Mashable launches new personalised news service

Technology site Mashable has launched a new personalised news service: Mashable Follow.

Mashable founder Pete Cashmore says the move is part of a shift away from a “purely editor-driven news site” to becoming a “true news community that seeks to engage our readers in the news process”.

Beyond personalization, we believe that curation is the next great wave in news, and empowering our community to choose the news of the day is the ultimate aim of the Follow project.

Full story on Mashable at this link.

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CNET: Conde Nast’s Reddit goes open-source

Social news website Reddit has announced that it’s code will become open source this week under a Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) allowing developers to adapt the site and build new features.

The social news site was bought by publishing giant Conde Nast in 2006, this latest move is an attempt to move closer – in terms of traffic – to its bigger and more well known rivals Digg and Yahoo Buzz.

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Digital Journal launches revenue sharing for its citizen journalists

Digital Journal has relaunched its citizen journalism site, which now includes a revenue sharing initiative for citizen journalists.

Regular contributors to the site can now qualify for a share of the ‘moneypot’ made up from advertising revenue and the site has reportedly already paid out $38,000 to citizen journalists.

The initiative applies to news stories, rather than blogs, journals, groups, photos or video, and is calculated on the number of news stories each citizen journalist uploads rather than purely on the popularity of individual posts.

Citizen journalists who would like to be paid for their contributions must first have their work approved by the Digital Journal board to ensure they ‘have a solid understanding of spelling and grammar, and can show an ability to find and research relevant news.’

The move distinguishes the social news site from competitors such as Newsvine and Norg as the first online community to share a portion of revenue, albeit to a small percentage of its total users.

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Valleywag: Digg has secret editors

Hold onto your hats, this might get rough.

Valleywag says Digg co-founder Kevin Rose has admitted that his social news site, a supposedly democratic venue where users pick the headlines, employs moderators: “We have site moderators that ban spammers, remove illegal content, and keep an eye on things. Always have, always will.”

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