Tall Poppy Syndrome
Interesting that when something new starts up, there are those who are critical. Yes, Myspace news does leave a bit to be desired at the moment, but i'm sure that it will get bigger and better as time goes by. I feel the most important figure of the artical is in the last line, yet it seems to have been almost overlooked by the author.
News Corp's MySpace has launched a promising news aggregator in beta phase. Their engine tries to combine the Google News system, which crawls the websites of its sources and indexes, classifies and displays them organized in clusters and ranked by importance and the Digg-like system, where users determine the importance of a particular news story.
However, a quick exploration of their website, news.myspace.com, reveals that MySpace's solution is so far much weaker than either Google News or Digg.
It's quite important to note that both the Google and Digg approaches have their own specific disadvantages to start with. Google News, which is the better of the two, uses a complicated algorithm to rank news on the same subject according to their relevance. This algorithm is very effective most times, efficiently sorting through thousands of news in almost real time, entirely automatically.
The algorithm also seems to keep out certain news which are classified as inappropriate. This is very useful, for example, if a source website gets hacked or an editor goes bananas. But the filtering also catches legitimate news, especially if they're on a controversial subject which contains keywords inappropriate in other contexts.
On the other hand, Digg-systems let users select news displayed as headlines by voting either positively or negatively or only positively. This has many advantages, which are obvious, but also the very upsetting disadvantage that the timing of a particular story greatly influences the outcome. As an user sees the news story and votes for it, it then makes it more likely for the news to get voted subsequently.
This means that if a story gets posted at a time when few users visit the site, it will fade away before it gets a chance to be selected, regardless of its content. It's also quite clear that user votes are not necessarily linked to the news' quality.
The fact is that Digg only works well with certain categories of news. I think it works well primarily with sci-tech news and is much less efficient for other news categories.
Google News, on the other hand, works equally well with any type of news and provides better news selection than that which would turn up as done by an unselected crowd. I think this system employed by Google will always be, at least for now, the best and foremost type of news website. The Digg-systems is also important, but it's bound to be less preeminent.
There are 25 main news categories on MySpace's news site, with 300 subcategories. Clicking on a MySpace News item leads immediately to the original source of the story, but a banner runs across a story's source page identifying the news item as part of "MySpace News." It also shows the rating for the story as well as related links to other stories in that category.
I think there is a lot of room for improvement in MySpace's news display system, but the idea looks promising and is worth following up. The news feature of MySpace is built using Newroo technology, a company they acquired in early 2006 for a rumored $7 million. Newroo never had the chance of displaying the merits of its technology in public because of the acquisition.
Newroo founders Brian Norgard and Dan Gould (currently employed at MySpace) said that MySpace’s scanning mechanism will use a similar algorithm found in Google News, meaning that it will grab content from trusted sources via RSS feeds and later aggregate it at the right categories.
"Many advertisers have expressed interest in the service, which allows them to target the MySpace community in a more direct way," Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, a company purchased by News Corp. last year, which created MySpace News' technology, said in an interview.
MySpace currently has 170 million user profiles and is adding 320,000 profiles per day.
If Robert Kiyosaki has joined Myspace, I can only assume that it will go from one strength to another, as he does not seem to make too many mistakes. Like all things in any form of business, consistancy and persistance will eventually pay off, watch the news service get bigger and better.
However, a quick exploration of their website, news.myspace.com, reveals that MySpace's solution is so far much weaker than either Google News or Digg.
It's quite important to note that both the Google and Digg approaches have their own specific disadvantages to start with. Google News, which is the better of the two, uses a complicated algorithm to rank news on the same subject according to their relevance. This algorithm is very effective most times, efficiently sorting through thousands of news in almost real time, entirely automatically.
The algorithm also seems to keep out certain news which are classified as inappropriate. This is very useful, for example, if a source website gets hacked or an editor goes bananas. But the filtering also catches legitimate news, especially if they're on a controversial subject which contains keywords inappropriate in other contexts.
On the other hand, Digg-systems let users select news displayed as headlines by voting either positively or negatively or only positively. This has many advantages, which are obvious, but also the very upsetting disadvantage that the timing of a particular story greatly influences the outcome. As an user sees the news story and votes for it, it then makes it more likely for the news to get voted subsequently.
This means that if a story gets posted at a time when few users visit the site, it will fade away before it gets a chance to be selected, regardless of its content. It's also quite clear that user votes are not necessarily linked to the news' quality.
The fact is that Digg only works well with certain categories of news. I think it works well primarily with sci-tech news and is much less efficient for other news categories.
Google News, on the other hand, works equally well with any type of news and provides better news selection than that which would turn up as done by an unselected crowd. I think this system employed by Google will always be, at least for now, the best and foremost type of news website. The Digg-systems is also important, but it's bound to be less preeminent.
There are 25 main news categories on MySpace's news site, with 300 subcategories. Clicking on a MySpace News item leads immediately to the original source of the story, but a banner runs across a story's source page identifying the news item as part of "MySpace News." It also shows the rating for the story as well as related links to other stories in that category.
I think there is a lot of room for improvement in MySpace's news display system, but the idea looks promising and is worth following up. The news feature of MySpace is built using Newroo technology, a company they acquired in early 2006 for a rumored $7 million. Newroo never had the chance of displaying the merits of its technology in public because of the acquisition.
Newroo founders Brian Norgard and Dan Gould (currently employed at MySpace) said that MySpace’s scanning mechanism will use a similar algorithm found in Google News, meaning that it will grab content from trusted sources via RSS feeds and later aggregate it at the right categories.
"Many advertisers have expressed interest in the service, which allows them to target the MySpace community in a more direct way," Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, a company purchased by News Corp. last year, which created MySpace News' technology, said in an interview.
MySpace currently has 170 million user profiles and is adding 320,000 profiles per day.
If Robert Kiyosaki has joined Myspace, I can only assume that it will go from one strength to another, as he does not seem to make too many mistakes. Like all things in any form of business, consistancy and persistance will eventually pay off, watch the news service get bigger and better.
