I just stumbled upon the freshly launched Mar.Com, dubbed a ‘Techmeme for Marketing and Communication’ by co-creator Giovanni Gallucci on Twitter. It’s essentially an aggregation and filtering service for news related to advertising, digital marketing, search engine optimization, etc. where users can also submit events and jobs related to those topics.

First of all, I have to hand it to founders Gallucci, William Hurley and Mike Erwin: the (domain) name is awesome². That said, I fail to see the connection with Techmeme, as it has nothing to do with automatically aggregating news from a number of sources and having the best / most linked / most discussed article come out on top. Users can submit, discuss and rank stories related to all things marketing, so it’s more like a Digg for marketing and communication than anything else. In fact, I suspect they’re using Pligg CMS or a similar product to run the website although I’m not entirely certain.

Update: Gallucci got back to my e-mail and explained why Mar.Com is still ‘kinda’ like Techmeme:

While we are not totally automated we are taking hints from techmeme. A couple of the accounts on mar.com are “owned” by bots. They cull through RSS feeds for us and collect possible stories based upon our own internal algorithm. We then make a decision to promote the stories either to the site based upon the category the bot as recommended to us, promote the story to the site after changing the category or do nothing.

I’m sure there are numerous websites which have similar objectives as Mar.Com (although I can’t think of any besides Sphinn), and I’m also sure they’re going to have a tough time forming a strong enough community that actively engages with the content to make Mar.Com a must-visit. That said, it might be worth checking out from time to time to see if you’re not missing out on any stories.