i was reading dave winer’s opinion on how internet news should work and while i totally agree with the model, i think there are some limitations to it that social news sites can/are addressing.

dave winer writes,

i immediately put together a web application that scanned these “feeds” periodically, and put the new stories at the top of the page, pushing down the older ones. then, to do my hourly news trawl, i’d just have to start at the top of the page, and read down until i came to something i had seen before. i thought of this as “automated web surfing.” it took the labor out of the hunting and pecking i had been doing before.

this is, imho, the way news should work on the Internet.

sounds familiar? it certainly should, at least to anyone familiar with socially driven news and content sites. the site that winer’s model resembles the most is reddit. however, the social news site takes the model and improved it significantly.

rather than one person trawling for news and updating the content hourly, there are hundreds of thousands of users doing the trawling and submitting stories by the minute. furthermore, rather than having one person dictate the importance and therefore placement of the story on the site’s front page, the site’s enormous user base votes on what is important and how important it is. lastly, rather than manually updating the list for to replace old content with new content, the site’s algorithm automatically pushes down older stories that are losing steam with the audience and pushes up newer, more active ones, and even gives you the option to automatically hide the stories you have already read. karp has more.

although social news sites are growing at a very healthy pace, they have nowhere near the audience of more established news outlets. perhaps there is even room for a cross between the social news model and the editorially driven news model (something that propeller has experimented with). publishing on the web should definitely follow the social news iteration of winer’s model, and i believe that we’re getting closer to that everyday.

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