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This is not my personal blog; nor, is it JD’s. It’s starting to feel like it, though. We need contributors, and in order to satisfy that end, perhaps we need to expand the mission of this blog a little further. You may not have thought it was possible, but I assure you; it is.
Our first and primary mission was to highlight those stories on Digg that, for one reason or another, did not make the front page. It was a result of being frustrated at and confused by an obscure algorithm that no one could even begin to understand. How does one story get picked over another? Is the decision to promote one piece over another truly being crowdsourced?
Through our posts we highlighted apparent flaws in Digg’s algorithm, its system design, and its community. Not satisfied with that and feeling rebellious, JD decided to highlight the utter crap that managed to be promoted to Digg’s homepage. Thus, even from its earliest days, this blog’s mission has always been two fold:
1) To highlight those stories that may have deserved to have gone popular.
2) To highlight the garbage that manages to become popular, but should really have not.
Mostly, we added human intellect and judgment to the selection of stories to go popular that Digg’s algorithm could not.
Not too long into this blog’s life (late June), we expanded its mission. All social news sites were included into our purview. If a story didn’t hit the homepage of a site, we sought to investigate why. The same went for stories that did go popular, but should not have. Unfortunately, this part of the mission had mixxed success. We did not seem to attract many users from Propeller, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, etc. Perhaps, that was our fault. Maybe we didn’t promote our mission well enough; maybe we needed to make it more appealing to blog here. Given all the recent issues surrounding Mixx’s front page, spammers, and its growth, it certainly wasn’t due to a lack of fuel for posts here.
The above mentioned part of our mission is still on. If you’re a user from another site and find yourself dissatisfied with the promotion of content there (for whatever reason), let us give you a platform to express that.
Now, on to the newest part of our mission - I am longwinded today, so bear with me 
For one we’re going to expand the scope of content we review. We started with writing, but now it’s time to move into audio, video and photography, which are making up an ever increasing portion of the web. Are you an active user on LastFM, StumbleAudio, Youtube, MySpace, flickr, or any of the like? True, these sites are not front page driven and don’t fit the typical Digg-esque model. But, how often do you see mainstream media outlets overlook quality bands and artists because they don’t fit the “mainstream ideal”? They don’t have the right “look.” They’re sound is not “radio friendly.” (exactly what killed Rock and Roll, no?)
Find and highlight those artists. Give them the recognition and exposure that social media can give and mainstream media can not.
Second, we’re looking to expand offline. We need people who are willing to review mainstream news, both online and off. Remember, our mission is two-fold. We highlight both quality content that did not go popular and crappy content that did. Did you see Fox, CNN, the NY Times, etc. relegate a story to an obscure part of their site that perhaps deserved much more exposure than that? Did you see something on their front page that made you stop and go “what the fuck!?” in a bad way? Or how about your local papers? Even if the content is not online, you can scan it and upload it to the web and highlight their editorial inefficiency.
Of course, we understand that some of you already blog elsewhere. No problem. Write posts for us and feel free to leave a link back to your personal blog. We love to drive web traffic elsewhere. That’s what social media blogs do. While mainstream media attempts to monopolize it’s audience, we share and share alike!
If you think I missed anything or have any ideas and/or suggestions, email me. Or even if you have questions. We need your help.
