Thing 12: Do You Digg?

No.

So let me get this straight: once upon a time, librarians kept abreast of the news so that they'd know what their patrons were talking about when those patrons came in wanting to know more about what was in the headlines. And now, librarians can use Digg or Mixx or Newsvine to funnel all those news stories to them instead of taking the time to skim several newspapers and glance at CNN.

This sounds like a great idea, except that I don't see Digg and its siblings fulfilling the function that scanning newspaper headlines does. The patrons of way back when had already heard the news and wanted to know more. It looks like Digg, et al. are there to give you the news for the first time. Do libraries often get patrons in asking reference librarians what's going on? If so, wouldn't it just be simpler to point them toward the newspapers?

I understand that in a time-crunched world, people would appreciate a service that would push them just the most crucial news stories. It takes time to skim a newspaper and you can't really fast-forward through a current TV news broadcast. But I don't see that letting the masses determine what I should see is any less unbiased than leaving that judgment to editors; it's just different criteria and a different number of people that are involved.

It looks like you could get these "social news" sites customized to your preferences eventually, but they mostly seem designed for you to try to get people to validate your taste in news. I'm going to give Newsvine a try--it seems more oriented to news rather than entertainment. But I think this is going to be another Web 2.0 innovation that I can't find much use for personally and none professionally.