Aug 8th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Although Mike Arrington seems less than impressed with it, I think Google’s plan to allow comments on Google News stories — but only from people involved in a news event — is actually a pretty interesting idea. There’s no question that it’s going to be a lot of effort, and that it may in fact fail as a result, but I think the impulse behind it (as described on the Google blog) is a valuable one.
In effect, this is a step towards “crowdsourcing” of the news, but in a very focused way. Instead of allowing anyone to comment on a news event or story, Google’s plan is to only allow comments from those who are a part of the story (although how the company plans to verify that remains to be seen). I think — as Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests does — that this has the potential to expand the journalistic process.
For many newspapers and other news organizations, a story has a limited lifespan, unless it is one of a small number of big headliners that get followed up day after day, or month after month. Whoever responds in time to get their comments included in the story makes it into print, and those that don’t are rarely heard from.
I found it interesting that in the Wall Street Journal story on the new feature, a professor of pediatrics who was asked by Google to comment on a story in which he was quoted said this:
“I’ll do a 15- to 20-minute interview, and two sentences will appear about what I’ve said… So the Google feature is really a chance to flesh out those two sentences and to include some more of what I ordinarily talk about in a 15- to 20-minute interview.”
Google’s proposal has the potential to allow unheard-from participants to make themselves heard, and thus make news stories more complete — as pointed out at Poynter Online and by my mesh friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt — and I think that would be a great idea, at least in principle. In any case, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Update:
As Mike notes at TechCrunch (courtesy of Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera), the terms of service at Google News prevent anyone from crawling the site and aggregating any of its content — but this doesn’t seem very kosher if Google is now effectively creating (or expanding on) the news. And Danny Sullivan has some responses from Google to questions about the new feature.
Apr 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
As reported by several sources, including Reuters and Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch (where the notion of an “exclusive” gets some debate in the comments section), MySpace has launched its widely-rumoured Digg-alicious news service, although Mike said that it would go live at 7 a.m. and all I get is a login prompt when I go there. Was the site not quite ready for prime-time perhaps? (Update at 12:05 EST — it is now live).
In any case, this new service from the geniuses at Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and is a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s media and entertainment behemoth News Corp.) was reported to be coming in March, according to Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog. The service will pull in news from RSS feeds — although News Corp. says it will not favour its own services and newspapers — and users can also submit stories, and then vote on them. Apparently news services will be able to opt out and not have their articles displayed, according to News Corp.
Despite the fact that most people who go to such “user-generated” media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories, as Seamus McCauley discusses here (based on a new Hitwise survey), I still think this kind of thing could turn out to be very powerful, and that MySpace is smart to do it. MG Siegler at Parislemon says he is skeptical, and Seamus says that it is a missed opportunity, while The Last Podcast says it is just plain bad.
The questions in my mind are these: What happens to Jason Calacanis’s Digg-ified Netscape? Or to Digg itself for that matter, which has been trying to branch out into non-tech news but without much success (as far as I can tell)? With 100 million users, MySpace has 100 times the audience that Digg has. Better yet, how long until Google News decides to add a user voting system? Now that would be fascinating.
Mar 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
From Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog comes word that MySpace — the 800-pound gorilla of social networking — will soon be launching a Digg-style news aggregation service of some kind. Is that a good thing? It’s certainly interesting, and I would expect Digg to be worried about the prospect. Whether it’s actually something worthwhile depends on how it is handled.
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch raises an interesting point, which is that having its own “social news” feature connected to the gazillions of people who belong to MySpace (even if those gazillions aren’t quite as large as the service would like us to believe, thanks to the multiple-account problem) could give News Corp. lots of ideas about pushing its news content into such an aggregator, giving it priority of some kind, etc. In my view, that would be bad. On the other hand, News Corp. could use the social aspect of such a service to get a read on what a large audience is interested in, and use that to inform the rest of its media operations, which would be smart.
Will News Corp. use its MySpace News as a kind of jungle drum, to pick up stories that might be under the radar? Or will it just be another Digg-style echo chamber where the uncouth hordes and flash crowds can congregate and spin stories into hysterical overkill? Should be interesting to watch. For more, see Pete Cashmore at Mashable and Seamus McCauley at Virtual Economics.
Update:
Joe Duck says that he expects MySpace to fail miserably. He says that “social news networks like Digg and Netscape are pretty bad for all but tech and quirky news because they generally fail to analyze or treat significant stories with much if any respect.” I would have to agree there, but then I’m a news junkie from the old school 
News Corp. is also trying to get other video content owners to bring their stuff to MySpace.
Nov 21st, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
Muhammad Saleem, a very perceptive blogger who is also a top submitter at Digg and Netscape, has written a post that looks at the problems with “socially-driven” news sites, using as an example a fake news story that someone submitted to Digg about Sony recalling 650,000 PlayStations. The story made it to the front page of the site in only a couple of hours, and stayed there until it was apparently removed. Muhammad sees this as another example of how many people don’t read stories they submit or Digg.
He’s right, of course. And there’s no question that the geek-heavy audience at Digg is likely to vote up stories like the PlayStation one regardless of whether it’s true or not — as appears to have happened in this case — just to take some shots at Sony. However, I’d like to point out that fake news routinely makes its way into newspapers and onto TV newscasts as well, and in those cases there are a heck of a lot more checks and balances in the system (theoretically at least) than there are at Digg.
In those cases, the fake news lingers in print and video — and in various databases — long after it has been shown to be wrong, which often gives rise to urban legends about people getting abducted so their organs can be removed, etc. At least in the Digg case, commenters on the story repeatedly pointed out how fake it was. That’s a service social media can offer that traditional media can’t (at least, not yet).
Oct 30th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
The American Journalism Review has an in-depth look at four online news operations, and how they differ from the traditional newspaper process — and how the two are (or aren’t) working together. The story starts with a description of how a Houston Chronicle online editor has posted several stories and is working on getting photos of a crime victim, while “around her, in a newsroom as quiet as a library, print colleagues shuffle in sipping from their Starbucks cups and grunting their good mornings. It is a scene repeated more and more often as mainstream newsrooms adjust to becoming two worlds in one.”
