Silicon Alley Insider reports that Ask has just launched a news site called Big News in partnership with Digg that, from the looks of things, only partially incorporates social news functionality.
There were rumors just earlier this week that Digg was white labeling its technology for Ask. However, Big News is more akin to Google News or TechMeme than to Digg. The bulk of the news items collected and displayed from around the web are identified algorithmically, not socially.
Digg’s only clear influence on Big News shows up in the footer of the site, where you can view the current top five Diggs and five stories collected by Big News algorithmically that haven’t been Dugg yet. This real estate will help drive traffic to Digg and encourage the identification of interesting news stories. What does Ask get in return? That’s not altogether clear, although SAI hears that “Digg ratings factor into the site’s algorithm.”
Interesting partnership. Wonder who’s helping who?
So in other words, Ask is going to buy Digg.
I don’t get it. There’s nothing compelling about it, and I can’t see the differentiator. While I certainly think the online news space is huge and can handle multiple players, this seems like ‘just another social news site.’ Perhaps there’s a twist and I’m missing it??
Wouldn’t it make more sense for Ask to plug Bloglines instead of Digg?
lol @ Digg and “news”.
#3 check out a specifc news item’s BigPicture, which gives you a week’s worth of data for the news item, including #of blog posts and images per day for the item/topic. It’s pretty cool.
Also I meant to add, it gives you a bunch of digg posts on the topic too.
I agree with mr. Islam. Why would some want the option to read 500 articles on the same subject?
Isn’t tech supposed to make our lives easier?
Data overload helps no one. I prefer services that show only the important stories, top 10s, etc… Sites like nobosh
“Sites like…mine!” Genius.
If Ask is going to get some value out of this partnership they’d be well-served to apply their searching and filtering heuristics to the Digg-overload problem.
I dunno…seems to make sense to me. Ask is trying to establish itself as an alternative to Google News, et al, and this seems like a decent first step. I mean, you can’t tell me Google News or even CNN is any better these days. Thank god it’s not just another Digg clone.
I think thats what the number “BigFactor” they call it, means. It helps you figure out the top stories.
And for perspectives, I actually like the option (while I may never exercise it) to see lots of articles. After all if only one source truly produced the “real” news and without bias, shouldn’t we just have a state run news agency (hmmmm……).
Social editing-type features (most-emailed, most viewed, etc.) seem popular on mass-market news sites, but still isn’t clear that people want to engage with or even just read a horizontal social editing site. Newsvine’s numbers have been dropping (perhaps because of last year’s funky re-design, where they may have over-complicated the site with portal-like flexibility), and Digg’s expansion out of IT news just seems to have watered down the site.
Maybe the right formula is just around the corner, but until then it looks like social editing’s better matched to verticals.
Pre-cursor to more integration? Maybe a test-out-our-teamwork type thing?
Been using it for a few hours. I really like it. The BigPicture is a great way to see how a story unfolded and i like the mix of stories and the visual presentation. Ask is really on a roll.
No big team here.
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@11 - I see the point you are trying to make, but I don’t think anyone said only one source always produces the best (high quality/credible/unbiased) content. If there are 1 or 2 articles about a particular topic that are of higher quality than the other 98, why do we need to trawl through the rest? Of course, who decides which articles are higher quality? thats another topic altogether
#17: Yes I agree, trawling through lots of articles is no fun, but I still like the option or least the perception of choice. Also I found that you can do a search and use their filters to pick a view point (like Liberal) to sort through the results. Thats cool.
Yes, the point of view feature is cool. I think its pretty basic at the moment (someone has just categorized a source as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’). I think there can be some more innovation/creativity around this. Full disclosure: I’m working on a project that has some of this functionality, so I don’t want to sound too negative. Any innovation or changes in the news space is refreshing and welcome, and I think Ask BigNews does really well in some area, especially search (no coincidence!).
naturally i journeyed first thing to the tech part of the site. I like the idea of media being bundled with the news stories. However, as others have noted, it could get a hassle sifting through the stories.
The stories don’t seem to be broken down into nice clusters like techmeme or megite.
e.g the top story now is “News.blog: Apple slows iPod, iPhone production” , but when I expand, I’m seeing topics yes related to ipod and the iphone, but in a general sense…i would have liked to see stories about the ipod, iphone production….
but i guess thats a small thing….:)
and course, bignews is much larger than the tech section =]
I think ask.com has done a pretty good job overall with the site.
Wow, great deal for Digg.
I like the way it’s formated and integrated and it easy to read than Google news which i read all the time, the only negative is the news update late. I will give it more time to try , over all i like it and maybe stick to it in reading news.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
how many more aggregation sites are gonna popup ?