The Popular Web at a Glance

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

On a regular basis (read: altogether too often), I check a bunch of different sites to find out what’s popular on the Web– Delicious, Digg, Reddit, PopURLs, and a few more. It’s fun, it’s usually mindless, and it’s a great way to be at the forefront of the burgeoning memes and whatnot on the Web. But it’s not always interesting, and it’s a lot to keep up with.

There are already a bunch of applications that aggregate popular stuff from a variety of sources to make surfing the popular Web a bit easier, but a new one has come out that does it in a new way – OurSignal.

OurSignal is a one-page, visual site that shows some of the most popular stories from around the Web, pulling in Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hackernews, and Yahoo Buzz. A few more sources might be good, but those five tend to be fairly representative.

It’s much like another favorite application of mine, the Newsmap – it’s not nearly as slick or feature-rich as Newsmap, but it works in essentially the same way: by size and color. The larger the headline of the story, the more popular the story. Brighter, "warmer" colors suggest a growing story, while blues and other soft colors are for stories that are fading out.

At a glance, you can see what’s particularly popular – click a headline, and you’re taken to the site. The site is crazy-simple, and seems as if it could have been thrown together in an afternoon. Which, weirdly, is one of the things I love about it. There’s no in-house toolbar or log-in they want you to use, or anything interactive within the site itself– just pick what you want to read or watch, and go to it.

On a Web where it seems everyone, even aggregators like Digg and Reddit, want you to use their own websites more than the one you’re looking for (the fact that you have to click, and then click again on Digg just to get to the story you want has always annoyed me), OurSignal is a refreshing change. The visuals are easy to learn and understand, and they do a great job of giving you, at a glance, a sense of what’s really hot on the Web.

OurSignal definitely has its issues – for instance, not-particularly-popular stories tend to have tiny print that’s essentially unreadable. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? If you’re looking for what’s popular, why do you care what’s not popular?

The only options you get are to hide the thumbnails that come up when you hover over a headline, to open links in a new window, or to hide visited links (if you don’t hide the links, they get crossed out after you click them). It’d be nice to be able to weed out a topic or a site, but that may not be in the cards for OurSignal. Stories get refreshed every fifteen minutes, but you’ll have to refresh the page itself.

But what OurSignal is great for is what I need so badly – a way to figure out what people are talking about, without wading through all the useless stuff that tends to come up on Digg, Reddit, and elsewhere. 

Photo: dsevilla

Liked the post? Share it with somebody!