Thursday, March 20, 2008

Thing 12 - Not Digging It

I looked through all four of the sites (Mixx, Digg, Newsvine and Reddit) on a couple different days and looked for the same kinds of information on each site. I liked Newsvine the best, I think, and also Mixx. It seemed to me that you have to work harder at filtering Digg in order to get the good stuff. The homepage list includes so much "junk" that it lessens the credibility of the rest of the stuff for me. Reddit is not visually appealing - it looks like a link farm.

I registered at Newsvine and added a link ("seeded the vine") to a news story from BBC-UK. In the process of clicking through a bunch of pages, I saw a story that later I wanted to go back and read. At that point, I realized you can't search for anything on Newsvine - at least I couldn't find a search box. There are plenty of lists and links and subject-like headings, but no search box. That's unfortunate! I also registered at Mixx and added the same BBC news story. Mixx does have a search box, but it took me a while to find the story I added, and I knew what the keyword tags were!

I'm much more likely to keep up with news by looking at the specific news sites that I like: BBC, NBC, CNN, etc. I'm sure you can find quirky, off-the-beaten-path stories not covered by mainstream press, but you're going to have to spend a lot of time on these sites and look through a lot of junk.

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