Nov 27th, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
BusinessWeek blogger Rob Hof stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest in the social-media sphere with a recent post about what he sees as the drawbacks of a site like Digg, and how he has dumped it and gone back to Techmeme — a site that aggregates and ranks blog posts on various tech topics. Like many Digg critics, Rob’s main point seems to be that the posts are lame.
Rob mentions how others have come to the same conclusion, including venture capitalist Jeff Nolan. Former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble has unsubscribed from Digg because he says there is just too much crap. With my usual flair for the coinage of new terms, I like to call this the “too much crap” problem, or TMC for short.
There’s no question that the signal-to-noise ratio, as engineers like to call it, is sometimes frustratingly low at Digg and other aggregators. But is Techmeme.com that much better? It uses an algorithm that founder Gabe Rivera continually tweaks to sort and rank the different posts, but it also uses a “wisdom of crowds” approach, in that bloggers themselves are the ones who decide — by linking — which blog posts get pushed to the top.
Techmeme has its share of critics, however (including Jeremy Zawodny), who argue that it is a blogosphere echo chamber, with the same small group of blogs always at the top (solution: quit linking to them so much). So while Digg is criticized for being too inane and full of crap, Techmeme gets slammed for not being inclusive enough. When Digg does do some of what might you might call “editing,” (as Muhammad Saleem describes here), it gets criticized for not being the voice of the people.
Sounds like two ends of the same spectrum to me. Too much moderation or not enough? Too open, so that any moron can link (or bury) something, or too closed and restrictive? I think we are still looking for the right model. Digg, meanwhile, is also getting criticized for using misleading traffic stats. And my friend and former journalist — now at the b5media blog network — Mark Evans has some thoughts about Digg and the future of social media.
Nov 25th, 2006 | Citizen Media, Social Media | 2 Comments
Lots happening with social media — or citizen journalism or open-source media, or whatever you want to call it. The BBC has a couple of ventures under way to take advantage of content produced by viewers, or “the people formerly known as the audience” as Dan Gillmor calls them. One of the latest was recently launched by BBC News 24, which is experimenting with a program called Your News.
According to the Media Guardian, the program will feature the best of the videos, photos and stories sent in by viewers to the BBC every day, and also some of the best user-generated content from around the Internet. The story says that the BBC gets around 10,000 emails a day with story suggestions, comments and pictures.
The Beeb’s Newsnight program is also experimenting with user-submitted videos, in something it’s calling Oh My Newsnight (a tribute to the Korean citizen journalism site Oh My News). A hat tip goes to Cybersoc for making note of that one. Viewers are asked to upload short video clips to YouTube or Google Video and then send the link to the BBC. One wonders why they wouldn’t just get people to tag their videos at del.icio.us so the BBC could find them automatically, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Meanwhile, ABC News has teamed up with Vancouver-based social media site NowPublic to gather opinion on what the U.S. should do about Iraq (thanks to BBC Radio’s Pods and Blogs for that one). NowPublic says that in addition to showing up on the site, “there’s a chance your video may appear on ABC’s Be Seen, Be Heard online news segment, as well as on flagship network news shows like Good Morning America and World News Tonight.”
Nov 22nd, 2006 | Social Media | 1 Comment
Came across a great post by Niall Kennedy — thanks to a link from my friend Om Malik — in which Niall digs deep beneath a recent story on weight-loss tips that got posted to the front page of Digg and finds what appears to be a series of connections to offshore spam blogs. More and more, this kind of thing is infiltrating social news engines like Digg and Netscape.
To Niall’s credit, he doesn’t just stop at noting that the story posted was classic “Digg bait” (since it mentioned dieting for computer geeks), but drills down to find out that it came from a blog whose main focus appears to be dental services, and then goes further to check where the blog’s domain was registered — and gives anyone interested a brief overview of link-spam practices and tactics, including CPMs for keywords involving dentistry, which is why the fake blog focused on that area.
Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life and Dr. Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests — two of the most insightful bloggers writing about social media right now — each have a take on the news, which comes on the heels of the recent fake news story about a Sony PlayStation recall that made it to Digg’s front page. In a nutshell, both Tony and Muhammad are of the opinion that sites like Digg need more human moderation to counteract such attempts.
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).
Nov 17th, 2006 | Citizen Media, Social Media | No Comments
From Liz Gannes over at Gigaom.com comes news that Gather — the social-media site that launched last year, backed by Lotus founder Jim Manzi and several public radio entities — has gotten another $10-million in funding, this time from Pilot Hill Ventures, McGraw-Hill and Hearst Publishing. That makes almost $20-million the site has gotten since it started.
Gather allows users to submit stories, blog posts and links and then vote on them in a Digg.com-like fashion, and also lets them comment on those postings and set up their own blog-like pages within the site. In a twist on the normal model, the network also pays users whose stories or links get lots of views and comments (although Liz points out that it’s not very much).
Another point that Liz makes, which is definitely worth noting, is that Gather hasn’t really racked up a whole lot of traffic given the amount of money that has been poured into the service. It has about 700,000 unique users per months and about 120,000 registered users, according to Gigaom.
Newsvine.com, meanwhile — which has a similar model and was started by several former journalists — has about 500,000 unique visitors a month despite the fact that it has had less than one-tenth the amount of funding that Gather.com has.
