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Oh! That’s interesting news

Photo: AP

For a high Connecting online gives a thrill

Social news sites have changed patterns of gaining access to news online. Users submit interesting items they have spotted online and share them with other users. They vote up on their favorites or vote down on what sucks. The pieces that get lots of votes crawl up the front page of these news sites. Thus, users find stuff online, which otherwise they would have missed, in traditional media like newspapers, radio and television.

Social news space is so teeming with activity that one would feel each news site is a clone of the other, especially Digg-clones. There is “hip now, hopped tommorrow” kind of news sites also. “Quality, speed and community determine the survival factor,” opines Harish K. L. who frequents news sites for the community feel. “”No doubt, they have revolutionised how we access news.” The stories users feel strongly about get displayed promininetly and “it’s always interesting to get happening news about topics you like and care about.”

‘Digg’is by far the biggest of social news sites with largest user base. “The sheer power of Digg comes from its users,” says Digger RajGopal. “You find technology, politics, entertainment, general items with a different flavor rather than regurgitated stuff.”

‘Reddit’ is another news site with a large userbase. “It’s a matter of preference,” says Surya, a tech worker. The site includes sub-sections (subreddits) on specific topics like programming and entertainment.

‘Slashdot’ is yet another one, primarily on technology. “The effect of Slashdot has been tremendous,” says Abhijit, a media analyst. “It opened up the whole field of grassroots journalism. As a matter of fact,” he adds: “Slashdot covers games, books and tech also,” he adds. There are many others and niche social sites.

In a remarkably fine synthesis,Chris McGill, the founder of Mixx brought together three strands of digital socialization into one: 1) Intense personalization (think netvibes, Pageflakes, myYahoo); 2) Democratization (Digg, Reddit); and 3) One-to-one contact that is controlled by the user (Linkedin and Facebook among others). “It doesn’t take one-interest-tickles-all, one-size-fits-all approach. Mixx allows you to customize “My Mixx” page around themes or topics you are interested in, and from where you can follow different categories, people and tags.”

“It is frustrating to go through the whole lot of stuff even on other social news sites like Digg,” says Krishna Kumar, a tech worker, adding “but on Mixx, you have customized funneling of news according to your specific interest.” Feeding off people’s interests and feeding into users’ space, news sites are spawning, clicking, teeming, seething and humping communities.

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