When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace all those months ago I really wondered what he had in mind for the social networking site beyond raking in ad revenue and acquiring an established - if somewhat anti-corporate - community.
Well perhaps one part of the puzzle is revealed today as MySpace announces the launch of a news portal, news.myspace.com.
According to Techcrunch:
"Like Google news, MySpace news will pull news items from a number of trusted sources via their RSS feeds. The news items will then be organized into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories including sports, politics, style, and technology. The order of the news items will be determined by user voting, taking into account the freshness of the news. Users can vote on each item of news with a ranking of 1-5. Higher ranked and higher voted items will appear at the top of each category."
So far, so good. A Google News meets Digg mash-up. But if you read on what seems a pretty anodyne service at face value actually shows real potential to become a rather powerful force in global media.
Arrington continues:
"Down the road we can probably expect users to be able to submit news items directly."
This is possibly the most significant piece of information about a MySpace News portal. With this, the site stops being a Google/Digg re-hash mash-up and starts becoming a potentially significant user generated news site.
Of course, on one level it would be little different from the Korean UGC news site Ohmynews. With Murdoch's mighty resources behind it, however, surely more can be expected?
I might even go as far as to say that there could come a point when MySpace News will challenge other, more traditional online news outlets such as the BBC which for the most part has a superb online news offering and ultimately remains unchallenged by sites like Google News.
However, in my opinion at least, the BBC's online news offering has shown its limitations over the past few days with the horrific events in Virginia in the USA.
As news of the shootings was breaking, the BBC made its usual appeal for anyone with images or first-hand experiences to email or text the site.
But in an an online environment where self-publishing and distributing content has never been easier, why would people go to the trouble of sending their exclusive material to someone else to re-publish? Surely they will stick it on their own blog or Flickr or YouTube account?
And this is the potential that MySpace news could well exploit. MySpace is a growing network which provides pretty much anyone with a platform to publish text, images, audio and video.
MySpace will offer UGC on a huge scale. With a built-in news portal to siphon off stories for publication and distribution we could be seeing the beginnings of a Murdoch UGC media empire - or am I getting ahead of myself?
Technorati tags: MySpace; Ruper+Murdoch; UGC; user+generated+content; Google+News; Digg; BBC; Techcrunch
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