsCred about this issue. And if they are unhappy, I hope the startup will find a workaround.