Naubo mixes up Google News, Reddit and Techmeme

Web news aggregator Naubo might be one of the unholiest unions I've ever seen. It could also be one of the best places for news junkies to get their fix. The service is an unabashed visual copycat of Google News, serving up the latest stories from around the Web. The difference is that it has a technology slant, covering news on big companies like Apple and Microsoft, along with gadgets, Linux, and hardware.

What makes Naubo interesting is that it uses this same spidering technology for blog chatter as it does for regular news, so like Techmeme you get big stories coupled together with other blogs that have chimed in. The listing of blogs is put together by humans, who maintain the collective. However that doesn't mean they're the ones to pick out the stories--that's done entirely through an automated system.

To go along with these two news trackers is a user-maintained news service called Buzz (not to be confused with Yahoo's Buzz), that lets users submit and vote stories up and down in an identical fashion to Reddit. The stories are seeded by users just like any other social news service, and the highest ranking stories get promoted to the top of the page and in each of their respective categories a little bit like social news service Mixx. Users of Digg won't be too enamored with the submission process though, you have to fill in each field manually--including the image that goes with it. In comparison, submitting a story to Digg will crawl the story link you give it and fill in all that information for you.

I found a lot of overlap between Naubo, Google News, and Techmeme. The one thing that wasn't getting a lot of play on Naubo is the buzz site. Most stories only had three or four votes before being promoted, so I'd be interested to see how its algorithm scales up with more users. I'm also a little worried about the service getting sued for its design choice, which I assume will get a new coat of paint at the first sign of Google's legal department.

Update: I got a ping from Paul Almeida who runs Naubo. Almeida says the site is getting a new look in two weeks based on user feedback.

Look familiar? It should if you've seen Google News. Naubo tracks Web news, blog news, and user-submitted stories in three different places. Seen here is the latest and hottest blog stories (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)