Neothoughts

Last night, AOTS called Digg’s credibility into question with this segment on social media. In doing so, they hosted a panel discussion with experts Annalee Newitz of Wired and David Ewalt from Forbes.com. Annalee recently made waves with an exposé on how she bought votes on Digg.

What they fail to disclose in between jabs at Digg’s credibility is that Wired is owned by Condé Nast, which also owns Digg competitor Reddit. They assert that they made efforts to include Digg in the panel discussion, but Digg declined. The result is a pretty one-sided discussion about how Digg is no better than such news sources as - get this - Fox News.

Next up, Coke calls Pepsi’s deliciousness into question.

Conservapedia is a newly launched wiki which purports to be the Fox News of internet encyclopedias. I’ve been getting a kick out of comparing the entries on Conservapedia to their counterparts on Wikipedia. So I made a bookmarklet to make it easier to jump back and forth between like-named entries.

To use it, just save or drag the following link to your bookmarks toolbar. Then, whenever you’re reading a Wikipedia or Conservapedia entry and get a hankering to see what the other site says about the topic, just click the bookmarklet.

Here are a couple of fun entries to try it out on:

Wikipedia - “Homosexuality”

Conservapedia - “Shia”

Wikipedia - “Internet”

Conservapedia - “Haggis”

There are some things social news has yet to master. Here are some types of content and methods of aggregation that have proved clumsy or non-existent on social news sites.

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From a Digg user’s point of view, Spotplex is a site that takes all the work out of social news. Users don’t need to submit, vote or comment on content. This begs the question: is the future of social news automated?

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If you were watching the Netscape tracker yesterday, you would have noticed a massive spike in new registrations. It coincided with their re-launch of My.Netscape, which uses the same login as their social news site.

The result: over 6,000 new registrations in one day. This helped to push them past a new milestone: 150,000 registered users.

And if you consider the size of that spike, just wait until they release their new browser with social news features integrated.

Today, Netscape re-launched My.Netscape as a customizable Ajax homepage. Netscape Navigator Fedquip produced this handy tutorial for using it to track Netscape tags:

You might also consider combining multiple tags into one content module by using Yahoo! Pipes.

Recently a conservative blog called Little Green Footballs voiced their displeasure with Digg’s “mob rule”, claiming that they are falling victim to left-wing diggers. If you set aside the partisan politics, there is actually a lot to learn from the situation surrounding this particular site on Digg. It brings to light some common misconceptions about Digg as well as problems that need solving.

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A couple of weeks ago, Yahoo! launched Pipes, a GUI that makes remixing and mashing up RSS feeds fun and easy to do. Since Pipes uses RSS data for input and output right now, the applications for social news are limited by the RSS features of the sites. The more RSS features they have, the more you can do with them in Pipes. That being said, there are a number of ways you can use Pipes to streamline your social news RSS subscriptions.

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In a world where large volumes of information can be produced in the blink of an eye, citizen journalists need tools to access and cross-reference information. Several online database applications have sprouted up to fill that need. Here is a run-down of sites that are making it easier for citizen journalists to connect the dots.

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The principle of transparency is regarded by many to be necessary in a successful democracy. Every day, people are demanding more transparency out of the media, business and government. Socially driven news sites are a step in that direction. They offer a level playing field where users come to edit news democratically. What role does transparency play in the users’ actions on these sites?

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