Slashdot Mirror
Social News Sites Pay Top Submitters
prostoalex writes "With the proliferation of social news sites relying on users to submit and vote for content, quite a few of newcomers to the industry face the need to pay top submitters or hire people away from other social news sites, the Washington Post reports. The phenomenon has also led to the appearance of the surfing jobs, where people are paid mostly to surf the Web and find out new links." From the article: "The system depends on a steady stream of contributors like Spring. Last month, Netscape said it would be the first to pay the most active contributors -- $1,000 a month to post at least 150 stories during that time to its newly redesigned Web site. The job qualifications are rather fuzzy, but an executive said active 'navigators' or 'social bookmarkers' provide a valuable service because they keep the site's content varied and fresh."
Is this the start of a new type of journalism?
No. It's much the same as it ever was since the newswires popped up. Your average daily newspaper is composed of hundreds of stories straight of the AP. The news editor's job is to fill up the pages with both original content contributed by the newspaper's own writing staff, as well as to place the newswire stuff to fill the blanks. Newspaper editors also get to paraphrase newswire articles (much the same as doing a writeup for a blog) when the article itself is deemed to long and boring; but they can also edit down (or fluff up) AP pieces. The latter is not an option for blogs, since they don't have a license to distribute altered content - the newspaper have licenses from the newswires to cut up pieces.
So, no, these people would ordinarily be called 'editors' in journalism, though of the chimpy, intern-like status where they can't be trusted to actually edit pieces, just pick them out.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Exactly how does digg.com give you spyware?
It doesn't, Alexa get their stats from the Alexa Toolbar, which is spyware (and IE only). All a higher ranking for digg tells you that more digg users have this spyware installed, and run IE, than slashdot users
While he definitely did do that for a while, he appears to have stopped.
Almost as though he were listening to us - or perhpaps, he really was being paid or otherwise favoured by the editors...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Alexa's tracking software is usually considered to be spyware. And don't tell me that the submitters to digg are journalists by nature when I find stories like this, this, and this as a few of the most popular stories in their respective categories. I go to digg to see a barrage of news stories and read the comments because I have nothing better to do sometimes. I go to slashdot to read (usually) insightful conversations. I've never seen a comment on /. that read 'LOL' or 'agreed'. And don't tell me their comment system is perfect if you can only have a conversation which goes one thread deep. It makes for some fairly confusing conversations and retards who don't know how to hit a 'reply' button. And, finally, I believe digg wasn't mentioned because digg is not currently paying their top submitters, and that is what this article is about.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Nope, it's the same as always. Look at the second link ("for more pictures and information, yadda yadda"), it still points to his blog, containing copy-pasted stuff from other sites.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Odd question, but... does anyone know where a guy might apply/acquire one (or two or three) such jobs?
I could greatly use supplimental income. Especially since it's basically something I already do...
If you're really interested then you should check an article in the current, Sept 2006, issue of "Business 2.0 magazine. In the print edition the title is "Blogging For Dollars" but the online one is titled Blogging for Big Bucks.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Roland has not stopped; he has two stories on the front page today!