Credible News by NewsCred
Think Google News, and then combine it with good and credible sources, social contribution and quality news. You get NewsCred.
NewsCred is a startup co-founded by Iraj and Shafqat in summer 2007. Designed just like a newspaper, NewsCred has a very clean layout with a nice white background. The layout resembles a magazine theme of Wordpress that I once came across, but never the less, the design is very well thought out. On the top bar are the major categories or sections of news like Top Stories, World, Sports, Entertainment etc, and then below that is the top stories module which contains 4 to top stories and the module changes them on click. After that come top stories from various popular sources like theguardian, Aljazeera, Newsweek, msnbc etc. Where as the column next to this shows popular news from blogs. The right sidebar contains the news sources which you can select and deselect various news sources to filter out the news according to your favorite sources.
The “credibility� of news comes from the fact that you can rank every news posted on NewsCred through a rating system. News can either be rated credible or discredited by any user. The rating of the news changes according to these stats. Also, an analysis can be seen of the rating of every news posted.
This makes for a pretty social activity but it seems like an easy target for spammers. If the whole process is so simple and automated, any user could post discredible news and rank it well enough through fake profiles. Unless they have a process to keep a check on it.
Another thing is that Pictures speak louder than words. But NewsCred focuses more on text rather than images. I would suggest them to show an image with the title of the news in the snippets, like they show the logo of the sources, as this will make it easier to find news of interest at a quick glance by the user.
Another interesting aim they have is :
NewsCred will be the first public database of journalists, along with their profiles, history of articles, comments, and credibility track records.
I haven’t seen any popular journalist yet on their website, but if that’s what they aim to achieve, then it’s a very good effort. What I would like to know is if they have talked to any popular and respected journalists yet to contribute and be a part of NewsCred or not.
Overall, NewsCred is definitely worth it, along side your morning cup of java.
 
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Looks very interesting. I’m surprised that Google or other major players haven’t introduced this type of personalization where you can filter on trusted news sources (I think you can do it on Yahoo to a certain degree, but its limited). They’ll certainly have to beat people trying to game the system, but promising start. And nice interface!
yea, but I still think they can improve on many fronts that I have pointed out in the post, to really give competition to Google, Yahoo and the likes.
@matthieu thanks for the feedback. We’re excited to hear that you like our service. As u point out, major news sites luke google and yahoo are missing some of the easy personalization features like the ‘1-click’ filtering. We want to bring the power of RSS aggregation to the masses!
@Imran thanks for the great review. We have a Loy of work to do and there are a lot of exciting features to come. Pictures are definately on the way, and we are also putting together a NewsCred community advisory board made up of some amazing international journalists as well as passionate users. Keep an eye out for that. Finally, a big welcome to all our new users coming from startupmeme!
Good to hear from you Shafqat, keep us updated on the changes and updates you make. I personally like your service as I’m really a news junkie myself. But I would like to know how you will keep in check the possibilities of malicious use of credibility rating? Bogus accounts could be made that can rank even a news post without quality to a higher level than most worthy news.
Imran - glad you like the service. Both Iraj and I are passionate news junkies as well, so this is right up our alley!
You bring up a good point about people trying to game the system. There’s a lot of things we do and also technology that can be deployed to prevent this. Firstly, we can try to prevent gaming altogether by ensuring accounts are legitimate (e-mail verification, requiring real names etc), checking I.P. addresses and capturing unusual voting patterns (frequency, time, duplicates etc).
But there will always be people who will find a way to cast votes that are not legit, so we have algorithmic technology on the backend as well. For example, we can use Baynesian Averages to ensure that votes well outside the mean are weighed less and thereby lessen the impact of gaming. Not all of this is developed yet, but as the site grows, we’ll have to pay more and more attention to these issues.
A very crowded space, but the execution is solid. The challenge will be marketing this amongst all the other competitors out there. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and so far I’m really liking it. Reminds me a bit of Findory, from back in the day.