Social News Networks and their validity

I haven’t posted for a while. I am beginning to slow down as we head into Christmas and school here finishes for summer holidays. I have one more presentation to give at a conference next week then a end of year report for work hopefully followed by some time off over Christmas.

I was reading this morning an article about the validity of social news networks. This article was referring to the popular site digg.com. Personally, I love digg and the way it allows users to decide what stories are worth reading. However, as this article states – these networks are being thrashed by corporation who pay readers to submit stories about their product and therefore creating an environment where certain products get much more attention than others. Apparently, paying a group of readers to digg stories, therefore creating more attention for your product is much cheaper than traditional online advertising!! Digg execs state that they have this under control and systems in place to stop these actions.

However, it does make me wonder how these types of networks are going to evolve in the coming years and if they will be able to defeat the corporate world. Furthermore, it raises issues of how we educate children to understand the power and therefore the validity of these networks. I think it once again is another example of how we need to be teaching students to critically think about the information they are consuming. What are the underlying basis of the infomration we receive – even on something like digg that has been designed as an area controlled by everyday users. I think it is important to remember that we live in a world that will use the way we engage in this new information environment in many different ways, all of which we may not approve of.

technorati tags:digg, brettmoller

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