Now digg this
Some stories have become so popular so quickly that demand has degraded and even crashed Web servers operated by news publishers and bloggers.
Social bookmarking and social news sites — three of the more popular ones are del.icio.us, digg and reddit — are democratising the process of news distribution. It is consumers, not editors, who are deciding what constitutes the “front page”.
Web users are unearthing news items that would never make it onto the front page of newspapers or become the lead item on television news, but which quickly become the most-read stories on social news sites.
At lunchtime on Monday this week, for instance, the most popular item of the previous 24 hours on digg was a video clip from CNN of eccentric US businessman Donald Trump saying that George W Bush is “probably the worst president in the history of the US”.
Content can either be accessed via the Web (sites such as digg and reddit link to the original content source) or accessed at any time, on any device, using Web feeds delivered by way of a system called Really Simple Syndication.
Local social news sites are also starting to appear, though they are still in their infancy. Muti ( http://www.muti.co.za ) has content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa.
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