If you are heading into 2008 thinking, we must do more with social media, here is a useful primer to social news websites. From the post: Social news websites generally operate via a wisdom of the crowds principle; groups of individuals with different points of views are able to collectively determine the value or importance of content disseminated through the community. The users are given the editorial power to influence

Could the stickiness of social sites such as Digg, Facebook or YouTube be explained by the notion that they function as hidden games? The Read/WriteWeb blog points to an ebook by C. Weng on this very idea. In The Web: Hidden Games, available for free on Lulu, Weng argues that: Officially, they are social networks, news aggregators, etc. and not designed as game sites like Second Life is. However, these

The young journalists behind Inkling Magazine are into science reporting because, as they say in their tag line, “science rocks”. One of the founders of the science blog, Anne Casselman, took part in the Future Directions in Science Journalism conference over the weekend at UBC. During a session about why people go online for science news, she gave an illuminating insight into Inkling’s readers. The site gets some 40,000 page

Call it a triumph for the audience. The events of the past day at community-based news site Digg offer an insight into how it is virtually impossible to control information in the age of the internet. The revolt was sparked off by Digg’s decision to take down a submission with details of a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs. Digg did so to comply following legal pressure from