Yesterday saw the second attempt to release a new news aggregator. The concept is very similar to NewsATM - the site fetches the latest stories from a myriad of different news sources. NewsATM standing for ‘News At The Moment’. Some of the featured sites on Netbuzz are ThoughtLeader, IOL, iJol, The Times, Sport24, Muti and a collection of other interesting news feeds. The website also features a ‘South African flcikr Photo Pool’, which displays a collection of South African photographs.
I’m not completely sure on the movements of the site or whether it will get popular, but the idea is good. Giving people one place to read all the news from across all the networks saves a great deal of time. When I launched NewsATM, I rushed the process and look back now and with I took more time to adapt it a little better, perhaps I will. The website never took off nicely, although I’ve had a decent amount of traffic, it never reached what I wanted.
Netbuzz is proudly South African and supports Muti, which is a plus in my eyes. The feeds which are read are good, informative feeds and the general look of the site is clean and neat, which is critical for a site of this nature. The design was cleverly put together by Foxinni. I had a chat to Charl, the creator of the website and he’s informed me that this is only the beginning and that we must look out for some impressive features being added soon. I look forward to watching the progress!
Thanks for the review bud, well crit’d
Not a problem, credit where credit it due :)
Will be interesting to see if this works, repeat content is generally a no-no in terms of traffic without a fat marketing budget
Ye, and I know that some of the big news stations are giving Google a hard time for syndicating content, etc.
@Mike – I wouldnt say the site is for repeat content, but your first stop in the morning to view whats new on all the top web desitinations in SA
Besides, we built in the site in two days.. its not a serious project
haaai…. NO.. i hav eh masta card!
I suppose it’s cool for people who are new to the web to have all their news in one place and perhaps mark it at their homepage, in which case I would put a big “Make this My Homepage” button somewhere easily visible. But for anyone with some web savvy, I think they, like me, would rather stick to a personalised start page like iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, or even just their rss reader. And I don’t think people are getting any less web savvy, so for NetBuzz to do well I think it needs to get more personally engaging and rewarding.
I agree, a bookmark this sign is definitely required! I did one for newsatm and realise that I should have made it bigger, will do that this evening.
It’s very hard to get people to move from what they are comfortable with to something like this, that’s very true.
The engaging factor is critical, but remember, Net Buzz is still in its very early stages, I’m sure we will see tons of development still happening :)
Great points Miguel, will definatley consider when we further develope the site
As Chris mention the site is still very early stages
Were not going to slap a ‘beta’ or ‘alpha’ label on it because its not really a serious project for us.. We saw popurls, thought it was pretty cool, my netbuzz domain was lying around and thought it would be a cool idea to do but with SA feeds.
I still use my reader as well (;
I think it’s cool. I’ve been a muti whore lately, read almost every single article which gets listed on their, but I think to broaden my field of reading might be a good idea.
Charl.. I got a pretty damn cool idea for the site, I’ll try find you on MSN.