ManageWP wants to change the way WordPress news is distributed. For six months the team has been working on a new offshoot of their site, dedicated to bringing community-driven news. Today ManageWP launches ManageWP.org, a new interactive site where anyone can share, vote and promote high quality WordPress news. The site was built with an author ranking algorithm similar to PageRank. ManageWP has created a browser bookmarklet to make it easy for users to share to the site, as well as a ManageWP.org sharing button that can be added to any website.
ManageWP isn’t new to the WordPress news space. In addition to their own regular blog, they’ve been blending their twitter stream to include articles from many major news sources. ManageWP.org is another interesting take on how commercial products and services are leveraging the high demand for WordPress news in order to bring more traffic and interaction to their websites.
With WordPress now powering a serious chunk of the web at 20% of all websites, the demand for high quality WordPress news will continue to grow. So far many publishers have found it difficult to sustain a WordPress news source without a strong commercial backing, as in the case of ManageWP. However, the underlying question is always how much of a slant is there based on the commercial interests of the publisher. In the case of a community-curated news site, that is less of a concern, since users are free to vote up the articles they believe to be the most important.
Do you like the idea of a community-curated news site? Are you likely to be an active participant?
Google hates aggregation (obviously).