Dec 13th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
At The Guardian, technology blogger Bobbie Johnson is engaging in a little bit of “crowdsourcing” by asking readers who come across interesting stories to send them to the newspaper by using the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool. He has set up a delicious account called Guardianista, so that anyone can sign on and save links to that account. But he also points out (prompted by a reader) that existing users can add The Guardian to their network, or can tag links with “for:Guardianista” in order to send them to Johnson.
Incidentally, you can do the same thing for me too — if you see something interesting, just tag it with “for:mathewi” and I will see it. Or you can always email it.
Dec 11th, 2006 | Social Media | No Comments
Maybe it’s just meant to be “Digg-bait” (as Nick Denton at Valleywag likes to call it), but Jason Clarke of Download Squad has a long post up about Digg and how it is destined for failure. As Jason mentions in the post, Download Squad is part of AOL, which owns the revamped Netscape — a site that was essentially modeled on Digg — so perhaps it’s an elaborate corporate hit-job. I thought Download Squad was all about cool software, but maybe I was wrong.
In any case, Jason’s criticisms are not really all that new. As far as I can tell, his two main points are: 1) Digg’s audience is full of mouth-breathers and low-foreheads who just pile on and flame each other, and digg down things they don’t agree with. And 2) Digg’s traffic, a kind of “flash crowd” that can shut down even the most robust hosting service in a matter of minutes, consists of window-shoppers who come quickly and leave quickly, and if they sign up for something they never actually use it.
Jason says that the Digg community is “rotting from the inside out,” and that “the sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming.” As with many other critics of the Digg model, or social media in general — including Nick Carr and Andrew Keen, as well as newcomers Andy Rutledge, who I’ve written about here, and Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal, who I’ve written about here — the argument is that the wisdom of crowds doesn’t exist.
The problem with the whole concept of taking advantage of the “wisdom of crowds” is that crowds have no wisdom. Microsoft Windows is an example of an operating system written using the wisdom of crowds… and don’t get me started on the majority of large open-source efforts.
As a commenter rightly points out, the Windows crack is a gigantic red herring. Any problems at Microsoft have little or nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds, and everything to do with corporate hierarchy and centralized decision-making. If anything, they could use a little more Digging. And as for the traffic problems, it’s true that Diggers flood in and then disappear, leading some to wonder how much value they actually bring with them. But couldn’t we say that about Web traffic from plenty of other sources too, like TechCrunch for example?
In conclusion, Jason says:
Social media sites are an unproven phenomenon… I predict that in the near future sites will start to attempt to block digg as a referrer, since getting a link from digg will simply cost them money. And over time I believe users will tire of the constant negativity that characterizes digg… unless digg can find a way to clean up their collective act.
Does Digg have flaws? Sure it does. And so do plenty of other social media sites. But I think Jason (for whatever reason) is being way too negative. What do you think?
Dec 11th, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
The New York Times has rolled out some social-networking and/or social-bookmarking features, with a small widget that appears next to stories and allows readers to submit them to Digg and Newsvine, or bookmark them with Facebook and delicious.
For some reason, TechCrunch has chosen to call this “surrendering” to social news. “This seems like a begrudging move for The Times, a paper with an elitist reputation and a crossword puzzle that you need a PhD to solve. A social networking site like Facebook doesn’t seem the type of company that The Times would consort with,” writes Natali del Conte.
Maybe so, but I think it’s a pretty smart tie-in to those social tools. Not to blow the Globe and Mail horn, but as I mentioned to George Scriban over at Global Nerdy, the Globe has had similar links to Digg, Newsvine, Magnolia and Technorati for several months now. If you click on the words “share this” at the top of a story, you get a little Ajaxified menu of social tools.
As Greg Sterling at Screenwerk notes, “These days you can’t survive with only a “destination” strategy. You have to have some sort of viral and/or other distribution strategies to get your content in front of users.” The Times is also creating a permalink URL for all stories, which makes it easier to link to them. Om Malik says it’s all about the page views — and Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics notes that unless the NYT has more of a strategy than they are letting on, these deals are just giving away the store.
Dec 10th, 2006 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life (who noticed the item on HTMKSteve’s blog), comes news of a paper in Connecticut that is looking to hire an editor to bring together “user-generated content” from the community. The classified ad at Journalism Jobs says:
The News-Times seeks someone with print and online skills to solicit, gather, assemble and strategically publish user-generated content on our Web site and in our niche publications… You will gather and compile everything from Little League pictures to prom photo galleries to audio/video narrations from veterans of war and undercover cops. Some writing will be required but that’s a minor part of the job.
As Muhammad — a top contributor to Digg and a paid contributor at Netscape — points out in his blog post, this is very similar to the kind of thing that “anchors” and editors at Netscape get paid ($1,000 a month) to do. And what is the pay scale for the News-Times job? It says just that it’s “negotiable.”
I wonder how long before the users who generate all that “user-generated content” are going to start asking the paper for their cut of the proceeds.
Dec 7th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
If nothing else, Jason Calacanis did one thing while he was running the revamped Netscape.com: By hiring away some of the top users at Digg, he ignited a debate about whether to compensate the top submitters to a “social media” site. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose said that he would never pay top Diggers because it would ruin the open and social nature of the site, and I tend to agree with him (I wrote about it here and here).
But now, according to Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, some of the top Diggers have found other ways of getting compensated — including getting paid by companies under the table for submitting their pages to the site. Several top submitters have reportedly been approached by companies to submit pages for money, and have done so. Some have been paid per submission, others on a kind of retainer, and some have received bonuses if a submission makes it to the front page.
This kind of thing is even more underhanded than PayPerPost, the company that pays bloggers to write about clients, but doesn’t require them to disclose it. But Tony says that some of the Diggers justify their illicit salaries by saying “If Kevin Rose isn’t going to pay me for my time, maybe someone else will.” Tony says that this reminds him of Third World countries where government officials take bribes in part because they are paid so little to do their jobs.
All of this tends (although I hate to admit it) to support my friend Rob Hyndman’s contention that top Diggers should be compensated because what they do is effectively work, and that Jason Calacanis recognized that and rewarded it (Rob’s thoughts can be found in the comments here, and in his post here). My argument has always been that Diggers get rewarded in other ways that are non-financial — they get bragging rights, for example, and the admiration of their peers, which in some cases is worth more than money.
But Rob’s point is that this shouldn’t preclude them getting paid as well. And obviously, some top Diggers agree, to the point where they are willing to take what amount to bribes to submit things. To some extent, this is probably inevitable — if there is a system, someone will find a way to game it.
Update:
Steve O’Hear, who writes a blog on social media for ZDNet, wrote something asking whether Digg users should be compensated, and then submitted his piece to Digg. It got about 90 Diggs and 40 comments, and made it to the front page — but then it suddenly disappeared.
