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Editor-less news services proliferate

Call them the headless horsemen of the media world, strange and fearsome apparations that seem to appear with increasing frequency as the weeks pass. Many say they are portents, ghostly harbingers of a new age in the media where the readers get to shape the news agenda.

Others think they are just cheap rip-offs of the original tech news service, Digg.

Take a look at this list of Digg-a-likes (via Tinfinger who also talks about Memeorandum, another aggregator service, and its simulacra).

This proliferation of community-edited news on the web bodes well for new models that will work outside of the tech space – the main question that’s on people’s lips, though, is when will Google, Yahoo! or some mainstream news service try out a Digg model?

Antony Mayfield

3 responses to “Editor-less news services proliferate”

  1. Simon Dickson Avatar
    Simon Dickson

    It’s starting to happen. In the US, FoxSports.com already offers a ‘create a blog’ service – and the project manager commented on a post I wrote: ‘There are filtering models (Digg, Newsvine, etc) that we’re experimenting with right now, and we plan to launch some interesting updates in the next few months.’ I really like the look of what they’re doing, although it needs to go a few steps further before I go ‘wow!’. You can imagine the potential.

  2. Antony Avatar
    Antony

    I know what you mean. It’s all potential at the moment. No less fascinating for that, but it needs to evolve further.

  3. matt Avatar
    matt

    Have you tried Megite at http://www.megite.com, a memeorandum like service.

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