Well, another news aggregator launched today. This one is called Newspond, and while they didn’t set a record for baseless hyperbole, they come close. The site, like TechMeme and Digg, tries to determine breaking and important news – but it is a little different than both. Digg uses user voting to determine headlines. Techmeme uses linking behavior of blogs and other news sites. Both are, arguably, fairly transparent, and you can see the number of user votes or inbound links, respectively to a headline. Newspond, by contrast, has a black box algorithm that looks at number of factors and comes up with an overall score called a Buoyancy Rating. The higher the rating, the higher the headline. So their approach is fine, although I argue that it’s filling a need that doesn’t exist. There’s just little to drive people to the site day after day. The user interaction on Digg, both from submitting and voting on stories (and getting all your friends to vote on stories) drives significant viral growth. TechMeme doesn’t have that, and has orders of magnitude less traffic. Newspond doesn’t have it either. And it’s unlikely to replace TechMeme as the blogger’s news site of choice. But they just make ridiculous statements on the website that I can’t ignore. The home page says Newspond is “The most advanced news site on the planet.” The about page has a huge yellow ball thingy and the same words in 40 point type. It also calls itself “the ultimate hub for the latest news.” What’s the technology behind this stunning new startup? Well, within “the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain” with “highly-advanced machine intelligence” that analyzes news “at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of.” It reads like a movie script. So far here’s my experience with the site – questionable freshness on the headlines and a complete failure to send me an activation for my account signup (they’ve posted on their blog about the problem). They also fail to provide a RSS feed for their content. Not so useful. More and more websites are starting to make these types of ridiculous claims to get attention. It works, but only for a day. And after that, with your credibility shot, everyone is waiting for the inevitable failure. And since expectations have been set so astronomically high, even a mild success is → Read More