So, you might have your favourite news aggregator.  God knows I love Techmeme.  I read Megite for some different flavours.  Tailrank from time to time.  Perhaps you like to scan the socially driven headlines via popurls.com.

My new favourite news aggregator, however, is one that you may not have heard of.  Its called Blogrunner.

There are a couple of reasons why.

1. Its fast: Compared to other news aggregators, Blogrunner actively shows news and blog stories from feeds that it follows as they show up on the original source.  I have no idea how it determines “importance” for which stories it picks to show, but amongst the stories that show up under a middle column called “latest news”, it actually displays news as it comes in.  For other news aggregators it might take hours to show up after it was original published.  Furthermore, the time stamp on Blogrunner under those stories are the exact time that the stories were released on the actual and original website — not, when it showed up on Blogrunner.  That bit about Facebook being “hacked” a month ago?  I picked that up on Blogrunner as it displayed the Techcrunch story about 1 hours after it was posted on TechCrunch (where it correctly displayed “1 hour”).

2. Its organized: I like being able to scan and read as much information as possible, and Blogrunner allows you to do this efficiently.  There’s a middle column which features “Featured” news headlines, but also “Latest” headlines (see above).  The left column, on the other hand, features popular news headlines which are determined by a number of factors (the actual number aren’t published).   Once you click through to a given headline, it gives you the option seeing other blog reactions and snippits from their blogs, related blogs, related articles, and other works that are either authored by, or mention the author.  Furthermore, there is a very little used option to comment directly on the story, which is a feature that no other news aggregator uses — BuzzTracker, however, is looking to join this field.

Now, its not perfect by any means.  I really like the ability to see blog reactions right underneath headlines a la techmeme, for example, and this feature is noticeably absent (and requires an extra click).  Its own blog is amateurishly undeveloped (and powered by Wordpress as the About page proudly tells me).

On the other hand there are features which make it a fairly versatile and comprehensive piece of technology, most of which I haven’t even talked about here, such as being able to sort stories by “threading them”, by source, or even by Latest.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Blogrunner have a go and let me know what you think.  Its certainly my new favourite news aggregator these days.

So you may have heard that Yahoo! snapped up BuzzTracker, a rather small potato in a field of news/blog aggregators, for a cool $5 million dollars. The details can be found courtesy of Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com over here.

Like Mat Ingram, I haven’t paid anything but a cursory look at BuzzTracker because it just doesn’t serve me as well as other meme trackers, namely Techmeme. Furthermore, its layout isn’t as dense (or concise, if you will), leading to pages and pages of endless scrolling. And that’s besides the comment spam that’s left behind some well-meaning (or not) BuzzTracker employees/evangelists/new media graffiti artists.

What *is* kind of interesting, however, is the announcement that Buzztracker *will* introduce one thing that other meme/news trackers *don’t* have. Yeah, I’m talking about Techmeme, Megite, Tailrank, (but not my new favourite news aggregator, see my next post).

And that’s a layer of discussion and community right over the daily topics.

I think this is a very good — and smart — thing for BuzzTracker, because it will allow BuzzTracker to directly host conversations, rather than, for example, readers being ‘forced’ to leave comments on respective blogs. Because, let’s face it — not everyone blogs.

By doing this, it can actively cultivate and “own” a proper community of readers in a way that none of the other news aggregators are actively doing.

Furthermore, it makes total sense when you consider what kind of jolt it will get just by being part of the Yahoo! family — and that readers from Yahoo! will precisely be the kind of people who might participate on news topics. Casual ones, without necessarily wanting to read blogs, or, who might not own a blog.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it will have the benefit of getting the trickle down traffic from the parent company to power these conversations.  Because let’s face it — having no discussions when its an offered feature is probably worse than having no discussion feature at all.