Monday, January 16, 2012

TrendingRight is now...

...BadBlue.com.

The news aggregator TrendingRight.com has undergone a major transition. The name has changed to BadBlue (accessible via http://badblue.com or http://larwyn.com). There are many enhancements that should make it much more relevant and useful for discovering the hottest news stories of the hour.

A new algorithm levels the playing field for news sources of all sizes - the new link-finding algorithm allows a small blog to achieve front-page status by automatically adjusting the popularity of stories based upon Alexa traffic rankings. A story at a tiny blog, for instance, that gets re-tweeted 10 times, could be equivalent to 60 re-tweets of a story at a major newspaper. You'll notice that the current front page has links from blogs of all sizes.

New Drudge-style layout - rather than a single column of stories, there is a cleaner-looking, Drudge-style layout that should make it easier to read.

Pictures! - the new layout thumbnails images from stories to make it easier to figure out what a story is about.

Fresher news - links are refreshed more frequently.

Twitter and RSS support - unlike the prior version, you can follow BadBlue on Twitter (@BadBlueNews) or RSS.

Comment support - the permalink page for each story includes a comments section (with easy social network sign-on supported), so it's easy to make fun of left-wing hacks without visiting one of their sites.

In short, Biff Spackle is standing by in the comments section, waiting to hear your feedback: positive, negative or just, eh, it's okay. If you like it, remember to bookmark the website -- it should provide some of the freshest news stories you'll find anywhere.

So please check it out and let Biff know what you think. He's emotionally quite sensitive, so be gentle.


8 comments:

Nice Deb said...

Hi Biff!

I've been checking it out. Didn't like it at first - but I'm getting used to it.

Btw, is Moonbattracker signed up?

http://moonbattracker.com/wordpress/

directorblue said...

Deb, Biff tells me that Nice Deb is in the database (obviously) but not MBT. It's on the list to be added, probably in the next day or so.

Nice Deb said...

Yay, thanks!

The_Bad said...

I like the new name.

Nice Deb said...

I don't understand the algorithm. I have a post that was retweeted 39 times (posted yesterday afternooon), and it didn't show on Bad Blue until today showing[8]. Also, I've noticed a long lag time between when I post something and it gets retweeted, and when it appears on your site. One post that got retweeted more than any other thing I've done, never got on trending right, at all.

I'm confused as to how it works.

Anonymous said...

Ugly. Takes too long to load.

directorblue said...

@Anon - good feedback. I checked Firefox and discovered, indeed, it takes way too long to load.

Should be fixed for the time being.

Thanks

Karl said...

Bookmarked.

Thanks Doug!