Like most people who write for a living, I scrupulously maintain my feeds. Twitter. Tumblr. RSS. They're a fixture of my daily existence, both invaluable and utterly overwhelming.

The latest additions to my media diet, two websites with the oddball URLs Belong.io and Latest.is, feel different. They're essentially lists of links. But they're lists of reliably great links, ones I often don't see anywhere else.

Belong and Latest share a similar approach. Both start with a human-curated group of Twitter users and use algorithms to cull the links those people are discussing. This clever one-two punch results in a phenomenally high signal-to-noise ratio, albeit for relatively narrow bands of subject matter. By combining people power and computer power, the sites turn a bit of the Twitter firehose into a quality, sippable stream.

More broadly, they show an interesting approach to tackling the eternal problems of discovery and information overload.

Culling Links

Belong was built by Andy Baio, a well-known and widely-connected web denizen (and occasional WIRED contributor). Beyond making stuff for the Internet, Baio is an avid consumer of it. For the last 12 years, he's maintained Waxy Links, a daily digest of interesting stuff from around the web. Baio refers to it as a "tangible manifestation" of his procrastination.

As the web has channeled into feeds and streams, Baio has noticed a change in his activity. "I started finding more and more of my links through Twitter," he says. "So I started to wonder if I could automate link discovery."

Belong, which Baio maintains as a side project, examines the tweets of every person who has ever attended XOXO, an annual arts and technology festival Baio co-organizes. It gathers every link this group tweets and attempts to "normalize" them, stripping URLs of extra crud and matching slightly different links to the same bit of content.

Belong

The site ranks these links by considering their freshness, popularity and simplicity. Freshness examines how recently the link was indexed. Popularity looks at how many people are linking to it. The newer something is, and the more people talking about it, the higher the ranking.

The third metric, simplicity, is more interesting. Belong looks at the complexity of each URL, privileging short links over long ones. "The hope is that it boosts standalone sites over blog posts and news articles," Baio says. "The theory is that if someone devotes a domain or a subdomain to something, it's probably a more significant standalone work. And that's the thing I'm interested in: substantial, new independent works."

When I wrote this, the formula appeared to be working. The top link on Belong goes to Fight215.org, a site devoted to galvanizing the public around getting Congress to roll back mass surveillance. Next is a link to a video on Fusion in which rap radio DJ Jay Smooth discusses the horrific murder of an unarmed black man by a police officer in South Carolina. Then there's a link to the Gizmodo post "Seriously, Stop Demonizing Almonds."

The mix offers a succinct example of why I find Belong so useful. This is the first time I've seen Flight215.org. It's new and relevant to my interests. I don't follow Fusion, but the Jay Smooth video is thought-provoking and I'm glad I watched it. I do follow Gizmodo, but I follow dozens of publications and often fly right by their tweets. Seeing the almonds story pop up on Belong means busy people are linking to it. It's an endorsement of quality. It's like I'm overhearing someone—or many people—recommending this particular story to a friend, and am thus inclined to check it out.

Belong isn't perfect. At a rate of about a hundred links a day, there's still some skimming and scanning required. It doesn't offer an easy way to track new links throughout the day. There are many stories I'm not at all interested in, and the site misses entire swaths of topics by design. It's best to think of it as a collection of stuff that's at the periphery of the mainstream tech press. Still, within this niche, it does a remarkably good job.