Good News for News Junkies

I'm a news junkie.

Checking my favorite blogs and periodicals is manually intensive and, frequently, a lost cause... because I end up in the web equivalent of Boston's Combat Zone after getting distracted ("Look, a squirrel!). RSS readers don't work for me: they produce too much clutter, none of it organized in a way that will tell me what's most important.

Which is where BadBlue.com was designed to help.

BadBlue is accessible via two domain names -- http://badblue.com or http://larwyn.com. There are many recent enhancements that should make it much easier to find the hottest news stories of the hour.

• A new algorithm levels the playing field for news sources of all sizes - a story at a tiny blog, for instance, that gets re-tweeted 10 times, could be equivalent to 60 re-tweets of a story at a major newspaper. You'll notice that the current front page has links from blogs of all sizes.

• New Drudge-style layout - rather than a single column of stories, there is a cleaner-looking, Drudge-style layout that should make it easier to read.

• Pictures! - the new layout thumbnails images from stories to make it easier to figure out what a story is about.

• Fresher news - links are refreshed more frequently, with the name of the site and its popularity index ("buzz") listed next to each headline.

• Twitter and RSS support - unlike the prior version, you can follow BadBlue on Twitter (@BadBlueNews) or RSS.

• Comment support - each story now has a permalink page (that's the small ∞ symbol) that includes a comments section (with easy social network sign-on supported), so it's simple to make fun of vicious left-wing hacks without actually having to visit one of their sites.

• Filter stories by site - click on the name of the news source and you'll get a list of that website's most popular stories.

In short, Biff Spackle is standing by in the comments section, waiting to hear your feedback: positive, negative or just, eh, it's okay. If you like it, remember to bookmark the website -- it should provide some of the freshest news stories you'll find anywhere.

So please check it out and let Biff know what you think. Don't hold back -- he's used to harsh criticism from management here at this august journal, where he remains Cub Reporter Level III after more than four years of erratic work history.