NPSC Blog

Russell Brown mentioned in his Listener column this week that Scoop have a social news site up. So I went in and snuck a peek. Bearing in mind that this is still in alpha, which means that there is still probably a good deal of work to be done to customize and refine the site, it is nevertheless a welcome development for a couple of reasons.

I am a big fan of Scoop. I like the fact that they have an extensive array of RSS feeds and that these feeds are updated with, at times, alarming speed. If you publish a media release at 2pm, you can expect to see it in your reader inside 30 mins (and I have often seen them up well inside that time). Which means that, for releases from the public sector, a feed (or better, multiple feeds) from Scoop pretty much guarantees delivery of all government news to your desktop within minutes of it being released. What’s the word for that again? Oh, yeah, priceless. Literally: it’s all free.

So what does Scoop It bring to the mix? It is a site for submitting and voting on news stories; much like Digg and Newsvine (Newsvine currently has a New Zealand section). Essentially, users submit stories to a queue and these are then voted on and promoted up the rank on to the homepage. Community driven editorial.

This particular type of social media is both incredibly popular (and Scoop It is a good indicator of how this is growing in New Zealand, Public Address’ recently launched System is another) and, from a communicators perspective, an excellent tool for tracking comment and conversation.

Agency X releases a statement. Someone submits it to Scoop It and it gets voted up to the front page. You can take an RSS feed to follow the items progress and track all of the comments that users append to the story. If you are so inclined, you could participate in the comments, enhancing the exchange and opening up what was a simple broadcast statement into a richer, more engaging conversation. Or not. But you have that option.

I think this is a terrific development. I know that it is going to make my job a lot more interesting. Your thoughts?

As the site is in alpha, I won’t offer any detailed assessment. It would be nice though, if there were a couple of functionality tweaks:

1. 2 screens to submit is 1 too many - simplify it down to 1 (or give me the option to disable the preview)
2. Release a Firefox extension so that it is fully integrated into my browser: the bookmarklet is a nice start, but I would like it to pre-populate the title and include any text I have selected as the summary - less typing for me.
3. Adding an RSS feed for comment threads would be gold.

Having said that, even at this stage it is a pretty impressive site. If you have any other suggestions, leave them in the comments or forward them directly to Scoop.

Update

Over the break, I changed the RSS feed over to Feedburner so if you have subscribed to the feed before Christmas you may need to update the address in your reader.