Fake news gets top bill at MySpace

MySpace went live today with a news aggregation Web site: news.myspace.com. The site is based on technology MySpace parent Fox Interactive acquired when it scooped up zgotic startup Newroo back in March, 2006. According to the folks over at TechCrunch (and who are we to question!), Newroo’s technology indexes and groups blog posts based on topic, showing emerging news in real time.

TechCrunch, reporting today, quotes Newroo cites Brian Norgard and Dan Gould as well as Fox Interactive Labs head Dan Strauss (talk about well-sourced!) saying that MySpace news will pull news items from “a number of trusted sources via their RSS feeds.”

News items are organized into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories. The order of the news items is set by user voting, taking into account the freshness of the news. So far, however, users can’t submit stories directly, according to TechCrunch.

MySpace and Fox are hoping to tap into some of the link love that sites like news.google.com and Digg.com have enjoyed. In particular, the site takes a page out of Digg’s book, allowing readers to vote for stories they like, giving those stories top billing on the site. The technology used to select stories for Google’s news site is more opaque, though the company does allow that it crawls designated news sources, then uses computer algorithms to select news stories.

But allowing anybody to promote a story for a self-described “news” Web site were immediately apparent on Thursday, hours after news.myspace.com launched. The top billed story on the page:

“Brady Quinn: ‘I’m Going to Be a Bust,” is actually a spoof sports story from The Onion about Notre Dame Quarterback and top NFL draft prospect Brady Quinn who, according to The Onion, told scouts interviewing him that he’d likely fail in the NFL.

That story was accompanied by coverage of Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle’s no hitter against the Texas Rangers on Wednesday.

News from astrology Web sites ranks high on the news site, as did a vitriolic piece from right wing political blog Scrappleface with inflammatory and invented quotes attributed to Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the 2004 Partial Birth Abortion ban. More mainstream coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings from the New York Times, MSNBC and Reuters also ranked high.

Of course, even established news aggregation sites like News.google.com have their eccentricities. And news.myspace.com is only a few hours old, so it has yet to attract the following that make sites like Digg.com and slashdot.org entertaining, interactive and mostly accurate. Time will tell whether this site ends up being a source for news…or just entertainment.