A newsgathering startup called Thoora unveiled its new news aggregation site at the TechCrunch50 conference yesterday. Boasting that it “tears down the silos between social and traditional media” (a mixed metaphor that gets the idea across), Thoora is taking on Google News and similar sites by collecting traditional news articles, blog posts and tweets on Twitter all on one site.

The Toronto, Canada company is conducting an invite-only beta test right now, but we’ve got 500 invites for VentureBeat readers. Just visit the site, click on “sign up for beta,” and enter the code, “vb4thoora.”

Thoora’s founders say they’ve created a site that gives readers the broadest picture of the news, and of commentary surrounding that news. Stories are clustered and ranked based on the reaction they received, a reaction that’s measured in related posts, comments, and updates. Thoora says that means it’s a more accurate measure of the wisdom of the crowd, compared to Google News’ link analysis (which favors traditional media), or to Techmeme’s combination of links and human editing.

I played with the site this afternoon, and there are some cool features — arrows showing whether a story is becoming more or less popular, a status bar measuring the number of responses and a box where you can see related tweets. Unfortunately for Thoora, I’m pretty satisfied with both Google News and Techmeme, and I didn’t discover any hidden gems of news coverage today that would convince me otherwise. But check it out for yourself.

Thoora has raised $4.1 million from Rogers New Ventures.

Read the original article at Venture Beat:
Find out if Thoora is the news aggregator you’ve been waiting for (invites)