New news aggregator site has a metaphorical approach to relevance

The popularity of Digg, Techmeme and other news aggregators has triggered a new wave of startups. Yesterday, one more site added itself to the ocean of second-source news: Newspond, with an intriguing -- if somewhat secret -- method of differentiating itself.

"Introducing the most advanced news site on the planet," Newspond's "About" page boasts. "At the heart of Newspond lies a self-sufficient news engine. This machine intelligence continually watches over and reads hundreds of different web sites, including everything from major news portals, to the tiniest blog or forum."

Instead of allowing users to submit news stories like Digg, Newspond's algorithm analyzes how a news story is shared, who is reading it and commenting about it, and even who is bookmarking the story. The collected data helps create a "buoyancy" rating, Newspond's standard of relevance. This rating is updated in real-time, with articles with the highest buoyancy floating toward the top of the list.Even though users are unable to add links to the site, Newspond has a tiered comment system that is easy to navigate and adds a social networking aspect. Registering was fast and painless: You enter a username, password, and e-mail address, and then immediately log in and begin posting comments.

The basic functionality of Newspond offers a simpler, cleaner looking home page when compared to Digg or Techmeme, though for right now without the large user base. For now, both Digg and Techmeme have more articles published on their front pages, but Newspond has only been public for one day.

Newspond also lists more than one source for all published articles, which allows users to easily read about the same news from a wide variety of sources, ranging from traditional news sites to hardware review sites that have news sections.

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