Thoora

Normal news sites leave it to glass-tower eggheads to decide what you should be reading about, when really, NYTimes.com doesn't know crap about those bears ransacking convenience stores that really matter. Leveraging the populist intelligence of social media to give you the news you actually want, Thoora.From a posse of Canadian developers, Thoora's a news aggregating service highlighting the most buzzed-about stories as covered by non-mainstream sources around the web in real time, via a complex algorithm that constantly filters, calculates, and ranks the subjects and content of blog posts, Twitter updates, and comments to determine what's actually attracting attention, other than steaming mountains of p*rn. To get learnin', click the Top Stories tab for a breakdown of what's garnering the most "signals" amongst 'Ra's cataloged sources (aka how often they're referenced in their growing feed of 81 million blogs, 5,000 media sources, Twitter, etc) or hit the category tabs to drill down to sections from Politics, to Sci/Tech, to "Controversy"; for more deets, just click any item to access a slick "Overview" page that aggregates relevant blog posts/news reports/comments directly, or find how many Tweets per hour it's receiving, a metric that highly favors Looney Tunes marathons. In these aggregations, little guys sometimes get their voices heard: a Balloon Boy blog entry offering a bible-sourced explanation of the media obsession from married elderly bloggers "Peggy and James", one about changing marijuana laws from a doomsday-loving dude named Mac, and a blogger's insightful background piece on why and how John Stamos was indeed drunk during an interview in Australia two years ago -- and they say journalism is dead?!?If a story's changed rank in the last hour, a small icon beside will tell you how much up or down it's gone, and you can also view stories' weekly or monthly ranks, so although one that's sure to be constantly popular is the one about laid-off glass tower eggheads.