Diigo Comment Bashes Yahoo News – Free Speech or Vandalism?

August 10th, 2006  |  Published in Emergent Tactics  |  2 Comments

Seems like 9.8 of out 10 days Yahoo users are treated to pure data-driven-to-the-lowest-common-denominator content in the feature video news area. It’s understandable that some users might be annoyed. Anyhow, I’m not writing to complain about Yahoo’s editorial policy.

I’m more interested in the comments associated with Yahoo’s homepage by a Diigo user. This is a unique and fast emerging example of an informal reputation system.

It sure is a wierd gray area. When you go to Yahoo, a small icon appears on the Diigo toolbar indicating that there are public comments for that page. Click on the icon, and the Diigo comments pop up in a separate browser window. The comments are hosted on Diigo’s server.

Is it vandalism? I don’t think so.

Diigo is potentially very useful as a research tool. The value of useful comments may someday outweigh the kind of strangeness pictured above. Let’s hope that in the interim the folks that fear strangeness don’t sue.

Wouldn’t be a fun lawsuit for a emerging small business with a slick new tool…

Props to Slacker Manager for boosting Diigo. I like it. [tags]Diigo comments, reputation systems[/tags]

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  1. Maggie says:

    August 11th, 2006 at 11:52 am (#)

    Hi Jeffrey,

    Thanks for your support for Diigo. At Diigo, we believe in allowing ordinary users a chance to voice their opinions. We also believe that it is equally important to uphold the quality of the discourse, through various measures such as community driven rating, filtering, and spam control.

    As a part of our fair use policy, we want to set a high standard for a public page comment or a public sticky note: if it is commercially motivated, it is considered a spam, and unless it adds something informative and substantive to the associated webpage, it is considered junk. Both junk and spam will be filtered out.

    We will continue rolling out tighter and tighter spam control measures. Together with our members’ active participation and help, we will try to make Diigo a really awesome place for all to enjoy!

    ~ Maggie

  2. Jeffrey says:

    August 15th, 2006 at 12:03 pm (#)

    Maggie,

    Thanks for the thoughtful response.

    I’ve been working with Diigo for a few more days now and I’m happy with it. Maybe I’m just learning to incorporate social bookmarking into my work, but maybe it’s your tool. What I’m trying to say is that I used del.icio.us for many months previously, and experienced a big jump in bookmarking when I switched to Diigo. Not sure why…

    An unrelated question is how do you monitor the internet for comments related Diigo? I’m guessing it’s a combination of referrer logs, emails from friends, and most importantly RSS feeds tied into search tools. I’m still learning these methods and I’d love to know how you do it.

    Thanks again!

    Jeff

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