Mike Isaac

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Wavii Gives a Fresh Look at the Political Landscape

Since its debut in April, Wavii’s big-data approach to news curation has been focused on the visual. Crawl the Web for news based on your selected interests, and Wavii presents an attractive chronological summary of relevant story links. The premise is that we are wont to consume more when things look pretty.

In a timely move, Wavii is bringing its crawling power to Election 2012 with Wavii Politics, a new section of the site that essentially acts as a landing page for the many disparate political articles circulating around the Web.

Just as before, it’s all about looks. Wavii drills down across different categories appropriate to the election — topics like ads, debates, speeches from candidates and fundraising events — and splays them across the page in snippets anchored by photos. Click on a quote cribbed from the article, and the site serves a page filled with articles on the subject, with the most relevant pieces given top billing.

Wavii has taken this topic-based approach to news since its launch. But the company came up with the idea of this curated landing-page approach after one engineer’s idea proved popular. Amid the myriad complaints of NBC tape delays and broadcast confusion during the Summer Olympics, a Wavii employee began an internal project tying together a page keeping tabs on all the big winners of the games by country, medal, event, and so on.

The neatness of the presentation made sense of a muddled situation; one where confused viewers just wanted accurate, instant information amid the mess of press coming out of the events. Naturally, CEO Adrian Aoun tells me, that scenario logically extends to the political arena.

And after the brutal boxing match that was Tuesday evening’s presidential debate, I’m guessing we’ll have a lot of writing to sift through. At the very least, Wavii’s new page will make it prettier to look at.

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