MySpace has officially launched its news service, a combination of Google News-style categories and the collaborative voting of Digg.com
MySpace, acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in June 2005, had itself acquired Newsroo, a real-time news aggregator, last year just before its launch.
Newsroo’s technology will essentially allow for news gathering, categorising and most importantly collective voting to lift popular stories to the top of the site and push unpopular ones down the list.
The news site, launched yesterday, is divided into 25 different categories with a further 300 subcategories. The aggregation or collection of the content will be done using Newsroo but that actual rank will be determined by the user.
“We’re putting it to the community to be the editorial engine driving our news service,” said MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson.
The apparent disadvantage of MySpace News would be that the interface isn’t as simple and well laid out as Digg.com, where users can either “bury” or “digg” a story. On clicking on a news story there are five diffent options for rating from “hated it” through to “loved it” which busy surfers may find too time consuming.
However, compared to Digg’s six basic categories of technology, science, world and business, sports, entertainment and gaming, MySpace News makes for detailed, comprehensive and exact searches of your area of interest in its many subcategories.
MySpace News will gather content from various sources including blogs but also plan to channel in news stories from traditional media. The idea behind this is that it will provide quality content from mainstream journalistic sources and this in turn will attract advertisers to MySpace, an opportunity News Corporation had been hoping for since its US$580 million acquisition in 2005.
By Marie Boran
