Overview of some “citizen media” sites
Craig has passed on a longish piece from Alternet, in which a writer takes a look at the recent growth of user-generated sites such as Digg.com (including the recent controversy about control by a group of insiders) and surveys some of the other sites such as Vancouver-based NowPublic and Newsvine. Here’s an excerpt:
The need the new sites are addressing, says longtime tech journalist Dan Gillmor, is to cut through the noise of the internet and find the good stuff users are submitting. “This is the experimentation period,” he said. And the “big jump from where we are to where we need to be,” Gillmor says, is a long way off. Companies are trying out new methods for weighing credibility and trustworthiness of web news, so that there’s more than mere popularity at stake. “We’re not going to know for some years what works and really doesn’t,” he says.
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