Cromotion Network

It seems that news aggregation has recently become quite a popular service in Croatia, as a number of contenders in that space have recently appeared. A few of them have been here for a while, but there is a couple of interesting newcomers.

We have already covered Naslovnica.info — a comprehensive service which is taking a number of news service and is indexing the article providing filtering, search, aggregation and a number of other useful services.

The latest service which came to our attention is Naslovnica.com — using nearly the same name as the previous site, this one has quite a different approach. Instead of aggregation, this service simply lists the links to all the articles by their respective sources, e.g. there is a list of all the current articles on the sites of all the major Croatian newspapers. Besides Croatia, Naslovnica.com is offering the equivalent service for other countries in the region, specifically Slovenia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Update: We were just informed that Naslovnica.com has been re-branded to Pogled.com.

Cro-RSS is an aggregator using the RSS feeds of various national news services to collect the information and display it in an informative and well-organized manner. While — like other aggregators — Cro-RSS doesn’t take complete articles, instead just linking to the original sources, an interesting approach is that a link doesn’t actually redirects you to the source site; instead, it opens a Javascript-based viewer inside the active browser window. There is a version specifically adjusted for mobile phones at mobi.cro-rss.com, and the authors also maintain a number of equivalent sites for other countries in the region, specifically Bosnia and Serbia.

Boboton.com is another news aggregation service which collects data from various local sources and displays them in a nice manner, separated by categories. Its interesting feature is that it can actually group the news by content, and instead of a dozen links about one same event you’ll see only one, from a single source (presumably selected by its popularity or relevance), with adjacent links pointing to other sources’ stories on the same topic.