Unjournalism

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A recent Wall Street Journal article attempts to explain to old people how sites like Digg, Reddit and Newsvine work. It’s really a very good article — a great effort by a big, old, traditional media outlet to cover some of this wild stuff you crazy kids are up to on the Interwebs.

The Journal’s tireless reporters explain their process for identifying the top influencers at these sites:

To find the key influencers, The Wall Street Journal analyzed more than 25,000 submissions across six major sites. With the help of Dapper, a company that designs software to track information published on the Web, this analysis sifted through snapshots of the sites’ home pages every 30 minutes over three weeks. The data included which users posted the submissions and the number of votes each received from fellow users. We then contacted scores of individual users to find which ones are tracked by the wider community.

OK. So you worked your ass off. Good for you. But maybe you could have pulled your heads out of your stuffy Manhattan orifices…sorry, offices… for a second and recognized that you didn’t really need to do all that work. Digg used to post its top users — no research necessary! — on its site, but even after it took the list down, ten seconds of Google delivers the “key influencers.” Reddit? Same deal, but it still has its own stuff on its own site.

Way easier than sorting through 25,000 pieces of captured data. Noble effort, Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen, but if you tried getting in touch with what you’re writing about first, you would have found the info you wanted — fast and free — on the Interwebs.

Tags: journalism //