Top UK news stories on Digg in 2007

Posted by James Ball on 10 January 2008 at 08:15
Tags: BBC, Digg, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mail Online, Telegraph.co.uk, The Sun Online

The social bookmarking and news recommendation site Digg, which determines its front-page content by allowing its users to vote for (or “Digg”) links posted by other users, has gained a reputation for generating huge spikes in traffic to web sites that stike the Diggers’ fancy.

So what stories have the often-geeky Diggers chosen in 2007? Surprisingly, perhaps, every one of the top ten most-Dugg stories from the UK comes from a traditional news website. It’s a heady mix of sex, violence and astrophysics. Take a look for yourself:

(more…)

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MySpace News: What, no personalisation?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 April 2007 at 12:57
Tags: Digg, MySpace, Reddit

As was long expected (by those who read the right blogs), the social networking behemoth MySpace last week launched a news aggregation service, MySpace News. But nobody developing news aggregation or recommendation sites will be quaking in their boots just yet.

As it stands a week after launch, MySpace News is an enormous missed opportunity. The service, which is based on the news aggregator NewRoo, certainly won’t win any awards for navigation in online news design.

With an enormous banner advertisement at the top, even users of large screens will see only a story or two on the front page. Its primary category navigation is hidden away beneath another huge advertisement. There is no obvious way to search for news other than that on the page.

MySpace News also allows users to rank the news stories. But, unlike the binary simplicity of Digg and Reddit, MySpace News uses an awkward scale of 1 to 5. What’s worse, few users seem to have discovered how to use these tools. Judging by the handful of votes on
even the top stories, MySpace’s 100 million users certainly aren’t streaming to their latest news portal.

The whole news site seems like a bit of a ghost town – which is something of a flaw for a site that seeks to harness the “wisdom of crowds”. But that may yet change if and when there is more integration between MySpace News and the rest of the vast site.

The lack of integration seems to be the site’s major flaw and a massive missed opportunity. MySpace is sitting on a huge amount of statistical data about how its 100 million users are connected to one another.

If this social networking data could be brought to bear on story selection, MySpace News could provide an interesting new twist to news personalisation.

In spite of the appearance of democratic story-selection, the great weakness of the existing social news recommendation sites is their voting algorithms, which mean the stories appearing on their front pages are dominated by a tiny elite of unrepresentative alpha users.

Unlike many other so-called participatory media sites, MySpace users generate useful information about themselves merely by forging the links that are a social networking site’s bread and butter.

Armed with its social-networking data, MySpace could, in theory at least, attempt to achieve innovative forms of news personalisation. MySpace’s voting algorithm, could, for example, give greater weight to articles voted on by the reader’s MySpace friends, on the assumption
that acquaintances are likely to share interests.

MySpace News, like any good website these days, is in “beta” testing mode, and has been soliciting feedback for improvement. One hopes someone is paying attention.

MySpace News launch expected

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 April 2007 at 15:38
Tags: Digg, Google, MySpace

As long rumoured, MySpace will launch a news aggregation service today.

The service will include an automatic news crawl that will automatically add links to outside news sources to the service, a practice that has prompted legal challenges from news organisations in various countries against Google.

In addition, MySpace News will offer users the opportunity to rank these news stories, a feature pioneered by social news aggregators like Digg and Netscape.

Technology blog TechCrunch has published screenshots of the service.

The service is based on the the news aggregator startup NewRoo, which was recently acquired by MySpace parent Fox Interactive.

Some new ideas in online news design

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 10:58
Tags: Digg, Flickr, Newsvine, Portland Oregonian, Washington Post, design

Two design studios have over the past few days unveiled experimental projects that combine traditional news web site design with social media trends.

Oliver Reichenstein of Information Achitects Japan, who are currently working for a newspaper client on a developing a more” logical and intuitive unity between screen and paper news”, unveiled an reimagining of the Washington Post as a wiki.

It’s an impressive idea which as one blogger put it, combines the traditional and the postmodern by presenting an old-fashioned-looking print design at the top of the page with a radically interactive set of features below the fold.

Canadian internet consultants Hop Studios, meanwhile, wonder what a news sight might look like if it were “built for sharing instead of for telling?” Its design exercise, for a news site called (wait for it) Tickr, is based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. It dispenses with traditional newspaper sections in favour of tag folksonomy. It also adds commenting and blogging features, bookmarking and Digg-style voting.

In other words, it would be a bit like the well-established social news site Newsvine.

Meanwhile, the Portland Oregonian has begun a different sort of experiment with Flickr. The US paper is uploading all of its photographs onto the photo-sharing site. Discussion so far centers on whether this is a violation of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site’s terms of service.

841 Digg users can be wrong

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 November 2006 at 14:12
Tags: Digg, Journalism

Steve Rubel points to an example of a failure of “the wisdom of crowds” systems that underpin many “web 2.0″ news recommendation filters.

Hundreds of users of the social news aggregation site Digg recently fell for a hoax claiming that Reuters had reported a recall of the new Sony Playstation 3 console.

The Digg users continued to recommend the article even after others had started leaving comment suggesting that it was inaccurate.

Rubel comments:

All of this points to a real problem in the social media world. The only yardsticks we use to measure the trustworthiness of a source are purely based on popularity - e.g. in-bound links, votes, etc. Now often popularity and quality are closely aligned. However, both of these incidents demonstrate that the current system isn’t working. We need more.

Indeed. Rubel suggests a third-party star-rating system like the one used on eBay to record sellers’ trustworthyness. Presumably would entail Digg users earning reputations from other users depending on their reliability for recommending useful and accurate stories.

Before the luddite contingent among the journalists here gets too smug, let’s not forget that those vaunted “traditional” fact-checking mechanisms are not exactly flawless, either.

Reddit to power Wired’s long tail?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 November 2006 at 15:18
Tags: Digg, Journalism, Reddit, Wired

So Condé Nast’s Wired Digital has purchased the social news recommendation site Reddit.

Reddit is a tool much like Digg, but far smaller. According to GigaOm, the site has 100,000 members more than 1 million unique visitors last month.

The deal certainly makes sense from the point of view of a rapidly-growing four-person startup’s point of view. But some have been puzzled why the Condé Nast would want to bring something like this into the same stable as Vogue and GQ.

Robin Hamman, for example, notes that unlike Digg’s reported suitor News Corp, which might have some use for applying recommendation technology to its existing online publications, Condé Nast has few obvious uses for a social recommendation engine:

… Conde Nast titles don’t deal with the type of content that would find it’s way into Reddit, at least not at with Reddit’s existing userbase and implimentation.” Ok, so Wired might make good use of it, but how many readers of Details, House and Garden, or Bride are really going to want to recommend an article and/or vote it up or down the list of stories? It’s not the type of content that gets the blood stirring.

But Wired may be enough. The acquisition makes perfect sense when seen in the light of the pet theory of editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Recommendation tools like Reddit have an important place in Anderson’s theory of “long tail” digital economics. Merely making more niche products or information online is not suffient for the emergence of a “long tail” economy, according to Anderson. To become economically viable, technological systems need to be in place to connect niche supply and niche emand. ”Filters” are necessary to help people find obsure items of interest and “drive demand down the long tail”.

These online filters generally use some sort of mechanism to harness the wisdom of crowds” effect to help their users find material that is relevant to them. Search engines are the classic example, of course, but so are social recommendation sites like Digg, del.icio.us — and Reddit.

On his blog, Anderson writes of the acquisition: “Reddit is an evolution of the ‘voting’ system pioneered by Digg: it’s fast, clean and very scaleable to niche subject areas (read: Long Tail media).”

Others have already used Reddit’s technology to good effect. It will be very interesting to see what Wired does to put its editor’s theory into practice.
Anthony Mayfield has some thoughts on the acquisition, as well.

Additional links for Thursday

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 October 2006 at 16:02
Tags: Digg, Guardian, Guardian Media Group, Journalism

• Read/Write Web: The Social News Faceoff
  A head-to-head comparison between social news aggregation sites Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and Netscape. Digg is judged the winner, although it has not made the promised strides from being tech-centric to appealing to a more generalist audience.
• AOP: Conference keynote videos available
  Watch last week’s speeches by Carolyn McCall and Tim O’Reilly.
• CJR Daily: London Times Prints ‘Rumour’, Market Goes Gaga
  Times rumour of the day lifts brewery shares 2 per cent.
• Newsknife: Top 100 US newspaper sites on Google News
  Contains what it says on the tin.

Additional links for Tuesday

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 October 2006 at 19:57
Tags: 18 Doughty Street, Blogs, Daily Telegraph, Digg, E-paper, IPTV, Journalism, Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk, Wikis

• Virtual Economics: Exploding the myth of the read/write web
  Seamus McCauly looks at the latest evidence of “participation inequality” — the fact that a tiny number of heavy users produce most of the material on user-generated and interactive web sites
• Shane Richmond: News from nowhere (part I and part II)
  Telegraph.co.uk’s news editor looks at the problems that the newspaper faces in the age of e-paper and unbundled content in the first part of a must-read essay. Part II has some recommended solutions.
• Dan Gillmor frets that “most won’t listen” to Doc Searls’ list of 10 suggestions for online newspapers. Maybe in America — but isn’t most of what Searls suggested rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom in (most) British newsrooms? Besides, the most radical idea about what the web can do for journalism— Adrian Holovaty’s “news as structured data” theory — was missing from the list(s) of suggestions.
• Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan D. Moeller and Moisés Naím remind everyone what really matters while all eyes are on Google and YouTube: “The fascination with the transformational effect of all this makes it easy to forget what is essential to the information process: traditional ‘old media’ messengers such as Anna Politkovskaya.”
• 18 Doughty Street launches tonight at 8pm.

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Can Digg be democratic?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 September 2006 at 11:20
Tags: Digg

The social news aggregation site Digg.com came under fire this week from critics suggesting that a small number of its users disproportionatly influence which stories appear on its front page.

Digg allows users to submit links to news stories from other sites and vote on their placement. Eager to benefit from the huge surges in traffic that a front-page placement on Digg can bring, news web sites (including this one) have been adding features to encourage users to submit their stories to Digg and similar sites.

Digg is often held up as the quintessential “Web 2.0” concept that harnesses the “wisdom of crowds” to highlight information of interest to its community of users. But the critics say that far from being this apparently democratic form of news selection, a small inner core of heavy users carry disproportionate weight on the site by submitting many stories and voting for each other’s submissions. In response, founder Kevin Rose promised changes to the Digg ranking algorithm to reward diversity of interest in a story.

But it’s not the first time that Digg’s democratic credentials have been called into question. Back in January, the Wall Street Journal reported that it took the votes of just 50 users to move a story to the front page of the site. At the time, Lloyd Shepherd (then of the Guardian and now Director of News, Sport and Information for Yahoo! Europe) noted that this was “a very small, statistically almost insignificant number of individuals” and wondered whether such sites were actually any more representative of community interest than what a team of responsive editors can achieve.

Since January, Digg has undergone a major relaunch and has probably done more than a little tweaking of its algorithms to mitigate against these presumably unintended consequences of the “one percent rule” — that only a tiny proportion of users actually participate regularly in “participatory” media.

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