Socio-Topical News is the Future

There are times when I am perfectly content with social news, albeit not very often. Really the only time I can think of that I am is when I use it as a tool to find things that are neat, weird, or funny. Usually this consists of funny videos on youtube or a flash game that I might play a couple times. However, social news seems to be falling short of a site like Google News, where news topics are grouped together.

Currently, on sites like digg or netscape, there is really only room for one source. Granted, Netscape's Navigators can add additional links they deem necessary. While this is a step in the right direction, it still fails to cover news topics properly. When a news story hits the front page people read it and thats that. If a story is submitted again dealing with the same topic, it is generally buried as a duplicate, regardless of its content value. Often times different sources can offer multiple views with new or supplementary information.

I have been paying attention to Techmeme ever since I was linked there several days back and I like what I see. Sure the site is not exactly social news like digg or netscape, but what is keeping those sites from adopting similar schemes? A while back I wrote an article proposing the grouping of similar and alternative sources into one topic. It seems that this is the next shift in social news. Sure there is still a place for social bookmarking and social 'cool stuff finding' but when it comes to news, who wouldn't want an easy list of topical links on a particular subject?

Perhaps it is just me, but I find that when it comes to general news topics the average 'social newser' only sees one side of the coin of news. Don't people want to read both sides of a story and decide for themselves?

Organizing news topics into groups of user-submitted links would not only accomplish this, but also spread some of the massive click-through love around. Are there any sites I am missing out on that do this? If so let me know, I want in.

Not Everything on the Internet is Awesome

I've been getting some pretty good hits from people submitting the material from this site to digg. Personally, I find it pleasing to see people other than myself submitting things from here. There is one thing that bothers me however; people burying the material.

I don't mind criticism or anything, but over the last several weeks I have been noticing an increasing amount of material from this site and others being buried. I don't think Digg is burying it or anything shady like that, I just think that as a whole, the digg audience doesn't really care about general 'social news' news all that much. When people submit every post from one specific site, diggers tend to remember them and bury accordingly. This is basically because as stated above, not everyone is interested in everything that is talked about here.

I would believe that this is not just the problem with Inside Social News, which is why I propose a method be devised for blocking individual entries from being submitted to social news sites.

This way, when I feel that there is something worthy of being submitted that the general digg audience would accept, I can allow it. I think we can all agree that not everything is awesome. By limiting the material from specific sites to only top-notch content, the perception of said site would be much higher.

I am pretty sure that people will probably hate this idea because everyone seems to only care about hits and pageviews these days. Until this is possible Submit away :)

On Spike The Vote (now it's for sale?) - Updated

Update - 11/27/06: It looks like someone got busted by digg for using the spike the vote system. His account and ip were both banned. Long story short, Don't use the service.

Also, the bidding is up to $1026 for the site.

News - 11/18/06: I was working on this post when I noticed that Spike The Vote is now for sale. Here is a link to the auction.

Several weeks ago, a new service called Spike the Vote was announced promising huge page views for people untalented enough to create what I like to call 'good content'. Some of my content would probably fall into that category, but instead of joining a losers support group, I try to make better content. (It still probably sucks anyway) Without further adieu, the launch of this service went something like that of a man announcing his impotence.

First of all, it is fairly easy to see what stories are submitted by the people attempting to spike the vote. For example, of the 3 missions assigned to me, I was able to easily sniff out 2 of the offending sites, the third offender was a toss up between a couple sites. Adsense is a often a dead giveaway though having adsense means nothing in itself.

Second, it is obvious to see which users use spike the vote. When a user is assigned 5 stories, other spikethevote users are also assigned the same 5 stories. A simple cross reference of the 'who dugg this' page reveals similarities, a digging history check of those users reveals the same 5 stories dugg in the exact same order. Coincidence? I think not.

Third, as for huge page views, there aren't any. While I noticed that each mission included a story submitted by a top user to try and fool people. These stories were quality and reached the homepage anyway. As for the others, the most diggs I saw was around 25 or so.

***Disclaimer*** I signed up for the luxury of writing a post about it and engaged in no shady behavior. I didn't digg anything assigned. Had I needed to submit or digg a story to be gamed in order to get a mission, I wouldn't have.

Welcome to 'Inside Social News'

I thought I would say a quick 'hello' and welcome. The content of this site will be everything having to do with 'social news'. We'll just have to see where that takes us.

Enjoy :)