There is a rise in popularity web of sites that collect, aggregate and rate the news such as Newsvine, digg, and Reddit. I have written about them a bit. But what is the nature of participation? Do a few users with lots of time on their hands control the news for the rest of us? That seems to be the case. A few individuals can submit stories and then a few hundred voters can influence what tens of thousands read. Never was some much owed by so many to so few. I think Winston Churchill said that.
But what are we getting? Is the wisdom of the crowds operating or is this the thoughts of a few underemployed and/or passionate hobbyists? The Wall Street Journal seems to think it is more the latter in their article, The Wizards of Buzz, that Cesar Brea pointed me to in his post, "In Their Tribes", Or, "How Do You Handle 10,000 Tech Maniacs' Votes?" The WSJ wrote, "At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named "STONERS" -- in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio -- was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list.”
Now this active participation can be a good thing if it is authentic, look at the Wikipedia. Visitors to the site just need to know what they are getting and that it can be gamed if the stakes are high. It is not the wisdom of thousands of individual web participants who scan hundreds of thousands of sites. It is the thoughts of a few highly passionate people who care about the topic, with some gamers possibly mixed in.
The sites try to prevent gaming but they may have their hands full with the upcoming US presidential election. Look at the recent Boston Globe article, Political bloggers fear publicists will infiltrate sites. It says, “With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers to plant favorable opinions of the businesses online, many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens expressing views.” It goes on to quote Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence in Journalism , "Candidates, history shows, will do anything they can to win. The only downside to a candidate is getting caught," he said. And the Globe adds, “But the downside for blogs could be far greater, because the blogs' credibility rests on the idea that they represent unvarnished grass-roots opinion.”
Now we have the opportunity to not only have fake bloggers (see Flogging for WalMart - Opps!) but fake submitters and raters. It has already started. The WSJ story raised this point. It wrote, “Pulling back the curtain on these hidden influencers is a controversial subject. Many of these sites say it can heighten the risk of payola and attempts to game the system…Payola schemes depend on the voting system these sites employ. Some marketing companies promise clients they can get a client front-page exposure on Digg or one of the other social-bookmarking sites in exchange for a fee, according to marketers.”
Cesar offers a good suggestion to segment the sites by content and have trusted informal administers monitor for gaming and authenticity, the community of interest concept. This seems to work with the Wikipedia as he notes. I hope they get organized for the coming political elections. We had Web 1.5 for the 2004 elections with the bloggers. The election was even one of the main things that raised bloggers in the public eye, getting Webster’s word of the year for 2004. Now we get a full blown Web 2.0 for the parties to consider in 2008. What will Webster’s say?
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