Efforts to conquer cyberspace unceasing

The balloons are hung, the flowers arranged, the nude mural painted. Now all Kimber Barrow needs is attendees for the Erotic Heritage Museum's first anniversary party.

For that, the Las Vegas museum's assistant art director is relying on the help of Newsvine, one of a growing number of social news Web sites.

Social news sites -- pioneered in the late '90s by fark.com and slashdot.org -- are Internet communities where people submit, discuss and comment on links to news stories, photos, videos, Web sites and anything else on the Internet. Most social news sites address a wide variety of topics, although some narrowcast.

For Barrow, these communities promise a major advantage over MySpace, Facebook and Twitter because of their potential to spread messages beyond a user's list of friends or followers.

"People don't have to know who you are," says Barrow, who uses Digg but prefers Newsvine because it allows users to post self-written stories.

"It's fabulous, because when I do my newsletter for the museum, I put it in as a column," Barrow says. "That way, it's going to anybody who happens to look up any of the keywords I put in."

Social news sites enjoy a mutually beneficial trade-off with traditional news sites; the social sites gain legitimacy, the traditional sites gain traffic. (Many newspaper sites, including reviewjournal.com, run a string of buttons along the bottom of their online articles, each of which automatically submits the article to a different site.)

What makes social news sites attractive to readers, however, is precisely what makes them tough to crack for marketers (and any content-provider with an agenda). Submissions are ranked by reader voting. The "crowd" principle holds that people with divergent points of view can make a better determination, collectively, of what's worth reading.

"I am incredibly convinced about the potential power of the crowd," says Larry Dailey, professor of journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. "When we get a group of motivated people together, they can indeed think of things that are more important than one or two newspaper or Web site editors might be able to think of under deadline."

Of course, this doesn't come close to describing what happened when Newsvine lit up for weeks in 2006 with an Associated Press story headlined "Cell Phones Found Inside Four Prisoners." (The illustration was a graphic X-ray.)

"It had the best comments in the history of the Internet," boasts Mike Davidson, Newsvine chief executive officer. (Dailey's response: "I'm not sure that these are stories people need to read in order to function better in a democratic society.")

Despite claims made by search-engine optimizers (companies that sell the promise of Web site traffic from a variety of Internet sources, including social news sites), complex algorithms are in place to prevent shortcuts around reader voting.

This may be why Las Vegas Disc Jockey Services owner John Dote calls social news sites "almost a waste of time." He has tried them to promote the Web pages he creates for his DJ business and recording studio. (It takes about an hour for Dote to create and submit each new page, the goal being for them to rank high on Internet searches for term combinations such as "Las Vegas" and "DJ.")

"You never get a front-page listing out of them," he says of Digg and the one or two other social news sites he has tried. "It always gets dumped on the third or fourth page."

Dote says he prefers working Google and MSN.

"Anything I put out on MSN, I can almost guarantee it'll be out there within 24 hours, at the very number one spot for whatever the key word is."

Barrow hasn't fared much better with social news sites. None of her submissions has appeared on Digg or Newsvine's front pages, or even garnered a single comment. Yet she remains optimistic. She says her dedication is generating "some" walk-in business.

"Not gigantic proportions," she says. "But I'm hoping as more people get to know about social news sites, the traffic will increase."

Barrow admits to hoping that some of that increase happens before tonight's party.

Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0456.

Social News Web sites