Willakuy

Willakuy

URL

www.willakuy.com

Type of site

News aggregator website

Commercial?

No

Registration

Free

Owner

University of Miami School of Communication

Created by

Kim Grinfeder

Launched

March 2007

Willakuy is a community-based news aggregator web site that displays content from Spanish-language newspapers in the Americas and Spain. Willakuy stands for “news” in the Quechua language. The Web site links together a virtual community of users interested in Latin America and Latino studies.

Willakuy users may submit news headlines that link to an article’s original Web site. Users may vote on news items, post comments, or search for news by keyword, country, and username. The user-based ranking system determines whether or not a news item gets published on the home page.

Functionality

Willakuy uses the same model as Digg to create a social community of news readers interested in news from the Spanish-speaking world.

Users post links to news that they find interesting and vote on in the "noticias pendientes" files. The articles with the most votes rise in rankings and get posted to the homepage.

Users can also post comments on the articles, message other users, and search posted news by keyword, country or username. Items are categorized under one of 23 country listings or as international news.

Registration and log-in are quick and the instructions are fairly intuitive. A large majority of postings are in Spanish.

History

The Web site is a project of the University of Miami School of Communication, the Knight Center for International Media, and the Maestria de Periodismo en Espanol. The School, under the leadership of Dean Sam L. Grogg, is a leading program in communication research and practice, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in Journalism (Print, Electronic and Visual), Advertising, Public Relations, Motion Pictures and Communication Studies.

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