Amidst the CNN fails and the realtime wins of the current situation in the Iran election, one thing has proven true – again. People, not press, are today’s predominant (and quickest) news-sharers, swiftly taking the powerful position of deciding “what makes the news” out of major news outlet’s hands.
Hardly a year ago, the share-centric ideas behind the realtime web were only starting to make sense. However, the legitimacy of the press-to-people power trade was a bit of a sore subject - because in most cases, online sharing was simply the web equivalent of gossiping. This ruffled feathers for obvious reasons, raising a decidedly fair question: Since when have gossips been a legitimate source of information?
The answer is both “Never” and “Always.” Then again, that never stopped people from talking – and furthermore, it never stopped other people from listening. So is there power in gossiping? Heck yeah – and people can’t get enough of it. Of course, today’s version of the town crier exists on places like Twitter, Digg and Del.icio.us, where millions of links are passed from user to user every hour. Pleasantly, a decent chunk of online banter references its point of inspiration in the form of an embedded, informative link that, when mined, provides a natural safety guard to the clothesline-style dishing that newsrooms seemed to fear (we use this approach at OneRiot).
There is a tendency for the information shared in each environment to relate to the inherent preferences of its users.
However, microblogging and sharing services have recently begun experiencing another classic side of gossip: the tendency for the information shared in each environment to relate to the inherent preferences of its users. Just like in the real world, people tend to congregate in online spaces where like-minded individuals come to connect. A study by Harvard recently uncovered that even in diversely populated places like Twitter, 10% of all users create 90% of the shared content. This creates a great platform for mining the information that this 10% cares so much about, but when it comes to extricating a comprehensive view of socially relevant information from that small sample, it’s impossible.
This clique-ing of information happens everywhere, and within every online community. Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon – each set of users has a fairly defined inclination to get excited about very particular things. What this means for information-hunters is that the realtime scoop they seek within specific online spaces tends to deliver only when that site’s users share their interests. This is why the melding of unique sharing ecosystems plays a crucial role in trying to make sense of this new approach to news-gathering – that is, finding the information you want within it. After all, the realtime web is the realtime web, not the realtime Friendfeed, or the realtime “x”, but a mix of all of those services and more. Sure, we caught on to the significance of what was happening in Iran – but is there a chance we’ve missed other situations of equal importance, simply because no one in our favorite social media setting was talking about them? Absolutely.
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