Surfing the Future of News 2.0

By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2006.

You could almost picture the movie trailer: "In a News 2.0 future, where the ultimate journalistic crime … is being editor-in-chief …"

Blogs were only the beginning of a revolution that has put you in control of the news: deciding the headlines, choosing what's front page. Or at least that's the premise and promise of a whole slew of internet services suddenly on the horizon, which forgo editors in favor of consumer choice. Some sites robotically survey public opinion -- others let users nominate and vote on stories. And in some spots on the Net, the rightness of democratic editing has become such an article of faith that it's downright scandalous for one man, even the owner of news site Digg.com, to appear to take charge of a front page.

That's why reports of a "Digg Army" -- a platoon of 15 or so robot users that gamed Digg's system to promote two stories -- have engendered a headache for Kevin Rose, "Tech TV" personality, creator of the computer news site Digg and one of several entrepreneurs to have received a fortune in venture capital funding -- $2.8 million -- for the promise of news by and for users. He told CNN last year that his Bay Area business had dispensed with "editors in a smoke-filled back room" in favor of handing control over to the 100,000+ Diggers.

In recent weeks, however, a flurry of disgruntled Diggers were accusing Rose not only of casting editorial votes with the Army, but covering it up: banning Digg Army stories from Digg and spiking links to critics. Rose, reached Thursday morning, said the controversy stemmed from a "complete misunderstanding" of how his site works, saying the people themselves had hit a "complain" button to dump the unfavorable coverage.

"Once it was buried," says Digg CEO Jay Adelson, "the website that submitted it -- Forever Geek -- created fake accounts…" "--someone did," corrects Rose. And as the alleged Geek Army submitted the story again and again, he says, the site's "secret sauce" -- a hidden security formula for blocking spam sites -- had hummed to life, he says.

Clearly secrecy is father to suspicion. "They key for us is to make it more transparent," he says.

These are the questions facing the new world of you-are-the-editor news sites, which have been proliferating since last fall. While Digg's emphasis is on computers, information technology and the RIAA, other sites are turning the approach to finding other material from the web -- as on Reddit, where users vote for interesting links.

And other sites are exploring the wider genre of news as newspapers traditionally cover it. Seattle-based Newsvine, which opened to the public in March with an undisclosed six-figure investment, has sought to create a place for friendly discussion of everything from Iraq to the Mariners.

The need the new sites are addressing, says longtime tech journalist Dan Gillmor, is to cut through the noise of the internet and find the good stuff users are submitting. "This is the experimentation period," he said. And the "big jump from where we are to where we need to be," Gillmor says, is a long way off. Companies are trying out new methods for weighing credibility and trustworthiness of web news, so that there's more than mere popularity at stake. "We're not going to know for some years what works and really doesn't," he says.

Or even what features are going to stick around, and which will prove to be relics like Windows 98's Channels, the ill-fated experiment in fetching the news for you. Read a blog or browse photos on Flickr, and the experience is breezy. But click to one of the new services -- grouped together under the loose banner of News 2.0 -- and you can be at a loss as to what the features are supposed to do for you, those little vestiges of Friendster, MySpace or Del.icio.us and even multilevel marketing, features that may lure venture capitalists and the kind of people who get excited about "folksonomies," but whose advantage to understanding the world situation may not be readily apparent to your mother. Or you.

So what's it like browsing some of these sites now? Hoping to test out what works, and narrowing my focus to websites that provide general news stories -- many others are offering local info -- I hit up a random group of News 2.0 sites, hoping to cut through the "noise" to find exactly what I want. It couldn't just be a big breaking story (like the recent immigration rallies) or a music consumer story that was guaranteed to be covered (Apple is keeping iTunes downloads at 99 cents!). It would have to test the ability of these sites to personalize the news and find what I want.

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