The personalized news service Veritocracy dropped its beta badge today, opening its doors for everyone to register and try their hand at being a story editor. Veritocracy (or Veri) compares itself with Pandora, but for news instead of music. You search for broad topics (think politics or internet) and the site presents you story clusters which you can then vote up, vote down, or even submit your own content. Veri’s motto: “Better information finds you.”
The way Veritocracy works is by allowing registered users to select topics or keywords they want to see stories on. In most cases, more than one related story will be returned, each from a different source. The user can then move through each story or see a topic overview with a list of sources. Either way, an up or down vote can be recorded. In Veritocracy’s system, this is a vote of confidence, both in the quality of the story and the quality of the source. The choices people make will then be taken into account when presenting stories to other Veritocracy users.
Since the site looks at a number of variables in the voting process, not just the specific story that’s voted on, the system can adjust in a number of dimensions behind-the-scenes to get you the type of stories you want to read on a particular subject. For example, if you consistently vote up stories from a certain source (either one of their generic ‘watcher’ sources or a particular user), you will end up seeing more stories from that user in the future. If you consistently vote a particular story type up (say stories with a conspiracy theory slant), you will end up seeing more of those types of stories.
From what we can tell, the system Veritocracy is going for will benefit overall with the input of as many people as possible. And, since it is a destination site with its voting features (as opposed to a news site that you can grab a feed from and never visit again), active participation is key. We found the process of looking and voting for news overall smooth and enjoyable, the product is very polished and we definitely recommend you go and check it out. It may just become the first place you visit on the web for news.
