Leave it to a blog on the Guardian's comment is free to be the first "mainstream media" report I've seen to make the proper distinction between "social news" sites (like reddit) and "social bookmarking" sites (like del.icio.us)*. Hurrah!
Dan Kennedy's recent piece, From the Daily Me to the Daily We, certainly makes a nice plug for NewsTrust (I'm evidently woefully out of touch, as I hadn't heard of them before) but it also addresses the nagging issue I've had with the PEJ report and have already blogged about too many times.
The study examined Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us, each of which operates somewhat differently. Digg and Reddit let users vote up or down on stories submitted by users. Del.icio.us is a social-bookmarking site: the more people who bookmark a particular site, the higher it rises in the rankings.Now, if only we could get this explained on TechCrunch -- then everyone would be saying it.
There was another heartening quote in this piece, that came from the PEJ director himself, Tom Rosensteil: "I think that to some extent websites like Digg and Reddit represent something really meaningful."
Dan & Tom, I'd like to send you reddit shirts. Hopefully this will be more successful than my attempt to clothe Andrew "[reddit] is particularly inane and dangerous" Keen.
*Bored readers will be interested to know that I nearly ran out of quotation marks in this sentence.
