Have Digg and Netscape reinvented a Yahoo! News feature?
For I don't know how long, Yahoo! News has provided the means to rate (aka recommend) news stories. It's not a simple "thumbs up/down" but a five-star scale. At the top of each topic page at Yahoo! News you can find links to "Most emailed," "Most viewed," and "Most recommended."The most recommended stories bubble to the top at several places (along with their respective RSS feeds):
- All news stories
- All news photos
- World News
- Business News
- Entertainment News
- Sports News
- Technology News
- Political News
- Science News
- Health News
- Opinion
What if the Y! News team woke up and smelled the excitement around social media sites Digg.com and the new Netscape and realized clustering the above list would be a huge offering? Unfortunately, their latent blog makes me think they will not be waking anytime soon. That's such a shame since there's so much Y! News traffic already and most probably aren't aware of this social media opportunity.
Some tweaks would really make it competitive, such as
- viewing ratings on a user's profile as you would Y! Local Reviews
- enabling blog posts (currently included yet separated from news in search) to be rateable
Frankly, I prefer the "Most viewed" perspective since it really relates to what people are interested in without requiring them to make a recommendation. And it may be the people who take the time to rate stories have different interests than those of us who won't bother with it.
Disclosure: This blog is run by the folks at Netscape and I'm a big Yahoo! fanboy. So there.
