Have you ever felt inundated by all the news avalanching you daily? Tough to find one place where people are talking about the news on media sites, blogs and Twitter?
A new start-up is trying to ease those data overload worries. Thoora.com describes itself as a site that “in real-time, identifies the most interesting stories by exploring the entire blogosphere, Twitter and nearly 5,000 traditional media sources to determine the stories attracting the most blog posts, comments, tweets, and news coverage.”
At Toronto’s nextMEDIA conference, founder Chul Lee demonstrated the beta site and what it can offer users.
“Keeping track of all those online conversations can be expensive,” Lee told the packed crowd. “For instance, I speak Spanish and Korean too, so I need many tools to follow various news stories.” That’s where Thoora comes in, Lee says.
Lee says Toronto-based Thoora is a next-generation online news tracking system. You can find the most popular stories, the ones with the “most reactions”, Lee says. Thoora has indexed 82 million blogs and 5m000 news sources, as well as Twitter.
Also, at the category Today’s Headlines, you can find an area where breaking news is paramount.
Lee displayed an example of a Tiger Woods article that was published 2,664 times on various media sites. More than 370 blogs mentioned it, and 818 comments were tracked on this story.
“We also provide a widget showing Twitter data, so you can see what people are saying about a certain article,” Lee says.
The Thoora team realize they need to be extremely alert since they aggregate data from various sources, such as media sites, blogs and Twitter. The microblog powerhouse Twitter is a priority, Lee says, because their system needs to update its Twitter index system every second. Thoora indexes media sites every five minutes, and blogs every day.
Thoora moved from a research project to a company in early 2008 after it agreed to collaborate with Rogers New Ventures, which also became an investor.
“We are trying to solve the problem of data overload,” Lee says. “We want to be the the one-stop shop for people looking to consume news from different media.”
The site plans to roll-out a search function in 2010 and is looking to generate a plausible business model to earn revenue.
