As had been rumoured in the last few days, Ask.com has launched a new memetracker - Big News.
A lot of the discussion today focused on the collaboration with Digg.com that is part of the site and apparently also part of the algorithm that decides the freshness of any given story. Working with Digg clearly gave Ask a lot of exposure today, but on the site itself, Digg isn’t a very important player.
What is more interesting to me anyway, is that this is actually a very well-designed and useful project. The most interesting feature to me is that Ask not only indexes and correlates blog posts, images and mainstream media news items that relate to a given story, it also allows you to backtrack the development of that story.
A few more thoughts:
- The content is refreshingly different from what’s on Techmeme and Digg right now. It also seems pretty fresh, with the headline about one hour old.
The layout of the top of the page is good. The second part, with the less buzz-worthy stories doesn’t quite seem to fit into the same model.
The “Blogviews” section on the right side is interesting, but I wonder how they decide what goes in there.
The ability to bookmark a story and track its development over the next few days is a very cool idea.
Overall, I am surprised I actually like the site. I was never a big fan of Ask, but I can see myself bookmarking Big News and referring to it when I want to see the bigger picture.
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