FutureNow is thrilled to announce the launch of our “Around the Net” news portal, now available at News.GrokDotCom.

News.GrokDotCom.com shows your favorite marketing blogs in one spot. And as an added bonus, you can vote on posts that “add value” — or “skip it” if you’re not impressed — so we know which ones to feature as Best of the Day, Best of the Week, and Best of the Month.

At News.GrokDotCom, you can…

• vote for the most valuable posts of the day, week, and month.
• see related posts for all topic (or “meme”).
• comment on any post or topic.

For those who may be wondering if we’re trying to out-digg Digg, out-sphinn Sphinn, or out-meme Techmeme, the answer is no, absolutely not. We follow each of those portals well enough to know they don’t need any competition. We hope to provide something else.

Together with OneSpot, FutureNow has developed News.GrokDotCom to monitor thousands of blogs, bringing you the most linked-to and commented-on marketing posts of the day. It’s part algorithm, part RSS feed discovery engine, and part human intervention.

Here’s how it works: We put your favorite marketing blogs (and ours) into a trusted set of feeds. The trusted set then starts attracting posts from blogs that the OneSpot algorithm identifies as “related” in some way. The result is pretty amazing; a consistently high quality stream of insights on online and multi-channel marketing news, social media trends, search engine marketing hoopla, merger gossip, venture postulating, tech posturing, web analytics geekery, and pretty much anything else that might help you make more money and define — if not dominate — your niche.

Over the past several weeks of testing, we’ve noticed posts on the Around the Net feed go popular before they hit big on other social blog portals. What’s more impressive is that the Around the Net portal shows stories from small blogs as well. Blogs we’ve never even heard of seem to magically show up once they publish a story our readers might find valuable.

If a story’s a dud, or if it seems to be over-hyped elsewhere, we delete it. The rest is up to you.

So vote on a few stories, play around with it, and let us know what you think. News.GrokDotCom is still in beta, so we’re eager to hear your reactions and any comments you may have on how we might make it better.

- Editor, GrokDotCom

P.S. You might want to subscribe to Around the Net vis RSS.

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