I took a spin around the social media sites Mixx, Digg, Newsvine and Redditt. Yes, of course, I see the theme. Editors, bad, wisdom of the crowd, good. Well, maybe.
Still, for all their aversion to editors, the top stories on these sites were often stories from the mainstream media. To be fair, they also feature blog and website content that might not be found at 'traditional' news sites. And I suppose that a story that was not prominently featured on traditional news sites might get more exposure here. The 23 things prompt seemed to indicate the value of these social media sites for librarians is that we need to scan them to be "one jump ahead of library users trying to find behind the headlines information" and "see what people are interested in". [Frankly, I don't know what they mean by 'behind the headlines information'. Rumor? Primary sources on which articles are based? What?]
Sure, being aware of the news that may influence queries from our users is good. Still, I think that an aggregator like Google news offers a better alternative if what you want to do is scan for news that is current and 'hot'. I can see, though, that for that more 'alternatively-sourced material' Mixx, Digg, et.al. would give you a quick picture of the blogosphere buzz.
I realize the unique aspect of these sites, as opposed to a Google News kind of custom aggregator, is that you can share with others what you found cool or interesting or important. For my personal news needs, I don't find this feature compelling, but obviously it appeals to many people.
O.K. I found an article to share at The guardian.uk. I clicked on their "share" link which offered options of sharing to Digg, Redditt, and Newsvine. However, I found that each of these sites required you to register before you could share an article. As I couldn't foresee ever using such an account, I opted not to have my e-mail floating around in the database of yet another website. I tried another article from USA Today, ditto above experience with Mixx, but I did notice a nice feature of Newsvine -- even while it was prompting me to login or create an account, it let me know that the article I wanted to share was already on Newsvine. Nice feature.
Finally, a couple of things I observed make me wonder how good these sites are at providing what they promise. When I checked on the Mixx site, they had in their "Community" area highlighting "new groups", several groups with the words "cheap viagra" in their names. Obviously, someone is trying to use this venue as yet another garbage marketing outlet. So, to stay valuable to their users these sites need to minimize noise from what amounts to spamming.
More disturbing to me was the discovery at Newsvine that if you create a column there "90% of all ad revenue generated from your column will go straight to you". Ad revenue? Generated how? Wouldn't people craft their columns to maximize ad revenue? Perhaps I don't fully understand their mechanism around ad revenue, but despite the high-flown language about 'no editors', or in Newsvine' s case, "editorial judgement (sic) is in the hands of the community", I'd rather have an editor deciding on content, than have it determined by how much ad revenue it brings in. Yes, traditional news outlets' revenue comes mostly from advertising, but at least there is some effort to have a wall between editorial and ad sales. Besides, don't these social media sites' mission statements imply that they are somehow better than the traditional model?
Still, for all their aversion to editors, the top stories on these sites were often stories from the mainstream media. To be fair, they also feature blog and website content that might not be found at 'traditional' news sites. And I suppose that a story that was not prominently featured on traditional news sites might get more exposure here. The 23 things prompt seemed to indicate the value of these social media sites for librarians is that we need to scan them to be "one jump ahead of library users trying to find behind the headlines information" and "see what people are interested in". [Frankly, I don't know what they mean by 'behind the headlines information'. Rumor? Primary sources on which articles are based? What?]
Sure, being aware of the news that may influence queries from our users is good. Still, I think that an aggregator like Google news offers a better alternative if what you want to do is scan for news that is current and 'hot'. I can see, though, that for that more 'alternatively-sourced material' Mixx, Digg, et.al. would give you a quick picture of the blogosphere buzz.
I realize the unique aspect of these sites, as opposed to a Google News kind of custom aggregator, is that you can share with others what you found cool or interesting or important. For my personal news needs, I don't find this feature compelling, but obviously it appeals to many people.
O.K. I found an article to share at The guardian.uk. I clicked on their "share" link which offered options of sharing to Digg, Redditt, and Newsvine. However, I found that each of these sites required you to register before you could share an article. As I couldn't foresee ever using such an account, I opted not to have my e-mail floating around in the database of yet another website. I tried another article from USA Today, ditto above experience with Mixx, but I did notice a nice feature of Newsvine -- even while it was prompting me to login or create an account, it let me know that the article I wanted to share was already on Newsvine. Nice feature.
Finally, a couple of things I observed make me wonder how good these sites are at providing what they promise. When I checked on the Mixx site, they had in their "Community" area highlighting "new groups", several groups with the words "cheap viagra" in their names. Obviously, someone is trying to use this venue as yet another garbage marketing outlet. So, to stay valuable to their users these sites need to minimize noise from what amounts to spamming.
More disturbing to me was the discovery at Newsvine that if you create a column there "90% of all ad revenue generated from your column will go straight to you". Ad revenue? Generated how? Wouldn't people craft their columns to maximize ad revenue? Perhaps I don't fully understand their mechanism around ad revenue, but despite the high-flown language about 'no editors', or in Newsvine' s case, "editorial judgement (sic) is in the hands of the community", I'd rather have an editor deciding on content, than have it determined by how much ad revenue it brings in. Yes, traditional news outlets' revenue comes mostly from advertising, but at least there is some effort to have a wall between editorial and ad sales. Besides, don't these social media sites' mission statements imply that they are somehow better than the traditional model?
So, I've been kind of negative, but let me say, it was pretty fun to follow link after link of stories that caught my eye. But the comments feature... not very valuable. The ratio of useful back and forth to ill-informed or mean-spirited rants was too low to spend the time reading them. It seems to me that these sites might be most useful to someone who had a particular narrow interest that they shared with a group at the site and together, the crowd could unearth information each might not discover on his or her own.
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