Just a quickie update. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. wrote his own take on social news sites and crowd behaviour therein back in March. He explains how untrue stories with a catchy title can very easily become widely disseminated. On the plus side, though, having thousands of editors also means that these stories are exposed as being false equally quickly. He thinks site communities that take a hard line on misinformation and ensure corrections are given as many votes as incorrect stories are the ones that will flourish. Ultimately, though, he says it’s a matter of time before people grow up to realise that the front page of such sites is not ‘The News’ in the way the front page of a newspaper is. It’s a collection of articles, or even just headlines, that a number of people found interesting.
I take a similar view myself when it comes to a lot of ‘citizen journalism’, but I’m a bit more hopeful about its future. Yes, it’s easy to write anything you want without much fear of any serious consequence. And yes, it’s currently fairly simple to get pretty wide coverage for this. But the thing is, sites that publish lies will surely lose readers. What’s more, the commenting systems that are so integral to the blog experience allow anyone to correct you instantly and, talking to the authors of a couple of high-profile blogs, people do. And thus the exposure of your mistakes become a permanent part of the site, something most of us want to avoid. This is a good thing, of course, because once bitten, it makes blog authors more careful about what they write. With news voting sites, once you’ve discovered that you ‘dugg‘ a story that turned out to be untrue, won’t that make you a little bit more cautious going forward? Similarly, while a lot of mistakes and bad writing appears in Wikipedia, it’s continually being corrected and refined, so that over time it gets better and better.
That’s very different to traditional media, where your editor and subeditor – and hopefully your training and professionalism – will stop you making as many mistakes in the first place. But, on the other hand, the mistakes that do slip through tend to take a long time to be corrected, if at all, and those corrections can quite easily be buried on page 32.
You see, the faster the news services the greater the chance of error. Social news sites can beat any traditional news site based on speed–but they are always going to suffer from the madness of the masses. The upside is that social news sites expose misinformation almost as quickly as they disseminate it–will people remember the correction or just the incorrect headline is the rub. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. The masses, and managers, of these sites are going to need to focus on corrections as violently as they do misinformation, or the social news sites will turn into glorified message boards/chat rooms.
My last post on Web 2.5 may be of interest.
Marc
Yes, ties in quite nicely.
[...] I have recently discovered a few very interesting blogs. They are Marc Fawzi’s Evolving Trends and twopointouch from Ian Delaney. Really nice and complimentary, if you are interested in AI research and web 2.0 theories, go ahead and indulge. Marc’s latest posts dwelves into microcrowds and Ian’s writes about social news. [...]