random incoherence and infantile meanderings

I started running into links about a new news aggregator called Newspond. I have not played around with it very much yet, most especially since it does not play nice with my PSP’s web browser, but it seems to remind me of another site that I used to play with.

ThotMarket is (was?) a “marketplace of ideas.” In it’s first public beta, it seemed to fill two different niches. One was as a weighted (think Digg) bookmarking (think del.icio.us) site, while the other was a more bizarre take on search results (“I like naked girls, so I’m gonna use my ThotDollars to buy lots of stock in these Google search results!“) The public beta closed in October 2007 and is expected to return to a public beta later this month.

The reason that Newspond reminds me of ThotMarket is in the valuation system. Newspond describing how it works:

Carefully, Newspond pieces together all of the intricate information nailing down exactly how much buzz a particular story has, and produces a number – the story’s “Buoyancy Rating”

And ThotMarket, describing how it works:

What makes Thotmarket unique, is that the submissions are ranked based on user’s trading of shares in those links, much like investors trade stocks of public companies.

Basically, both use an inscrutable valuation system that seems to almost arbitrarily assign some imaginary meaning to … well, to URLs. On the good side, Newspond sure looks pretty.  As long as you are not trying to view it on your mobile device.  Then it doesn’t.