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 :)

The Wrong Headstone

In the last couple days there have been a few posts with regard to digg's moderators. Mine, Muhammad's, Deep Jive Interests.....

One of the things that bother me about digg is when submitted stories are buried innappropriately. A prime example of this is an explanatory post about digg's moderators by Muhammad @ themulife. At digg, the submission was marked as inaccurate and buried. Usually I would celebrate this self-moderation by the masses, except that in this case, it was completely wrong.

This story was not inaccurate. It pointed out that digg HAS moderators. A common misconception among the digg population is that there are NO moderators. If anything this would give people a better understanding of how digg works. Kevin Rose, the creator of digg, even confirmed the existence of moderators in the comments, further showing that this story was not inaccurate.

In a side note, frustration with digg's burial process is probably at an all-time high right now. I would think that this would be a good time for the digg crew to unveil the 'buried stories bin' which has been worked on since at least April. More on the bin to come.

Do Not Digg This Post

Over the last several days I have been doing some serious thinking. One of my focuses has been on how to make this site a legitimate news source for things dealing with social news. So here are some ways I will try to do that:

1. Not submit any posts to social news sites unless it is actually 'news'. After doing some research, I found that digg does not like random thoughts being paraded around on digg. Here are a couple comments by danhuard (digg moderator):

"STOP submitting stories like this. Digg IS NOT a message board, stop treating it as such. You submit technology and science news content only. Don't use the submission feature as your personal megaphone. As much as you hate exclamation points you're equally cluttering up th digg queue. Please think about your actions before acting on them. You're identifying a very petty problem by creating a much larger one. Think..."

and

"submissions like these are exactly why it's so difficult to follow stories completely through the /diggall queue to the homepage.stop treating digg like a message board...it's science and technology news not "whatever comes to my thought process gets submitted."contact digg at feedback@digg.com"

2. Research, research, research. One things that news sites do is research to be sure what they are saying is accurate. Sure some people may disagree, but there is generally some sort of editorial wall before something can be published. Many Blogs do not have this because they generally 'repurpose' news and throw a link to the people that actually did research. Again I will use a comment by Dan Huard to prove digg does not like this:

"If you're going to call digg out, you've gotta come in with more credibility
than this."

3. Change my domain from insidesocialnews.blogspot.com to www.insidesocialnews.com. Many people see the blogspot tag and immediately consider it blogspam regardless of its content value.

4. Keep it ad/adsense free until I have something worth getting paid for to say. Many people put ads up in hope of making a quick buck or paying for hosting or something. As of right now blogger pays for my hosting so there is no need to try and recooperate costs.

Lastly, here is a comment by dan that kind of sums up their feeling on blogs. I think it is relevant to the topic. An please don't submit this to digg.

"After reading this I still don't see how blogs add any value to digg. The people who actually get off their asses and do actual news gathering and reporting should be credited. Generally, blog sites even try to hide the original source and only link internally thereafter. The obvious ones are the Weblogs, Inc. guys (engadget, joystiq, blogging baby, etc.)

Maybe I should retract what I said, "After reading this I still don't see how blogs add any value to digg." There IS a value for blogging (different perspectives, sometimes addtional expert advice, etc.) but bloggers have abused their power too much. It's too easy to submit anything you want. And EVERYBODY wants a few extra bucks from Google Ads so there is the problem, imo.

On another note, digg users still don't understand the administrative toolset digg provides. People complain about how bad the stories are but they don't 'report' the story. The community needs to realize that if you want digg a certain way, YOU have the power to change it. YOU are the admins. It's like voting for our president. You can't complain how bad of a job he's doing if you didn't vote!"