Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Medium and LinkedIn’s Pulse are probably the main blogging platforms that exist today. There are many other platforms and millions of people all over the world use these to share their thoughts, persepectives, etc every day. NextWeb published a post on The 18 best blogging and publishing platforms on the Internet today earlier this year and, if you do a search for blogging platforms, there are others that are not on that list. Sites as diverse as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vice, The New York Times, The Guardian, Mashable, Entrepreneur, The Verge and Wired also generate mountains of content and continue to be the leading sites online.
How digital has absolutely disrupted print news media has been documented extensively as well as how much information the average person has to sift through every day. To address this, many an aggregator has been developed both online as well as in the form of mobile apps, including Flipboard, Zite, Prismatic, Yahoo News Digest, Google News, Circa and Facebook Paper.
A New Player
EKCKO News has stepped into the fray, positioning itself as “more than just an ordinary newsreader.” On registration, you can create Newsrooms around specific keywords or pulling from specific urls and “EKCKO monitors thousands of global news feeds” to bring you articles that are relevant. You can create multiple Newsrooms around specific topics, such as Sport, Arts & Culture, Techology, as well as follow other Newsrooms.
You can also organise your Newsroom around topics, ensuring that you aren’t jumping between different ones – in essence, creating your own centralised portal. Some of the featured Newsrooms at the time of writing include Star Wars, Apple Watch, Capturing The Moment, Icasa, Julius Malema News and ISIL and ISIS, which gives an indication of how broad or explicit they can be.
Two features that I particularly like are: firstly, you can include your own article/posts by either importing from a url or writing and publishing from within EKCKO, and; secondly, you can bookmark any webpage from your browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Explorer) by installing the ‘bookmark’ button.
The biggest challenge they have is tied to the problem they seek to solve – with the multitude of platforms out there, how do you get what you are doing to stick? The real work is in getting us to make EKCKO the first point of contact when we open our browser. And, with so much of our content consumption being mobile, although the site is mobile friendly, they will probably need to figure out how to entrench themselves on those screens.