MySpace Launches News Aggregator
MySpace has launched MySpace News, a real-time news aggregator, powered by Newroo. Readers can sort the news by topic or popularity, with topics broken down into subcategories. Clicking on a topic will pull up 15 of the latest news stories in that topic, revealing a teaser, the website that the news feed originated from, and a link to read more. Beside the teaser is an option to vote for the article.
Anyone can vote on a news story, which determines its position in popularity. Five options include: Hated it, Didn't like it, Liked it, Really liked it, and Loved it. You don't have to be logged into MySpace to vote for an article.
Clicking on the news story title (or "read more") will take you to the blog's post, framed under a MySpace iFrame. The MySpace frame at the top of the page allows the reader to rate the story, or click on the following three news stories in the related topic.
MySpace could generate quite a bit of traffic for blogs with this news service. If they allowed MySpace members to add a topic or blog to their MySpace, blogs would benefit greatly.
Another way that MySpace could improve on this service is to allow people to subscribe to a topic's feed. Currently, a particular topic is not offered as an RSS feed. If this option was offered, topics could be subscribed in an RSS Feed Reader, making it simple to follow thousands of blogs with just one RSS feed.
MySpace News: General Music
MySpace News: Indie Rock