West African born Nicco Mele is a bit of a technology wunderkind. He was featured in this months Linux Journal for his ‘Man Cave’, the basement of his new house where all his technological toys live. I use the term ‘toys’ lightly, the room features 5.1 surround sound, a 110″ television screen, and his Core 2 Quad Processor MythTV box! But where Nicco is really making a name for himself is with the new political news aggregator NewsJunk.com.

Nicco’s career began as a member of the technical staff for various political campaigns, in particular the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama AND John McCain! It’s an impressive resume, for his skills but also for the bipartisan nature. It’s no surprise then, that his latest project would be a website that pulls in information about politics from all across the web and centralizes it in one place. Here’s a quote from Nicco himself on the project…

I’ve been working on a new project with Dave Winer — Newsjunk.com. For the last few months, I’ve been annoyed at how hard it is to follow the political coverage. News pops up in a lot of different places, and having single source to follow what’s happening throughout the day has been an itch that needs scratching. Dave remembers the briefing books we had on the Dean campaign, a fixture of many campaigns. So NewsJunk.com started as a way to scratch the itch of the political news junkie, and a way to begin to build an open briefing book.

Right now NewsJunk only aggregates political news but Nicco’s partner Dave Winer hints at some big plans for the future here.

About the Author: Jonathan Gosier is a software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he incubates and invests in East African entrepreneurs as the CEO of Appfrica Labs. He's also a 2009 TEDGlobal Fellow.

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