Today, MySpace’s well over 100 million users will find a fresh feature at their disposal: a news service harvesting stories from across the web for their reading convenience. Employing an algorithm to troll the Internet and aggregate popular stories from newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other websites and classify them into 25 groups and 300 subcategories, MySpace News has utilized the style of online news sources like Digg and Google News.
But the online hangout has added an interesting component: a user ranking system. MySpace surfers can read posted stories and determine the ranking of that story by voting on a scale of one to five; the more votes, the more prominent the story becomes within its category. “We’re putting it to the community to be the editorial engine driving our news service,” MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson said in a press release.
Although officials have stated that material from MySpace’s parents company, Fox News Corp., will not gain preference, bloggers are deliberating the value of a youth driven news source, sounding off on what headlines will amount to if cyber-teens are determining the editorial content for themselves, a vast population growing each day.
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Here’s what MySpace News critics, supporters, and bystanders have to say:
“Is that a Digg-killer?” — msgbeepa.multiply.com
“A taste of adolescence has already been added with the voting system, which is based on a scale of 1 to 5: hated it, didn’t like it, liked it, really liked it, and loved it.” — George Gardner, tech.blorge.com
“So, does that mean the news content will come from Fox News, the NY Post, and TV Guide? Great, just another way to ensure that the next generation won’t actually know what’s going on in the world” — 92BuickLaSabre, gizmodo.com
“Despite the fact that most people who go to such ‘user-generated’ media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories…I still think this kind of thing could turn out to be very powerful, and that MySpace is smart to do it.” — Mathew, mathewingram.com
Talk: Will MySpace News become a media giant or will the initiative flop?
