Wikio - News Aggregator and Digg
21. December 2006 – 22:06 by
On December 12 French news aggregator Wikio launched localized versions for Germany, Spain and the US. French and Italian versions went live earlier this year. This article is referring to the German version.
For its German version Wikio scans 8152 blogs and other news sources at the moment but users can add own news as well. It is also possible to suggest new sources which will be included for further aggregation.
In Digg like fashion users can vote and comment on news. It is also possible to add tabs to the main news site. Just add up to ten tags for each tab and you will have a personalised news site. A very useful feature.
Wikio is well designed and looks very slick and professional. News aggregation seems to work smoothly as well. Though it seems Wikio has no native speakers on board, at least for the German version. Everything is translated well and almost perfectly. There are people who know German very good though sometimes there are words that don’t fit. That applies to the site as well as the blog. This should be fixed, I think.
At the moment it seems to be unclear how many users Wkio has. For example I was surprised that there were users who seemed to have submitted more than 200 articles on the first day of launch. On closer examination it became clear that those users were all French. So it seems Wikio has either no statistics for each localized version or those statistics are not published. Confusing to say the least.
Wikio is an interesting new service combining Digg and news sites like Google News. However it will need a strong user base to survive and has to be more open about the number of users and other statistics.
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