Like you, I spent a lot of time trying to keep up-to-date on the hottest significant news stories. Since we free-thinking folks have to largely bypass vintage media, which have largely become a public relations arm of the Obama administration, it isn’t easy to do. There are thousands of great sites out there, any of which can have a noteworthy news story.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time to check thousands of websites for breaking news.
Yes, there are some great aggregators out there: Drudge, Twitchy, etc. But all of them rely upon human editors and, most importantly, don’t give smaller blogs and websites much of their attention.
That’s why we created BadBlue News. It’s a very different type of news aggregator because it uses machine learning and automation to achieve massive scalability in assessing news sources and breaking stories. Here’s how it’s different:
1. It uses social network buzz, not a set of human editors, to determine how important a story is.
2. It levels the playing field for smaller websites and blogs by taking into account traffic patterns; that is, a story on a small blog with 15 retweets might be equivalent to a story on Fox News with 1,000 retweets. The traffic patterns and social buzz are both factored in by BadBlue to offer a much wider range of news coverage than any other aggregator.
3. It never sleeps: BadBlue runs 24×7 and never relies upon human editors making decisions.
BadBlue is growing quickly. From September 2013 to January 2014, page views grew by 20 percent with Google Analytics reporting the average time onsite is a startling 31 minutes!
In this election year, BadBlue can play an important role for advancing the conservative agenda by cutting through the media censors and offering a level playing field for websites and blogs of all sizes.
I’d love for you to come visit and, if you like it, to tell your friends, tweet about it, or like it on Facebook.
2014 will be a big year for liberty and I believe getting the word out on uncensored news stories — bypassing the state-run media — will be critical.
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Doug Ross runs his own blog, which you can visit here.
note: I posted this BEFORE I realized I won no award from Doug for 2013.
He got lucky. ;)
Bookmarked.
Just going to say that Doug Ross’ site, along with that of our humble host and one or two others, is one of my daily blog stops.
“1. It uses social network buzz, not a set of human editors, to determine how important a story is.”
I thought editors checked facts, not importance. Wouldn’t this just be an unconfirmed gossip hub?
I’m probably missing something.
BadBlue is an aggregator, not a source. It’ll need tweaking from time to time to keep it from devolving into celebrity gossip, but that shouldn’t be too difficult if Doug’s reading it too.
McGehee, I was speaking to a more general impression of gossip than just the celebrity type. It sounds to be a list prioritized by the number of people talking about a subject in the political category, on social media. My concern (if you can call it that) is what is to differentiate between real stories and just rumor?
> is what is to differentiate between real stories and just rumor? <
the reader?
I’ll check it out.
The algorithm, which I expect Doug will tweak as needed. As I would do if I created something like it and used it myself.
I should correct myself. The choice of sources would do the most to keep the output relevant. That too would be subject to occasional tweaking.
It’s become a worthy site now that Doug and company have worked out some of the kinks in it.
I’m glad to see this has happened, as this is a needed tool.
OT: Everything you ever needed to know about climate change.
– Lerner says that radio listeners and Conservatives are assholes, which is to say for Progressives that’s anyone who doesn’t agree with all their made up crap and crackpot theories.
– But I don’t believe its unbounded arrogance that drives them to that ridiculous position, its unbounded fear they’re wrong.
“I should correct myself. The choice of sources would do the most to keep the output relevant. That too would be subject to occasional tweaking”
There can’t be a choice of sources, like a go to list, if as hinted at the stories selected are by order of popularity, or “hits” to the algorithm across social media. Also this “tweaking” thing is starting to sound something like “human editing”.
I don’t mean to be obnoxious. Maybe bh will figure it put.
– I don’t know. For me if I could think of a less relevant bench mark than the opinions and biases of the lap dog legacy media it would have to be social media, so maybe I’m dumb today but I don’t get it.
– I’ll give it a try but honestly it seems to me that at best you’ll get a large bag of game players and deuchebags that like to vent and cause trouble and confusion, and at worst you’ll get the bogus idea that somethings popular by its merits instead of some hokey emotional reason like “it’s sooooooo cute”, or “it’s sooooo coooolies”, or what ever. Remember you’re dealing with kids mostly.
John, we’re almost certainly talking past each other. Doug can answer your questions best.
And then there are those who are incompetent at weaving.
I have Doug Ross @ Journal (aka directorblue.blogspot.com/) open in another tab even as we speak. As a matter of fact, it’s how I ended up on PW today, although I check in here regularly, too.
I like BadBlue, too, but the auto-loading videos are extremely annoying to those of us with limited bandwidth.
Thanks, Doug!
P.S. You you can send my endorsement check to:
The Society to Squish John F. Kerry’s Face to Normal Proportions
PO Box: Heinz 57
Horseface, MA, 57666
BadBlue is okay. I’ve had it on speed dial for a couple of months or more, but I’m not hitting it daily, or even weekly, of late. The format gripes me. The boxes are disconcerting, for some reason. They jumble the small necessary sense of order, maybe? The layout makes it hard to tell if anything has changed since I last obsessively clicked to the site. Are the small pictures placed with any degree of relevance?
I usually hit Drudge, InstaP, Google News, and NewsNow whenever the news urge is happening during the day. Drudge moves links around in his columns, but not overly obnoxiously so, and the late breaking is always at the top. Google is Google, both deep and shallow, leaning toward the latter. The others are sequential. As is Weasel Zippers, which I page down through once a day.
For the essential color and wisdom there is Protein Wisdom and a very small coterie of others.
The point being that a short four or five other websites are giving me almost everything that BadBlue gives, along with a lot of other potentially interesting effluvia, and doing it in formats that are more natural to my surfing instincts.
BadBlue’s challenge is probably similar to (fucking moron Ezra Klein) Vox’s challenge. How do you get just enough interesting click bait on the front page that doesn’t lead to disappointing crap to keep people coming back?
Jeff sez that “not just anybody can summarize the news”. Hell, they may not even be able to aggregate it.
I read pages 1 and 4 of my local paper online, then a handful of blogs (starring PW), then I have Breitbart and Drudge, and then a few local news sites from various towns.
If I miss something my mother-in-law will see it on Zuckerbook and tell me about it.