Search Marketing Gurus noted today that Newsvine beat Digg to the breaking news about the shooting at Virginia Tech. My thoughts are pretty much inline with Marketing Pilgrim - no crap. [UPDATE:] Please note that I don't mean to in any way make light of or play down the tragic events today, I'm simply commenting on something that I read - it literally could have been any event that brought this up, unfortunately it was the situation at Virginia Tech.
If you're going to Digg's front page looking for any breaking news you're going to be disappointed. Even the fastest promoted stories (usually those about Digg or Kevin Rose) rarely make it to the front page in under an hour.
If you have a solid RSS collection, a good group of friends on Twitter and check out sites like Techmeme and Megite, you're going to get almost all of the information that makes Digg's front page hours, if not days before it gets there.
This was my main complaint about Digg a few weeks ago - that I felt its front page was too full of mainstream stories and that is not its strong suit. Digg is a great place to find information that you wouldn't necessarily find otherwise, not breaking news stories.
The very nature of Digg - that a user submits a story they find elsewhere for the community to vote on - inherently requires that there be a story, already written, to submit in the first place. If it's already written and it's a big story, it's already being seen on other sites that don't require 50 people Digg the story (without anyone burying it as lame).
Digg the unique stuff, leave the breaking news to sites and services that specialize in that.
3 comments:
They could really benefit from editors (and not the secret story-burying kind). Netscape for example has mods who review the incoming stories, and if one of them is important enough they will promote it to the front page with 1 vote.
I agree, if Digg wants to be a source of news - which one would think since they have all the news categories - they should have moderators (and believe me I used to be very against moderation) at least for that section.
Even if they had no intention of being used for breaking news, this and many other incidents make it clear that a sizable portion of users wish to use it that way.
Perhaps a moderated 'Breaking News' section would be a way to go - but that would undoubtedly get a lot of potentially bogus or BS stories, so the moderators would have their work cut out for them.
I agree with you guys, when I first heard the news from my gf. I went on Digg to check for more detail, but I found it no where near the front page (kinda disappointed).
A breaking news section is definitely a good idea; there are too many random stuff that cloaked the front page lately.
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