Editing by the crowd
Advance Internet, my old employer, has mashed up one of its news sites, OregonLive, with its social editing tool, Reddit, to create a nice new feature: the readers edit. Digg, upon which Reddit is modeled, is wildly popular but also accused of being too tech-driven. Here is a chance to see whether local news can work with social editing. I hope it can, for this gives us another window on the news. No, it doesn’t replace editors, but it does check editors and tell them what people care about; it also enables people to find more stories than editors have time to find.
A week ago, I noted that Kevin Rose of Digg said they would go into social recommendations of not just news but products, services, restaurants, images. Here’s a chance to see whether newspapers can get there first.
Tags: newsinnovation, social
June 12th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
interesting - good to see the Newspapers taking the lead with something like this.
one thing I didn’t care for: I’m a registered reddit user, yet need to register with OregonLive to vote. (Couldn’t they share this reg info?) - OregonLive’s reg form is pretty onerous …
another thing (a nit, perhaps): i’m pretty sure Reddit and Digg were born contemporaneously, or at least that neither was “modeled” on the other.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Steve is right, at least according to the founders of reddit, who have said they had never seen digg until reddit had already launched. This seems plausible, especially given how functionally different the sites are. I recall them saying most of the people they showed the site to early on would ask how they were different from del.icio.us, which in hindsight was a much easier question to handle since social bookmarking sites are fundamentally different from what reddit (and digg) aim to do.
I realize a bit of snark is mandatory in the BuzzMachine, but saying reddit was “modeled after digg” seems a bit disingenuous, don’t ya think? Especially since there is little evidence to support it. I don’t think anyone would say Google was modeled after Yahoo!.
June 16th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Oregonlive.com sucks, as does the Oregonian. They have not a clue.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I disagree Dedra. It is obviously you who does not have a clue. And in turn, this makes you suck. Badly. What kinda hippie leftist crap are you polluting your mind with. Move away. Now.
August 6th, 2007 at 3:17 am
[...] New Oregon Live site incorporates Reddit social news site “Here is a chance to see whether local news can work with social editing. I hope it can, for this gives us another window on the news. No, it doesn’t replace editors, but it does check editors and tell them what people care about; it also enables people to find more stories than editors have time to find.” [...]