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The Evolution of Social News

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.