Web 2 Ireland

We all know what unmitigated disasters Digg V3 and later were. In a world of Twitter and Facebook they kept thinking it was still 2007. When V3 launched I said that it should have been built around the popular stories on Twitter since that’s what people are really interested in, rather than the closed coven of Digg power-users. So I was thrilled to see the recent launch of NewsWhip which does exactly that.

The site is an aggregation of popular news based on sharing and RTs across Twitter and Facebook. So there is no gaming, no moderation, just a smart algorithm bubbling up the hot news right now. They give a score to a news story by measuring how many Tweets, Likes, Shares, and other interactions it gets.You can filter by the location you are interested in and various categories and sub-categories.

At the moment the front page is showing some stories on the possible return of Arrested Development. That makes me very happy indeed.

For a great snapshot of interesting news across the realtime web during the day, I think the guys have nailed it.

Vinny Glennon of UseAMap and JustRoutes has now launched a nice news aggregation site

In his own words:

I wanted to create a site which solely focused on News. My intention is to be able to see the breaking news throughout the day from each country at a glance, without overloading my RSS Reader. The end result is 4topnews.com which picks up the news from all over the world.

I’m with Vinny on the RSS overload thing. Most general news sites simply generate too many stories in their feed every day. I currently use NetVibes to check out the top headlines a few times a day but I’ll be trying this out too.

The blog is at blog.4topnews.com