Everyone wants to emulate Digg. I use Digg somewhat loosely here. Essentially, whether you’re in the tech world, or the science world, or some other, many services have tried to emulate the success of Digg, the poster child for bringing the impact of crowds (I refuse to use “wisdom” and “Digg” in the same sentence, this one excluded) to news. The latest effort in the life sciences, news.thinkgene.com space is actually not too bad, at least at first glance. The site is brought to you by the folks at Think Gene and allows you to vote on stories (not sure there is a down vote). As usual, I have not done sufficient stress testing with the site, but it’s simple enough to get started.
For starters, news.thinkgene.com automatically pulls in posts from the DNA Network into the recent tab, so at the very minimum, it’s allowing users to vote DNA Network stories up or down (although they need to do a better job with attribution instead of the generic “feeds.feedburner.com”. You can also submit your own favorite stories, and there are the obligatory site widgets etc.
So what’s missing? Well, community. Right now, the ranking really doesn’t mean anything because the number of votes is somewhat limited and the discussion is somewhat small. The reason FriendFeed is so attractive is that we have an active community there and getting a discussion going is easier than any other place I’ve been. new.thinkgene.com is a decent enough site, but to succeed, they definitely need to get a core set of active users, who submit content and participate, because without that, the other 99%, i.e. the consumers won’t come, and this is a challenge every such effort has.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think. Like, dislike, don’t care
Technorati Tags: news.thinkgene.com, social networking, wisdom of crowds
The shadow of Digg
Everyone wants to emulate Digg. I use Digg somewhat loosely here. Essentially, whether you’re in the tech world, or the science world, or some other, many services have tried to emulate the success of Digg, the poster child for bringing the impact of crowds (I refuse to use “wisdom” and “Digg” in the same sentence, this one excluded) to news. The latest effort in the life sciences, news.thinkgene.com space is actually not too bad, at least at first glance. The site is brought to you by the folks at Think Gene and allows you to vote on stories (not sure there is a down vote). As usual, I have not done sufficient stress testing with the site, but it’s simple enough to get started.
For starters, news.thinkgene.com automatically pulls in posts from the DNA Network into the recent tab, so at the very minimum, it’s allowing users to vote DNA Network stories up or down (although they need to do a better job with attribution instead of the generic “feeds.feedburner.com”. You can also submit your own favorite stories, and there are the obligatory site widgets etc.
So what’s missing? Well, community. Right now, the ranking really doesn’t mean anything because the number of votes is somewhat limited and the discussion is somewhat small. The reason FriendFeed is so attractive is that we have an active community there and getting a discussion going is easier than any other place I’ve been. new.thinkgene.com is a decent enough site, but to succeed, they definitely need to get a core set of active users, who submit content and participate, because without that, the other 99%, i.e. the consumers won’t come, and this is a challenge every such effort has.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think. Like, dislike, don’t care
Technorati Tags: news.thinkgene.com, social networking, wisdom of crowds