Thursday, April 19, 2007

MySpace News & Digg

News Corp. launched MySpace News today. The new service allows users to vote on their favorite articles (like Digg), but at this point users will not be able to add their own news stories. Instead, MySpace will aggregate the news from other sources (like Google News).

It will be interesting to see the response of Digg. Digg allows users to both vote on their favorite articles AND upload their own news. Digg allegedly refused to sell to News Corp. when Rupert Murdoch refused to put up the $150M target price, so there's obviously some contention between the two.

This gets back to the whole discussion of the value of blogging. Digg allows users full control, whereas MySpace News will control the content. I personally would turn to Digg when I want to be amused and I'm not as concerned with the validity of the source. However, when it comes to news, I think the MySpace News model is better because MySpace has to ensure the validity of its content in order to maintain its reputation.

No comments: