What would happen if you apply the design ideas of social media to news? This is exactly what my friends over at Hop Studios in Vancouver have done in a project they call Flickring the News.

The idea is a deceptively simple one – “What if,” they asked, “news sites were built for sharing instead of for telling?”

Social media sites like MySpace, Flickr, Blogger etc are sites where someone’s contributions to each other’s work add tremendous value and knowledge to the information on the site.

What if we did this with news, encouraging people to blog, digg, bookmark, tag, annotate, add notes and comments? And rather than organise the material around traditional news sections, allow for a greater variety of groupings, much like Flickr does with photos?

When Travis Smith from Hop Studios first told me about the idea on Tuesday, I was intrigued and excited about the possibilities of such a news site.

Using the design principles of social media fundamentally challenges the approach of traditional news media.

It undermines the ‘we write, you read’ dogma in news. It challenges the idea of the news story as a prepackaged product that is a final destination. Instead it re-imagines the story as a launchpad, as the beginning of a news narrative which encourages everyone to take part.

In there sense, the news becomes a far more organic, rather than a static product.

To take this idea further, could the design principles of social media replace the notion of the news front page, decided by editors?

It would allow for collaborative editorial decisions on the prominence of news stories, along the lines of Flickr’s interestingness and its use of groups. It is an intriguing vision of news.