Wripe — social media, edited by humans
Haydn Shaughnessy is an Irish writer and blogger who has also launched a couple of interesting online properties recently. One is called My Diet Friends, and is designed to be a social-networking site for dieters and those interested in losing weight. The newest offering is a “social media” site — effectively an online magazine or newspaper — called Wripe.net.
Haydn says the idea behind Wripe is to find interesting blog posts, news articles and other information sources that aggregators like Techmeme.com or TailRank might be missing out on. Aggregators are good at finding the most talked-about posts using algorithms, he says, but aren’t particularly good at finding new voices or interesting things that not everyone is writing about.
When I asked Haydn how he determines what to post, he emailed me this summary that he was writing for the site:
How do we decide which blogs and posts to aggregate?
The answer lies partly in what other aggregators exclude and partly in what newspapers are missing… it seems to us the pure technological decision process is poor at spotting what newspapers and magazines used to pride themselves on, the new story, the new angle, the new writer.
For WRIPE, the decision process is therefore purely editorial with no technological intervention.
As Haydn says elsewhere on the site, “It means, unlike sites that automatically aggregate blog posts, at times we’re exercising our own judgment. And we want you to exercise yours by telling us when we get it right or wrong.” Wripe is effectively running on a platform developed by Ted Shelton for his social-media site PersonalBee.com, which gets people interested in different topics to effectively become editors of sub-pages devoted to those topics.
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