Last week news was the launch of another online news aggregator, dubbed Newspond, which claimed to be nothing less than the “most advanced news site on the planet.”

Unlike other aggregators like Digg and TechMeme, Newspond’s editorializing of news (how high a headline is placed) is determined by a “black box algorithm that looks at number of factors and comes up with an overall score called a Buoyancy Rating. The higher the rating, the higher the headline,” reported TechCrunch.

TechCrunch’s Michael Harrington didn’t seem convinced by the site’s “most-advanced” characteristics though. Citing “questionable freshness” of news items and the lack of an RSS feed, he bashed Newspond for its hyperbolic statements: “being proud of your work is one thing, but spouting random nonsense is something else entirely.”

It seems that until now the most effective news aggregators remain those that have an element of human editorializing, including Digg, which is based on user votes, and Techmeme, which measures the number of links from blogs and news sites.

Source: TechCrunch