What is a Social News site?
Imagine a news site where the editor wasn't the one deciding what was the lead story for the day. Instead, the decision-making power has been transferred to the actual people reading the news, the ones who read the story and rated it as relevant or not. The story which would make the headline news would be decided by a voting system, where the overall user base of a site actively influences which stories are promoted and prominently displayed.
Well imagine no more, as this is exactly the concept of social news sites, and they exist aplenty on the internet. The overriding idea is that you are not influenced by a single authority, but by a large number of the site's users own preference for news - and this is where the social angle comes in.
Indeed, sites like Digg and Reddit have grown by huge proportions over the past year, in large part down to their business model being focused on allowing their hardcore user base to actively influence the selection process of content on the site. It seems that more and more people are keen to vote for popular news stories in this fashion, with Digg in particular riding the crest of a wave at the moment on the back of this trend. Having incorporated a much greater range of news content to include on the site, recent ComScore figures reveal that traffic to Digg has grown to over 1.3m users last month (up from 243,000 the year before).
The increase in this trend has brought with it the noticeable imitators who see the potential in advertising spend from the traffic that sites like Digg have at its disposal. AOL have recently launched Netscape as a collaborative news site, although the site is so far behind the market leaders that the general manager, Jason Calacanis, has resorted to offering the top users of Digg and other collaborative news sites $1,000 a month to start using Netscape. Digg's success was generated from steadily growing its passionate technology-focused user base, and Netscape's challenge is to replicate this as quickly as possible - except the financial backers behind Netscape aren't as likely to be as resilient to a gradual word-of-mouth growth strategy.
In conjunction with completely re-branded sites starting afresh as collaborative news websites, other more traditional online news outlets have been taking a softly, softly approach to incorporating a social news angle, with the BBC being the most high profile site to adopt such a feature recently. Users of BBC news will have noticed that each page (all top navigation pages alongside actually news stories) contain a 'Most Popular Stories Now' box, with links to the top five read and e-mailed stories the site has running at any given time. Updated in real time, the feature shows which stories people are reading and e-mailing to their friends, which video clips they are watching, and how this changes minute-by-minute through the day. The clever people at the BBC have also managed to sort it so you can sort by regions of the world and by day and time.
The rise of collaborative news as a concept seems to be taking off, meaning that more and more traditional news outlets will need to get a little more social if they want to compete with the new kids on the block, and the BBC's attempts to do this is a good first step in the right direction. The challenge will be for these sites to keep their editorial integrity of pushing the main news headlines to the top of the site whilst incorporating enough of a social angle to keep those who want to influence the news content.
