The news that Daylife — the social news-aggregator that Jeff Jarvis is involved with, and craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark has helped financially — has gotten a second round of funding is an optimistic note for the idea of social news, although I’m not quite sure Daylife is there yet (or Newsvine, or Gather.com for that matter). Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he thinks the perfect media product for the 21st century would be a mix of Techmeme, Digg and Topix.com (which doesn’t get as much attention as I think it deserves).
I think he’s probably right, in the sense that all of those use some combination of “crowdsourcing” and editors/moderators, along with some algorithms (or robots). And that’s why I would argue that when it comes to Stan Schroeder’s question at Mashable — Who Will Bring Us News: Robots, Crowds, or Editors? — the answer should be: All of the above.
Digg takes links that people submit and lets users vote, and also uses algorithms to help determine what gets to the front page; Gabe Rivera uses an algorithm at Techmeme.com, but also tweaks it himself constantly, using his dark geek magic 🙂 I think it makes sense to use readers as a resource — either to submit news links, or vote on them, or rank them based on clicks or comments, or some combination of all three — but it is also important to have editors who make judgments as well, and algorithms to smooth the process. It doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) just one or the other.