Dec 18th, 2006 | Social Media | No Comments
If you like things like podcasts, video and a widescreen look to a website, then Digg has just launched a site redesign that will be a nice ChristmaHanuKwanakah present for you, as described by both Om Malik (at NewTeeVee) and Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. But will all of these new additions help to broaden Digg’s appeal, or will they just further dilute that appeal?
If you’ve been following the blogosphere, there has been a fair bit of controversy about Digg — not about it broadening its reach into general news and other areas (in fact, there’s been surprisingly little comment about that) but about it being rigged, about submitters taking money under the table (which I wrote about here), and so on. Jason Clarke has argued that Digg is useless.
It’s obvious that some of this is getting to other people too. Over at TechCrunch, one person says they hardly go to Digg any more because the comments are cluttered with morons, and that “As Digg gains more and more momentum to be mainstream we will see that it no longer becomes a barometer of cool but just another established website beaten by fragmented niche sites.”
There are definitely both risks and rewards to the way Digg is going. On the one hand, video is becoming more popular — and Digg’s crowd-voting system can no doubt bring its value (positive and negative) to that as well. But at the same time, adding podcasts and video streams and other features takes away from the streamlined focus on Web links that made Digg so popular (StumbleUpon, which got its start in Calgary, has also launched a video service).
As Digg-style voting tools get worked into other sites, it’s also possible that people might desert Digg for other, more focused sites in particular areas (the way Digg used to be for technology). Meanwhile, Peter Cashmore over at Mashable calls the changes “ridiculously overhyped as usual.” And Neil Patel at Search Engine Land notes that Digg has also made some changes that will affect submitters in subtle ways.
Dec 15th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
The Fresno Bee, a newspaper owned by McClatchy — which also owns the Sacramento Bee and the Modesto Bee — has just acquired two community-media sites, FresnoFamous.com and ModestoFamous.com, for an undisclosed sum (hat tip to J.D. Lasica). The sites were founded by Jarah Euston, a former bond analyst who writes about the acquistion here. She and a small team built the websites up over the past two years to have 2,000 members and about 150,000 page views a month. The newspaper writes about the purchase here.
Dec 15th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
From Jay Rosen’s excellent PressThink site comes word that a chain of daily and weekly newspapers in the U.S. called GateHouse is rolling out Creative Commons licensing for all of its papers:
Over the weekend, the Watertown TAB of Watertown, Massachusetts, revamped its website. The result is, for now, strikingly bloglike: a wide center column with items in reverse chronological order. And at the very bottom, a small silver badge with a line of text that reads: “Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license.”
GateHouse owns 75 daily and 231 weekly newspapers, and so far “the CC license now covers 96 of the company’s TownOnline sites, which are grouped within a portal for their many Eastern Massachusetts newspapers,” the PressThink piece says. The chain’s reasoning is seen as “a response to the cut-and-paste world of weblogs, which frequently quote and point to newspaper stories. Making it easier — and legal — for bloggers to quote stories at length means that bloggers are pointing their audience at the newspaper.”
The TownOnline and WickedLocal online networks or hubs of newspaper websites that GateHouse now has, the piece says, have been redesigned and will include “user-generated content.”
Dec 14th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 4 Comments
There’s been no shortage of mainstream or traditional journalists leaving their jobs to join or start online ventures over the last little while (the sign of a new era, or a bubble forming?), including The Politico — which just gained a couple more staffers from Time magazine and Bloomberg, as this article notes. Now the former head of news for CNN has started a media venture focused on Iraq.
According to a piece in Editor & Publisher, Eason Jordan — who quit in 2005 after 23 years with the network — has set up IraqSlogger to focus on the war in Iraq and the Middle East in general. The project is an offshoot of Praedict, a news and information service that Jordan runs which provides briefings on hot spots in the developing world, based on data and analysis by a team of security specialists and journalists.
IraqSlogger has news reports from Iraq, analysis and other coverage, including a tally of attacks and casualties. E&P says that “One of the site’s unique and most valuable services is a daily roundup of news from Iraqi newspapers that few in the U.S. media have ever bothered to translate. Jordan has Arabic speakers here and in Iraq providing this service.”
And a note at the end of the E&P story says that the article produced a lot of commentary from conservative bloggers, who asked Jordan to look into stories from Associated Press (about the burning of six Iraqis) which used as a source a police captain named Jamil Hussein, who the U.S. military claims doesn’t exist. Jordan offered to fly blogger Michelle Malkin to Iraq to check the reports, and she has accepted.
Part of the backstory here is that Jordan resigned from CNN after making comments that allegedly accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists.
Update:
As has been noted in the comments (by Mr. Pelton himself) the IraqSlogger site was co-created by Robert Young Pelton, the Canadian-born author (The World’s Most Dangerous Places), documentary filmmaker, “adventurer” and security expert. Meanwhile, there’s a great feature on Eason Jordan and IraqSlogger at the New York Observer.
Dec 14th, 2006 | Blogs, Citizen Media | No Comments
Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft and the world’s richest man, met with a bunch of technology bloggers yesterday, including Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Liz Gannes of Gigaom.com and several others. Everyone got to ask one question and there was some general discussion for about an hour with what some described as a very relaxed Gates.
Some of the questions — like Mike’s question about DRM, which I wrote about over here, and Liz Gannes’ excellent question about the future of web-based applications — were fairly hard-hitting, but others… well, not so much. Like Steve Rubel’s question: “What’s on your Zune?” (This wasn’t the only softball, of course; there was also a question about what Bill has on his Christmas list).
Trevor Cook, who writes at a blog called Corporate Engagement, takes Steve to task for this question in a recent post. He notes that Edelman, the PR firm where Steve works, represents Microsoft (which he freely admits in the post) but that he says he was there “as a blogger.” So if Rubel had a month to plan for it, why didn’t he ask a better question? Cook’s post is entitled “Rubel inadvertently demonstrates the value of traditional journalism.” Cook says:
I’d hate to see blogging just become a way of the powerful giving the appearance of being open and accessible by using these carefully orchestrated events with people who seem to be overcome by their audience with the great monopolist. There is not going to be much ’speaking truth to power’ in these situations.
This is a fair point. Yes, Steve admitted he works for Edelman, but says he was invited as a blogger (and therefore was supposedly independent). So why such a lame question? I realize that Steve is not — nor has he ever claimed to be — a journalist, but still. That kind of thing makes Barbara Walters’ Oscar special seem hard-hitting.
