Social Media

Who Will Bring Us News: Robots, Crowds, or Editors?


Automated news aggregator site Daylife has raised $8.3 million in a second round of funding - despite less than enthusiastic initial reviews. It's a sign that news aggregators or "memetrackers" as we like to call them, are still considered a lucrative space. Meanwhile, Digg is ripping through the top lists, with Compete's latest data putting it ahead of Facebook with over 20 million unique monthly visitors.

Let's take a quick look at both spaces. In the crowd-wisdom arena, you have Digg, Reddit, Netscape (Newsvine and Shoutwire are close behind regarding some metrics), and an army of smaller competitors, not many of which are managing to gain enough traction to be noticed. The memetrackers are in a similar situation, albeit on a smaller scale, with Techmeme, Tailrank, Megite leading the pack, and Daylife, Buzzfeed, DailyRotation and several others being relatively close behind.

digg, reddit, and netscape

So, while some of these sites are definitely moving up in the world and becoming more and more important sources of news, I don't think we can declare the decline of good old traditional news sites, with live editors, just yet. One problem is that neither are sites like Digg fully crowd controlled, nor are sites like Daylife fully automated. There are live people on these sites on the lookout for problems, algorithm malfunctions and obvious errors. So, basically, they're algorithm and/or crowd-assisted, but without live editors working on them they would probably fall apart.

Secondly, am I, as someone who lives off news, able to do only with these automated, semi-automated and crowd-managed aggregators? Hell no. All these sites sooner or later fall into some sort of a pattern and it's necessary for me to dig deep into my huge RSS feed collection to look for the bleeding-edge stuff.

One thing we have to admit, though, is that these three different ways of aggregating news - via algorithms (robots), crowd wisdom, or live editors - work great when put together. Is there, then, a thing to be said for a service that would combine all three?

Well, while everyone is welcome to try, and we'd sure like to see an ambitious project that goes in that direction, it's going to be hard to reconcile these three fundamentally different approaches in one service. Newsvine has come quite close to this idea, but it hasn't (yet) brought it phenomenal growth. Community doesn't like to be managed - at least not too much - and they sure don't like to compete with a cold, dead algorithm.

This said, having the news aggregated automatically, handed over to the community for voting, and then cleared and corrected by a team of live editors still sounds like a good plan. Maybe someone will be able to pull it off.

In the meantime, I guess the answer to the question in the title is still: all three, and none of them will be disappearing anytime soon.

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