Megite, a blog aggregation news service (see here for a comparison of Megite to its competitors) has launched a videos vertical that tracks popular videos in an interesting way. Unlike the Digg video channel, which ranks videos based solely on user voting, Megite’s ranking is based on what vidoes blogs are linking to or embedding into their sites (the same way Megite tracks other news). An authoritative blog linking to a video can drive it up in the rankings, as will a large number of less authoritative blogs. The “freshness” of the video is also important (meaning Megite is tracking newly uploaded videos). Megite is tracking 20 video sites, although understandably YouTube is currently dominating the results. This is a good way to rank videos because it suffers from less potential voting fraud than, say, Digg. If an established blog links to a video there’s a very good chance it is a real vote for that video. Taking aggregate statistics from tens of thousands of blogs will tend to yield very good results. More from Rex Dixon, who also links to an interview he recently conducted with Megite founder Matthew Chen. → Read More
I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo. The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users. It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance. My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting. The List: Blogniscient Blogrunner Blogsnow Chuquet Megite Memeorandum Newroo (pre-launch) Tailrank Technorati Kitchen Tinfinger (pre-launch) Topix.net TruthLaidBear The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services. And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines. Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe. → Read More
Megite has been getting some attention on the Web 2.0 Workgroup email list as possibly the first company to be able to group blogging conversations as well as Memeorandum (profiles). The site is very rough design-wise, but is grouping things intelligently and seems to be popping popular stuff up to the top fairly quickly. Memeorandum has redefined how early adopters get and digest their news. While these sites are still young, they will have a disruptive impact on the big guys, soon. Tailrank (profiles), another service in this space, is also doing interesting things, like analyzing user-uploaded OPML files for additional data and including a screen shot of the post/item under discussion. For additional information on Memeorandum see this interview with Founder Gabe Rivera. → Read More
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