The Diggites have been at it again. After the guys at Digg launched a new comments system last Thursday, a group of users were in uproar immediately over the changes - oh, how we humans hate change! Kevin Rose hastily posted a message on their blog the next day indicating that they appreciated the feedback and that more changes were coming to their comments system.

Poor old Digg, dugg if they do and dugg if they don’t - apologies for the pun. I’m sure all they were trying to do was enhance the user experience on their website, but unfortunately they got it wrong and suddenly they are lambasted as some sort of evil empire trying to rule over all. Well actually they do own the website and all content within - I’ve been over this before - and if they want to screw it up by introducing a new ‘broken’ comment system then that’s their look out. For the group of people who rudely criticized Digg for the changes, vote with your feet (or keyboards) and not with profanity.

Source: ComputerWorld

On Wednesday KOTV posted a report on its website that a lightening strike had caused a fire at an oil refinery in Oklahoma. The company that owned the oil refinery announced that there had been no fire and the report was wrong. KOTV removed the story from its site but meanwhile the price of crude oil had increased by 40 cents a barrel. Now admittedly that was a less than 1% increase but after the finger of bad journalism was pointed at engadget recently, you think that the mainstream media would get this kind of thing right.

As an aside, oil prices had dropped by US$2 the day before after expectations that a new president in Nigeria would stablise the supply from the country. The more cynical amongst us may think that a greedy oil baron had phoned in with the news of the fire to KOTV.

Source: I4U

The term of “social news” isn’t a new one, but it was popularized in the past few years. Wikipedia defines it as the process of allowing users to submit, vote on, and make the news. Users choose what is shown to them. Therefore, social news websites are also called news aggregators.
When the web was still 1.0, communities of any kind were rare and mostly, the Internet consisted in static content, published by the so-called webmasters for the readers. With the evolution towards web 2.0, everything is running towards community-based activities. Forums are transforming intro blogs and classic news sites are tending to become social news sites.

As with all Web 2.0 applications, social news sites are heavily based on user interaction and user will. The ideology is that really interesting news that are worth it will be more voted by users, thus creating a relevant ranking. This is a good system as long as no ones tries to manipulate the vote results. But social news sites are also great traffic drivers and there are a great deal of webmasters that try to generate large amounts of traffic to their websites. Manny social news sites try to stop this by creating complex ranking algorithms and by banning both users and entire websites. Of course there will always be mean to trick the system, means such as group voting and other ways in which users genera false votes.

Given the development of Web 2.0 we can expect that social news sites will develop, along with other forms of mass communication, into more user-oriented content that will become the core of Web 2.0 and the Internet.

A recent statistic shows that social news website are now generation over 1/4 of the overall WWW traffic, and this figure is continuously increasing every day. This means more and more users are using these websites to find out about the latest news, and regular news feeds and papers are losing ground fast.

However, social news websites changed the way I’m now searching for news online. Did they have any effect on you?