Techmeme, Digg and BoingBoing - Which Approach is Best?

Aggregated News SitesWhen I take a step back from my daily reads I realize through the magic of Techmeme, Digg and BoingBoing I can get a pretty good feel for the news I am interested in even before I descend into the time-sucking mire that we call feeds.

When you add a quick skim over Twitter (without getting caught up in the banter, he says optimistically), and BBC News, it is possible to feel like you are pretty up to date.

These mega news sites are just the ticket for catching up on a subject area, but each uses a different approach … which strategy is best?

It seems the three news sites I have mentioned vary in the amount of automation or editorial control involved. Other sites, such as Slashdot seem to be hybrids.

Fully Automated

Techmeme and the sister sites, memeorandum and WeSmirch (politics and celebrity), are designed to be fully automatic and rely on a closely-guarded algorithm to choose what to display on the homepage at any time. This means while other site owners are sleeping, Techmeme is pumping new stories up constantly.

How stories are displayed on Techmeme is quite different to normal sites also. Rather than just a straight newspaper-like layout, stories are clustered to show a group of publications all talking about the same thing. Take todays Gmail story for example. First up is what the system regards as the most important article, followed by others also contributing to the conversation. It is a great way to get good coverage of breaking news.

Sites get into the system by either being one of the sites on Gabe Riveras leaderboard or they get referenced by others already in the system. Apparently Techmeme monitors a good couple thousand feeds already so get noticed sufficiently by already trusted sources and you ought to show up.

Reality though suggests it is not as easy as all that so people do comment about Techmeme being elitist or serving to fuel a “blog echo chamber”. Another issue is when those chosen blogs all talk about a story, Techmeme covers it, no matter how relevant. This leads to stories such as Robert Scobles baby announcement getting headlined on Techmeme!

Democracy

One of the dreams of the web is to use “wisdom of crowds” to produce new and better approaches. Does it work? Well … kinda. Digg has a democratic approach where anyone can submit a story and everyone can vote it up or down. Also there is a busy commenting component that further ads to giving everyone a voice.

Unfortunately as most people who have ever been to a soccer match will tell you, crowds ain’t that wise. Human beings have a herd-like instinct and also tend to be quite aggressive when protected by both anonymity and safety in numbers.

Having said that Digg is on my daily reads for good reason. A great many of the stories that get through the system are interesting, even managing to bring you news earlier than you would see through other channels unless you were constantly monitoring hundreds of sites. Providing the story gets enough positive votes and does not get marked down as spam there are no limitations to getting to the front page, A-listers through to Z-listers. Yes, some sites are there all the time, but many others get their 15 minutes of fame too.

Editor Control

Rather than use a computer algorithm or the audience to select what is important, many sites take the BoingBoing route and just write up what interests them.

The big advantage is you can get up to speed far more quickly. With the automated system you have to build the system up to a decent spec before people can find it useful. Democracy only works when you have a decent sized audience, which is a kind of catch-22.

Obviously the main downside is you have to personally work much harder and would require a team spread around the globe to publish 24/7. This means you do not get the coverage, timeliness or scale of the other sites.

From the readers point of view though, when it works it really works. There are not quality control issues, the system can not be “gamed”, and the audience can even submit stories for review (with no guarantees they will appear).

Summary

So which is best? I think it depends on the subject area and what you need. I have found on many occasions reading Digg before BoingBoing means I have already seen many of the stories before I get to them on BoingBoing and the authors often miss things, so I could cut out BoingBoing a lot of the time and not miss much. Having said that the authors do occasionally add value by supplying their own commentary. Techmeme gives the best overview of an individual story by bringing together all the viewpoints in a conversation, something you do not see so much in the other two (in Digg you might lose the others covering an issue because it would be seen as “old news” or a duplicate). This gives you depth and breadth.

For my money if you want the best system you would take the automation of Techmeme and the editorial control and added commentary of BoingBoing. Funnily enough, the site that most matches this hybrid idea seems to be the much-overlooked Slashdot, if they added an automatic component it might be the perfect news site.

Which type of site do you prefer and why? Have I missed out something? Let me know in the comments …

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0

Comments

3 Responses to “Techmeme, Digg and BoingBoing - Which Approach is Best?”

  1. Jack @ The Tech Teapot on October 31st, 2007 12:25 pm

    I prefer the one man band sites myself sitting there hidden in my feed reader waiting for me to discover it.

    Its kinda like supermarkets. Go into your local Tesco and you get the same 15,000 products week in week out. Boring!

    Go into Netto and you might just get a surprise. New stuff that has never been there before and will never be there again appears. I like being surprised.

  2. Chris Garrett on October 31st, 2007 12:56 pm

    I think you are right about the fresh and surprising stuff being found in “boutique” stores but if you want to be up to date quick then those news sites are like getting a readers digest - reading them frees your time to really look for the shiny uncovered nuggets :)

  3. bmunch on November 6th, 2007 12:20 pm

    By going through these 3 sites, you will be able to get about 99% of interesting news around the web. but its only on the individual niches sites that you can get news that nobody gets.

    Once in a while, you will find nuggets of gold…

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