THE NEXT WAVE OF (WEB 1.5) SOCIAL NEWS WEBSITES

Recent studies are showing the emergence of a new kind of social Web 1.5 news sites exploiting a new trend on the internet. These sites are so simple and basic that many web Entrepreneurs ignore them almost entirely. I call them Web 1.5 because they are in between the Web 1.0 sites where there was no user contribution and Web 2.0 sites which rely almost entirely on user input.

A recent poll revealed that most internet users (97%) are “consumers” as opposed to “producers” (3%). The “consumers” are the people who actively use the internet to look for content, be it text, video or images. The “producers” on the other hand are those who find or produce content and upload it on the internet.

The success stories of such Web 2.0 sites as Digg.com and Reddit.com has helped produce numerous clones which end up being unsuccessful since they are all competing for the 3% content “producers” who actively upload news stories and then vote for them.
The successful ones (Digg and Reddit) are succeeding because they serve the Technology oriented niche which, though small, tend to be more of the “producer” category.

This leaves a huge market of about 97% of the “consumers” who are actively seeking information of various topics but do not necessarily contribute the content. A new form of social news websites is emerging to serve these people and some of them are getting very successful.

Two popular examples are Topix.net and Minnesotabuzz.com, news aggregators mainly concentrating on local news. Topix.net is a national site which collects news from thousands of news sources from all over the country and categorizes them by city and zip code. They use crawling technology and human editors to sift through the thousands of links they get.

Minnesotabuzz.com is a smaller version of news aggregator concentrating on local news from Minnesota. They scan hundreds of news sources in Minnesota and choose the most interesting and relevant news stories and present them in an impressive format on the website. They also have an easy to use comments section for the readers to put their comments, making it more interactive. Readers can contribute their own news links to the site too. They even offer a free classified section.

These new Web 1.5 sites are also acting as a news archive to preserve older news links which people may be interested in. This model is proving to be very successful because they serve many people who seek information but not necessarily apt to contributing content. The readers love the sites for easy access to news links from many sources while the news sources love them for driving readers to their websites.

This may be the next wave of social networking sites and creative entrepreneurs may be able to do very well with these kinds of local news aggregator sites.