Digging into the Socialization-of-News Era
Important Details: Long-promised, it’s finally arrived: the socialization of news.
News junkies have been using the main aggregators of news – Yahoo!, Google, MSN – as starting points to find a broad representation of news on topics they care about. Of course, they get a lot – and a lot of redundancy, like 73 essentially-the-same AP stories appearing on different sites.
News lovers also use those first-gen personalization models – think MyYahoo!, among other RSS aggregators. It’s great, many have said, to get all those feeds corralled in one place. But, they ask: Can we add more intelligence? Instead of just a bunch of the most recent posts/headlines, can we get the best stuff?
This week, a couple of answers are cascading through the Web. Digg and Netscape have come forward, and NewsTrust is in the wings. The new products aim to get news readers a better selection using a variety of techniques, but they all have several notions in common:
- Tap the collective power of readers. Let readers rate stories, much as they’ve rated each other on eBay as buyers and sellers and as they rate books on Amazon.
- Assign value to content over time. Allow readers to store their ratings of articles so they remember what/who they like.
- Get RSS feeds from preferred sites. Let readers select sources they want to read regularly.
In a nutshell, here’s how the new products distinguish themselves:
Digg: This site for techies has matured. Started as a buzzpoint for sharing the latest tech news and rumor, it has been the ultimate viral expression of the Silicon Valley culture – sharing the latest talkabouts. Digg’s been trying on the idea of expanding to news for months and now has come forth with Digg 3.0, including six content categories in addition to tech. Digg has critical mass – 9 million page views a day – but more importantly, it’s set up as a community, or, in its words, a "user driven social content website." Vote on stories, help push good ones to be more popular, vote down bad ones. Importantly, Digg lets you set up "friends" groups, a la Netflix friends and Yahoo!’s MyWeb 2.0, so that you can see what stories people you like, or who share your tastes, have found interesting.
Netscape: The new service finally tries to capitalize on all the people out there – 800 million+ page views – still hanging on to Netscape as a home page or touchstone to the halcyon ’90s. It’s kind of a cross between About.com for newsier topics and the old Yahoo! directory, with about 20 staffers (full- and part-time) picking the best stories in 30 topical channels. Calling them "anchors" gives it a broadcast, day-parting feel. Netscape, too, lets users rank stories, but they appear below the anchor-picked ones. Netscape is now helmed by Jason Calcanis, made Web-famous when he sold his blogging network Weblogs to AOL last October.
NewsTrust: Scheduled to launch later this year, this is a nonprofit peer review service, emphasizing of course, trust. It’s been long in the planning, as organizers try to figure out ways to get readers good tools to rank and share stories.
What’s fun is the Digg Manifesto: "….everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see." Cool enough. And with its organic sense, it may succeed better than Netscape, which has a feel of a has-been site trying on another new set of clothes. In fact, Netscape kind of frames the pages it displays (when you click on "go to the site" next to a story), another faint reminder of bad times past. Figuring out better ways to find the "stories I want" is key in the age of story abundance. These sites point a way. Sure, most of us won’t want to rank and leave comments merrily, but if we find like-minded souls who have the time, that might be swell.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Will any of these stick? Well, they are a beginning of more intelligent aggregation. Outsell believes that there are elements in all of these products that will work their way into the culture. Yet, they are all ungainly in ways as well. After all, the issue for most of us isn’t that we need more to read. In fact, we want less and better. We want informed selection, and that will inevitably mean some alchemy of editors we trust and rings of friends and associates who know how one story on a topic is better than another. We all know simple popularity ranking is a disaster – it’s all Britney and Paris, all the time. A human/peer group/machine algorithm will be found over time.
What’s odd about these ideas is the absence of news companies’ role in or around them. Where are the news companies, and why aren’t they creating a social news portal themselves? They may have missed the first rounds of news aggregation, but work on these socialization models has been very public for a long time. The socialization of content is a place traditional publishers must get comfortable with.
As Digg CEO Kevin Rose recently told a San Francisco SIIA conference, joking about Old Media’s cluelessness: "MSNBC comes to us and says, ‘we know we ought to be talking with you, but we don’t know why.’" At least MSNBC knew enough to start talking. Print publishers should take this lesson to heart and get moving into discussions of their own.