What’s next after Social Bookmarking? What will Digg++ look like?
Social bookmarking has attracted quite a lot of hype over the last couple of months. Digg’s founder on the cover of Businessweek, now Reddit being acquired by the Wired people. As with any successful market, a lot of me-too applications spring up all over the place.
Together with this success, though, I have the impression that there are an increasing number of complaints and growing criticism levelled at the social bookmarking phenomenon (I’ve also contributed some of my own). There were several related discussions about the quality of posts making it to the front page of Digg, about elitism of regular Digg contributors, and people abandoning social bookmarking sites. Some of the criticisms against Digg that keep coming up are that only a few Digg contributors appear to control which posts make it to the front page, and that cliques keep digging each others’ submissions and/or systematically digging down other people’s submissions. That, coupled with a high volume of ego-based submissions (people submitting their own Blog entries to Digg) make the value of the shared space somewhat dubious. The collective filtering approach does not appear to be working.
What would be the components of a better social bookmarking or sharing site? I don’t know! If I did, I’d build it and get my mug on the cover of Newsweek (or at least the German edition of MAD Magazine — I’m really not picky). But I’m thinking about it.
The system would need to be easy to use and easy for people to get into. It should make it easy to submit stories, but provide enough control and monitoring that an abuse of the system can be prevented. Let’s look at a few components of systems that are out there. You might need to encourage people to submit quality sites, or ereward them for doing so. Netscape (the new, reinvented Netscape, now with extra AOL added) seems to want to do this by paying contributors. The jury is still out on that approach.
I like the approach Reddit has taken with the sub-Reddits (special collections, if you like, centering on a certain topic). A number of recent discussions about readers requesting specific new sub-Reddits and not getting them have shown the weakness of the system, though. How can niche topics be catered for? What do you do if the topic distinction for certain articles isn’t clear (is a submission related to Global Warming a science submission, or is it politics?).
Tag clouds have been out there for quite some time. In fact, tags and tag clouds appear to one staple component of what is often referred to as “Web 2.0″. Slashdot recently adopted a collaborative tagging system. Any registered user can add tags to stories. The most-used tags are displayed in the Slashdot summary page. Interesting! This gives me a quick overview of other people’s opinions and interpretations of stories without having to wade through the comments. A similar approach is being taken by Amazon’s US store, where customers can attach tags to items in the store and the tags are displayed according to how frequently the same tag is attached to an item. This system has recently been used (abused?) to start tagging electronic items with DRM support as “defective by design”.
What good is social bookmarking or social filtering, though, if I cannot express my own preferences or prejudices? Why do I want content filtered or approved by people I don’t agree with (apart from the ovious reason of keeping an open mind and keeping the blinkers off)? By applying the same logic of the “wisdom of the masses” to established media, we’d all be reading the ‘Bild Zeitung’ or ‘USA Today’ and watching Fox News. I don’t think I could deal with that. So we would need a mechanism to express “common ground” or closeness, similar to what social networking sites are doing with contacts and contact networks. If we share a couple of interests or values, then chances are that I’d be more interested in what you submit to a social bookmarking site and chances are that you’d be interested in what I submit. This isn’t just addressed by compartmentalizing the information, as in the sub-Reddits. Sure — I’m interested in topics related to science or politics. But that is such a broad characterisation, that it’s pretty much useless.
Well — as I said: I’m still thinking about this. If you came here expecting some kind of point, or conclusion, or insight, I apologize for having wasted your time. I’d appreciate your thoughts, though. Is the system broken? Is it fixable? What would the components of your ideal system be?
Tags: digg; social bookmarking; reddit
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Add this post to digg.com
Bookmark on reddit.com