Noticed this little, Digg-style feature on The Times website this morning. In the milieu of my general antipathy to the way newspapers are running their online operations, this rates as a resounding ‘meh’. Most newspapers already have a ‘most read’ or ‘most commented’ feature or some such gay equation running on their site as it is, and this is just more of the same thing. While it has the superficial sheen of a typical Web 2.0 social bookmarking thingumajig, it is still proprietary and inward looking – offering the appearance of feedback, but actually doing nothing of the sort. There’s no ‘do not recommend’ feature, most obviously.
I suppose this might get interesting if feedback like this was used to create to a user-led frontpage, where the most read and recommended stories made the front page, but as so much editorialising in the mainstream media is about Control and Maintaining Party Lines I can’t ever see that happening.
If you’re going all “social media” and “user interaction” on us, do it properly and stick a big “Digg this” button on it like everyone else does.