Aftonbladet rolls out social network for readers

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has soft launched a new community for users called Snack, Media Culpa reports.

It is hoped the site, which lets users share comments, images and videos, will be populated by readers acting under their own names rather than anonymous pseudonyms.

According to Media Culpa, the newspaper will soon open up commenting facilities across its online articles to encourage even more user interaction with the site.

Similar posts:

• Aftonbladet to offer readers social network style profiles
• Short-skirted woman sues newspaper commenter
• CMLP: Anonymity of online speakers protected in District of Columbia Court of Appeals
• Allvoices.com offers $10,000 reward for citizen journalists
• CNET relaunches GameSpot website

JEEcamp: pitch from Kyle McRae, ex-Scoopt

Entering the afternoon session at JEECamp, delegates have been invited to pitch their ‘journalism enterprise’ ideas to the floor.

Kyle McRae, who left photo agency Scoopt, which he founded, only a week ago, raised the idea of Qotz (working title), a community site, where online articles and content will be submitted and filtered on the basis of ‘pull quotes’.

The pull quote, says McRae, is the bait that draws the reader into an article and by tagging content in this way adds more value to the recommendation.

Content would then be searchable by pull quotes and categorised.

While suggesting the service would share similarities with Digg, McRae said there would be ‘no a-list bias’ e.g. no users would have more authority or privilege over others.

Answering a question on how Qotz would differ from del.ici.ous, he said: “del.ici.ous has limited value because it’s the same people recommending the same sites, without any real justification of why.”

Very much in its infancy, with McRae himself admitting he is 60/40 over whether this is a good idea (no indication of direction given) – but how useful would you find this?

Similar posts:

• JEEcamp: Kyle Macrae on Scoopt: We’re all entrepreneurs now
• Sarah Hartley: Help investigate local authority news coverage
• Life.com website launched
• Sun’s mobile barcodes attract 11,000 users
• Editor&Publisher: Top 30 news sites for September 2008