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.
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To take this idea further, could the design principles of social media replace the notion of the news front page, decided by editors?
Hey, sounds a lot like what Digg does in a small, tech-related sphere. I’ve argued before for Digg-like voting mechanisms on college news sites. Unfortunately, the technological know-how and want-to are sorely missing at this point.
I think that we should use the social media and networking principles and apply them not only to the news but to all forms of knowledge… my particular research interest is trying to do this with academic knowledge. Thanks for this… I’m going to check out Hop Studios now…
Hi Brian. This could take it beyond Digg-like voting on news sites. Think about using an idea like interestingnews and applying it to news stories. So prominence is determined by a mixture of page views, comments, annotation or more. Could news index pages be organically created based on tags? As you say. all of this requires not just a technological know-how but also willingness to innovate and experiment.
ahh, so this would be more of an algorithmic approach to the layout of the front page of the news site. Very interesting, and i’m sure something that would certainly be achievable with the right amount of vision and money – quick, patent it!
seriously, with AJAX, you could even make it so that the page could refresh with a new layout every so often as people read and react to the news of the day – and readers could see the page layout change before their eyes. wouldn’t that be cool.
an added benefit to this sort of approach is that it would remove some of the incentive for gaming the system that occurs in Digg.
[...] reportr.net: What happens when you Flickr the news Alfred Hermida: “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.” (tags: flickr tickr journalism) [...]
[...] ¿Y si hiciéramos eso con las noticias, animando a la gente a bloguear, usar sistemas tipo Digg, marcar favoritos, establecer etiquetas (tags) o añadir notas y comentarios? Y más que organizar las noticias en las tradicionales secciones, ¿qué tal permitir crear una gran variedad de grupos, como hace Flickr con las fotos? […] Vía | Reportr.net [...]