Advance Internet, my old employer, has mashed up one of its news sites, OregonLive, with its social editing tool, Reddit, to create a nice new feature: the readers edit. Digg, upon which Reddit is modeled, is wildly popular but also accused of being too tech-driven. Here is a chance to see whether local news can work with social editing. I hope it can, for this gives us another window on the news. No, it doesn’t replace editors, but it does check editors and tell them what people care about; it also enables people to find more stories than editors have time to find.
A week ago, I noted that Kevin Rose of Digg said they would go into social recommendations of not just news but products, services, restaurants, images. Here’s a chance to see whether newspapers can get there first.