Inspired by Robert’s blogpost on news curation we’ve started this experiment. With YiGG we’ve been providing a Social News Platform since 2006, where news-addicted users have been reading, adding, commenting on and recommending news.
Some of Robert’s ideas we’ve implemented already, others we haven’t yet. As always, the easiest thing for us would be to develop this “curation thing” step-by-step — following the seven ‘needs’ he described in his post.
For us management of news always has been and most likely will be a smooth combination of algorithms and user behaviour. Today, 5 days after our first discussion, we’ve launched the first step: the Social Media Newsroom SMN. Being a part of the well known Weltspion, the SMN shows those news stories people care about most — on the Internets outside of YiGG (as you will see, we show stories in English and German language).
With 2 clicks users can tweet these stories or add them to YiGG Neueste Nachrichten and to their accounts, respectively. This part of the SMN is the algorithmic one.
Another part of the SMN is the user generated one: by adding a “tip @yigg” to any tweet, users can send news URLs to YiGG. If those URLs belong to known and trusted sources, stories will be added to Neueste Nachrichten, automatically. If those domains are unkown, they appear as user recommendations in the SMN and can be aded manually. The YiGG team will check those sources and add them to the pool of trusted URLs. By tipping YiGG, users can influence the stream of news shown on YiGG!
Next steps will focus on the story detail page. Now the detail page concentrates on a story — we’ll allow more users to edit a story detail page to turn it more into a topic detail page. This means we’ll modify our story concept from “user centric” (i.e. the user owns the story) to “story or topic centric” (all users can curate and enrich stories).
As always we love to read your feedback!