SOME RANDOM DUDE

A while back, I read a very interesting article debating the validity of social news sites. There is no denying that the old media machine is beginning to sputter - most notably newspapers. New media has begun to pull visitors away from traditional news outlets with free access to news, less advertising (sometimes) and features unique to the internet such as voting, discussing and recommending. Getting news on the internet is not, well, news at all, however social news is starting to catch on. By catching on, I do not mean our generation, we have been well aware of it for some time - I mean that the larger mainstream is slowly starting to hear whispers of such an idea. The interesting thing is that many people are trying to pit traditional news against social news - as if “there can be only one”. Rather, social news is a great addition to the genre of news which will only improve the public’s access to information.
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Image courtesy of urlyart.

As many of you most likely know by now, a
series of numbers used to crack HD-DVD have been spreading like wildfire on the internet. As to be expected, articles pertaining to this subject (and the number) showed up all over the place on Digg. All of the sudden, those dugg articles started disappearing off of the Digg site - no doubt from heavy pressure from people affiliated with the HD DVD business. It became suddenly clear why the pressure in this particular case seemed to work when an article pointed out that Digg took a HD DVD sponsorship. As one could expect, the Digg community was furious.
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Fitting that the Daily Digg’s subject would be, well, Digg. There has been quite a bit of controversy over some of Digg’s methods of chosing top stories - this is another well-written description of the problems. In a nutshell, the top of the Digg food-chain essentially controls what gets to the front page - that is most likely why the same sites and the same subjects (Wii articles 24/7) are on the front page. This is obviously far from the Democratic approach that Digg boasts and smaller, less-known sites that do not have the right “friends” have a snowball’s chance in hell to make it to the front page. Sadly, the very strength of social news is completely lost in this model.

Delicious seems to be the clear next-in-line to dethrone Digg if things continue as is and people become fed up with the status-quo. Reddit is another challenger, but its traffic is significantly lower and the ability to down-vote storied opens up the door for rampant gaming - something which seems to be fairly common as discussed on Reddit.

Social media/news was supposed to be the solution to the top-down information approach of traditional media. Sadly, the “new media” seems to be taking quite a few lessons from the old school.

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