The Vocal Nation Blog

Over the past few months I've been working on a big overhaul for Vocal Nation.  These additions have moved Vocal Nation a lot closer towards the original vision I had for the site.  While Version I was more of a community blog, Version II has developed into an social-news website, with a stronger emphasis on voting and the ability to filter your stream of news.

Here are some of the more notable additions:

Feed Digestion: Content from your favorite websites can now be automatically added to Vocal Nation via feed-digestion, just like feed reader.  All you have to do is enter the site's RSS feed address.  Of course, the typical manual submission is still available for submitting individual stories.

Hybrid Search: The site now combines a traditional keyword-based search with ratings for a unique kind of human-powered search.  You can also now search within categories, regions, and feeds.

Customize Your Info Stream: Want to exclude all but your favorite feeds?  How about just including the best postings from the last hour?  Want to just see postings from New Zealand, China, Iraq?  The new site's flexible interface lets you slice the data anyway you want so you can delve deeper and customize your news stream.  

Browse your Friends' Favorite Postings: Curious what your friends have been enjoying?  Check out their profile page to see their highest ranked postings.

The World Map: The site's world map has also been overhauled and now operates alot better.  The map is a great way to get an overview of stories and opinions from across the globe.

As always, feedback is appreciated, so let me know how it goes.  Thx.

Google's mission is stated as "to organize the worlds information".  In my opinion, it is upon this aim that all informational / research websites succeed or fail.  For example, Wikipedia sought to organize information through a wiki/encyclopedic format.  Flickr's success was due to its organization (and easy sharing) of photos, as was YouTube with video.  In a similar theme, Vocal Nation seeks to organize and democratize the world's news and opinions.

Despite the Internet's short history, there have already been some great attempts at revolutionizing how people get their news.  With the advent of RSS feeds, Feed Readers like Google Reader and BlogLines, were a huge step forward in the way they aggregated all you favorite news sources from across the web into one centralized point.  Meanwhile social-news sites like Slashdot, Digg, and Newsvine demonstrated the ability of the crowd to collectively determine the ranking of content.   Since the web 2.0 surge of new startups, there have been swarms of social-news sites hoping to capitalize the ideas of these predecessors.  But none of them have been able to carry the ranking of social news beyond just a system based on the number of votes.

Today's version II release of Vocal Nation attempt to bring social-news to the next level.  It breaks the mold of Digg-style of voting, incorporates the strengths of feed readers, and wraps it in a responsive interface that users to customize their news stream.  

I just got back from the OSCON (a yearly convention for open source software), where I sat in on a session called Shaping the Web Future of the Newspaper.  It was basically an open discussion between the techies that run the online editions of the major papers around the country (N.Y. Times, Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, etc).  While a lot of ground was covered, the underlying theme was that these entrenched dailies are loosing ground due to the sweeping changes occurring throughout the web.  Their profits margins are shrinking as more readers shift towards the web, and they feel that if they don't adapt quickly to this strange new media, they'll may be out of business in the next ten to twenty years.  Personally I'm sure there will always be a place for this traditional journalism, simply because it serves such an important function within society.  But it's role is certainly shifting.  I'd like to touch on a couple of the major points discussed.  

Firstly, a break seems to be occurring between the breaking of news stories and their distribution.  More people are getting news through aggregator websites, through RSS feed-readers, or filtered & spun through the blogging community.  This distributed nature of the web is particularly threatening to these papers who have no idea how to monetize their content when it's spread this way across the web.  The conversation became heated when this become a conversation on APIs, a feature that one of the reps said would never happen on his paper.  I personally feel that this is extremely short-sited, as advertising can be passed through the API embedded within the content.   This is FeedBurner’s strategy, who must be on the right track since they were just purchased by Google for around $100 million.

Another central theme was a fear of loosing journalistic integrity and objectivity in news sources due to the rise of blogging.  I strongly agree that the major dailies provide an essential service to society by dedicating huge resources to in-depth reporting to break these stories, and editors to uphold standards.  While there is a trend in cable news towards more superficial content (like all the Paris Hilton stories), institutions such as the New York Times and Washington Post are sticking to their guns, and reporting the facts.  Interestingly, these two papers may be regarded as respectively left and right leaning by traditional sources, but they are both pretty moderate when compared to the highly polarized opinions presented in blogosphere.

A few questions to ponder: Is the wide range of opinions from across the blogosphere complimenting these traditional sources? Do they just dilute and distort the discussion but putting a spin on every issue?  Are these old news institutions doomed to failure in the wake of Web2.0 news sites like NewsVine and independent journalists like TPM Muckraker?  Do these old school institutions really present a moderate, objective view?  Does the highly edited and controlled process of traditional news censor and limit the discussion, or is it an essential part of accurate reporting?

Things have been pretty busy at my real job lately,   but I finally got a chance this weekend to roll out some of new features that have been in the works.  

Firstly, some of you had requested the ability to edit your existing postings. You can now find an edit link below each of your postings. (Eventually I'd like to add wikipedia style version tracking too, but that's low on the list of priorities right now).

The "Add a New Posting" process has also been improved, and should allow you to add content a lot quicker.  You can now add links to external webpages that you find interesting, and link to videos instead of just embedding them.  

One of the biggest new changes is the hierarchy of categories has been flattened.  This was done largely to make adding new postings easier, but also because the old multi-level category system was not really practical (some of the subcategories should have belonged in multiple parent categories, a lot of subcategories didn't have much content, etc).

As it goes with programming, there are likely to be some glitches that come along with the changes, so please let me know if anything's not behaving right.

As a way to keep contributors aware of people responding to their postings, the site now lets you watch entries via email or RSS feeds. Just click the subscribe link on right sidebar of the posting you want to watch, and you'll be able to easily keep track of all the new replies.