website.net.nz

Scoopit was a good idea … not a new idea but a good idea. It’s a useful aggregation of news stories that scoopit users think are important or newsworthy. That’s the idea at least, and that was the way it worked for the first few months but now unfortunately it is being abused.

The tagcloud now shows that the tag or keyword ‘macroeconomics’ is the most popular by a long shot. And as I write this the bulk of the stories on the front page are crap about the US financial market - all tagged with just ‘macroeconomics’.

And if you dig a little further you can see that all have been voted on by pretty much the same people (or at least the same usernames). Exibit I Exibit II

So the conclusion is some sort of organised campaign to populate scoopit with rubbish about ‘macro economics’.

You have to wonder why.

I think the folks over at scoop need to tighten things up a bit on scoopit before it becomes useless.

I think user driven content - especially media - is a good thing but the flipside is that it is very easy to abuse.

I think it would be good if scoopit users could vote things down and I think it’s time to do away with the anonymous voting.

Got an email from someone today alerting me to another brand new NZ digg style social news aggregator Linka.co.nz

A user driven social content site for New Zealanders by New Zealanders

Not sure if there’s room in NZ for two sites like this but who knows. I’ve added a link.

I personally don’t think linka is presented as well as scoopit, it’s missing the all important SOE URL rewrite mod, the linka / link language is a little clumsy and of course it doesn’t have the backing of scoop.co.nz so it’s a little hard to see how it will get the traction needed to be a real contender. But Who knows!…Good luck to them.