there's been a lot of talk recently about the new sites that are planning on challenging the popularity of digg.com.
for example see:
http://www.readwrite.../digg_ceo_jay_ad.phpDigg CEO Jay Adelson took time out of his busy schedule to email me some thoughts about Netscape's new digg-inspired community news site. Jay's thoughts below, but first some context. I've written two posts about the new Netscape site. In the Read/WriteWeb post I had two main points:
1) I think introducing paid editors into a community site may end up being as problematic as the 'hive mind' that it aims to prevent - because it introduces potential bias and favoritism.
2) The prominence of internal links and editors influencing discussions with "commentaries", IMO deflects attention away from the actual articles - which leads me to think Netscape wants to keep people onsite, in order to expose them to more advertising (which there is a lot of on the new Netscape site). This of course is an old-style portal strategy.
I followed that up with a ZDNet post which suggested that the paid editors now hold the balance of power - and how appropriate is that for a community site? I also pointed out that because Netscape has released a working version of non-tech categories before Digg, that this could spell trouble for Digg as it attempts to expand beyond tech.
Personally -
This probably won't win me too many fans here, but i generally consider myself an anti-hive mind type.
I should start of saying that I find digg.com to consistently have great links. and i think the ideas about "the wisdom of crowds" are *generally* insightfull. letting lots of people indicate whats interesting or good can usually lead to great results.
however i am genuinely disturbed by the fadish nature, the susceptibility to gaming the system, the influence of organized groups biasing results, and the general randomness that results.
these problems aren't unique to community run sites - they are prevelant in most media - where silly items can get huge amounts of attention if they happen to get some momentum on a slow news day, while genuinely important issues can be completely ignored because it somehow doesn't excite the masses.
SO,
i find myself much more in favor of finding a way to combine the community approach of these sites with some sort of higher level "editors" or filters, humans with background knowledge and some ability to objectively make a decision about the relative newsworthiness of subjects.
just my 2 cents.
Recent Posts
)