NewsCred: The News Isn’t Just About Being Popular

Remember that Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates a cop but won’t admit he watches Melrose Place until he cracks during a lie detector test (“Just remember. It’s not a lie… if you believe it.”)? Just checking. All this talk about the “new” 90210 has been slightly disconcerting, especially since we remember very clearly the original 90210. Very clearly.

Anyway, NewsCred is a news credibility aggregator, which has just launched to the public, and is sort of like a lie detector, but for blogs (not that anyone will be forcing you to admit to reading Perez). The site ranks stories by the credibility of their source and not their popularity by allowing users to “rate each story, author, and publication’s credibility, which is then plugged into an algorithm to determine the site’s prominent headlines.” Oh man, one can only guess at the algorithms of FBNY. That said, if it works it would be a great tool, and a nice counter-balance to, say, the NYT‘s most emailed list.

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