WebProNews

Big pictures, big name news sources

A joint project by Ask and Digg led to the opening of BigNews, a service for tracking important and widely discussed news stories.

No fanfare accompanied the debut of BigNews, which fills a gap in services provided by Ask. Other major Internet players established news sites, from Google's aggregator to Yahoo's with some original reporting.

BigNews uses an algorithmic method to find stories that factor in four areas: breaking news, impact on sites and blogs, associated multimedia, and discussions of the topic. If it's new, generating buzz, and has pictures, it could be a BigNews candidate.

Ask calls that ranking method the BigFactor. Category pages for news rank stories in order of their BigFactor, but the Top Stories section is not. Instead, it assembles a snapshot of major stories from all categories.

Limited filtering currently available allows people to limit what they see by geographic region. Someone who only wants to see stories from Asia or Africa enables this with the Source Filter.

Next to each featured story, Ask offers a Track button. Visitors can keep up with the story through the BigNews My News feature, or one of several feed readers linked from Track.

Digg's contribution comes across as a minimal one, at least superficially. Scroll all the way down BigNews, and two Digg columns appear. One lists the top 5 Diggs in the news, the other lists five stories with zero Diggs (Be the first! says its title.)

Silicon Alley Insider said Digg also has a place under the hood of BigNews. Digg ratings have an impact on the BigFactor algorithm.

Ask touted BigNews for people who like to find many viewpoints, and "not just stories from the wire services." But quickly scanning the BigNews front page shows four sources dominating the content: New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, and MSNBC.

BigNews does place a lot of news at one's fingertips, keeping in line with the philosophy of other Ask features and services. There is a lot to see for news junkies, and links out to blogs and additional content everywhere, making it worth a visit. Maybe even a bookmark.