Pulitzers, Blogging, and a New Kind of Digg
December 12th, 2008 - Jarkko
The field of media is changing. And it is doing so on multiple levels at once:
Old media, such as newspapers and magazines, are quickly losing ground to the Internet as a whole. It’s not doing so without a fight.
At the same time, blogs are winning ground from the old kind of non-blog Internet content. But the web sites (such as the sites created by traditional media companies) are not giving in without a fight.
As a blogger, I naturally tend to side with blogs: they are opinionated, they stand for something, and at best they are the most likely candidates to take the role of columns, and the deeper articles from high class newspapers.
In his latest post, “You’re not going to win a Pulitzer prize“, Seth Godin brings up a valid fear:
Here’s what we’re going to miss, and quite soon: the cost of having a printing press and the money to run one meant that there were newspapers with gravitas. Newspapers that invested for the long haul, that stood for something, that spoke up. When you can launch a blog for nothing and disappear quite easily if it doesn’t work, the gravitas is a lot more difficult to find. When the newspapers are gone (and it’s happening a lot faster than the people in the industry are able to admit) that’s what we’re going to miss the most.
The Internet is full of writing.
Some of it good. Some of it not so good. Most of all, there is so much of it that many great, important articles never get read by more than a few lucky ones who sometimes happened to stumble on a not-quite-so-famous-yet blog, such as this one (by this I’m not implying that I am one of the important writers — although that’s what I’m striving for).
An interesting coincidence was that today, on Twitter, there was a message on a closely related topic:
@indymike said to @mark_hayward: “The blog biz needs better news aggregators than Digg and the local newspaper.”
Then Mark retweeted the comment to his followers and that’s when I received it.
So, here is my challenge! Let’s dream up what a new — bloggers only — “Digg” would be like. I have no idea if the idea would work. And I have no idea who would be the one to implement it.
But so what, I think we just need to let the ideas flow and hope that someone, somewhere will build the thing — if it’s worth it. It could be one (or all) of us.
What do you think?
Interesting thoughts. Enjoyed your article here and I’ll make sure to subscribe to your blog. I can’t wait to see your new design coming in 2009.
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I believe you are on to something… something important. I’m with you, Jarkko my man. I love all the white space as well.
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Thanks for the support, guys! Now if I only knew what the something in this idea is :)
Sounds good on paper. I’ll be there to support you with whatever you come with. With this temporary theme of yours, I feel so clean and so pure just looking at it.
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Jarkko,
I just wanted to stop by and thank you for all the information you shared about putting a blog/ social network together. I found your site about a year ago and picked your brain from time to time. My new site is up at 5k5k.org The site is a personal challenge on fitness and personal finance. Thanks again for your help.
Chett
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Yes Jarkko this is a very interesting question. To be user-centric it would have to combat everyone elses SEO efforts, from black-hat spam efforts even to the white hat stuff.
While all that SEO is very useful to the person publishing, it’s far less useful to the user and in fact is the main detrimental factor hindering useful information retrieval.
In an ideal world (that will never exist) – where people didn’t do every trick the book to manipulate search results – Google in conjunction with a form of ranking would provide what we need.
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@Chett: My pleasure!
@Ben: Good point. Even the white hat SEO that is considered OK isn’t really that useful for the user of the information.
I wonder… What do you think would need to be changed for that ideal world without SEO to exist? And could a site like the one suggested in this post somehow help that kind of a world to become closer to reality?
The wide open, free, anonymous internet we all know and love is always going to have the “SEO/Spam problem”.
While there is financial reward in manipulating peoples online activity and effectively no punisment
for doing it, it will always be with us.
I’m not sure even the mighty Google are on top of the problem, I not sure how often my searching
is thwarted my all the various kinds of rubbish links/misdirection, but it could be up to a third of the time.
2 things that could make a better expression.
1. Some form uf semantic markup that goes beyond tags in describing/rating content.
Perhaps covering concepts ‘level of expertise’, degrees of relatedness to other concepts,
say rather than just tag an article ‘Marketing’, have also sub-tags ‘online marketing – relevance 40%’,
‘direct marketing – relvance 25%’. Maybe have a vocabulary of 100 or so specific semantic words, like ‘Introductory Level’,
‘New Insights’, ‘Explains Key Concepts’. And also the possibility of negatively rating/describing content.
2. Ensure the users doing all the tagging/rating are in a trusted, self-policing system, that ensures
anyone not rating/describing content on objective grounds of usefulness, gets weeded out.
So some way of referring dud/spam/SEO results to a moderator function, that warns/deletes offending
users and all there rating/tagged results.
Thus over time the users build up a body of their own search results that are useful.
It’s strange you don’t hear of more people doing tis already, maybe they are and I just haven’t heard.
Ben Mulveys last blog post..killing me softly
@Ben: I like your idea of a more semantic tagging system and the relevance percentage. Also, having a hand picked group of people doing the tagging and adding of content would definitely help.
The problem there is just that it’s a balancing act between growth (user generated content enables exponential growth) and usefulness (having a staff pick the content leads to more of that)…
I think a big part of Digg’s success has come from the fact that anyone can add content and anyone can digg. On the other hand, sites like Sproutwire often die quickly because they require so much more commitment.
We’ll need to find a convenient middle ground, I guess.
Reddit is a great site for this type of idea. They allow you to setup a sub-reddit that focuses on any topic; I have one focused on management, for example. Reddit incorporates user feedback on submitted links and learns from what you like and dislike. It compares your likes and dislikes to others and can recommend current links based on that history.
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@John: Hey, that’s a good idea! I think I’ll investigate creating my own sub-Reddit too. Thanks for the tip!