WWS309

Rojo's slogan boasts that it provides "your news, your way." It offers users the ability to share specific stories or RSS feeds (i.e. blog feeds, which are like subscribing to a specific blog and having each entry fed into your customized web page) and allows them to share those stories and feeds with friends and other members of their "social network." It also allows users to tag and comment on news stories, which facilitates discussion and can provide users with unique perspectives from people they care about.

Rojo was recently taken out of a beta version that I had participated in and was launched to the general public on April 22, so many of its features have just been added or improved in recent weeks. Here’s a look at its new interface:

And here’s a list of some of the most interesting features highlighted on Rojo’s tour, along with my comments about each:

Tagging: Lets you use a keyword to categorize a story--a tag is just a keyword that can be applied to an object, such as a blog post. Story tags are useful in a couple ways. First, by tagging a story you can easily keep track of it and return to it later. But most interestingly, you can view tags from your contacts and from all Rojo users to see what's capturing people's attention. Tags used more often appear in larger fonts, and those used less often appear smaller.
Flag: Lets you save stories for your own use or for later reference. This function is similar to the tagging feature, but allows users to assign a story a greater degree of importance, rather than simply assign it to a category.
Email a Story: Lets you email stories to anyone. Many major news sites now feature this capability (often in the form of a small link at the bottom of a news story that offers to ‘send this link to a friend’), but Rojo is specifically designed to facilitate such referrals.
Share comments: Lets you comment on and share stories with your Rojo contacts. This innovative yet simple feature essentially allows users to jot down notes and commentary on any particular article and share those comments with friends by posting or passing along their annotated copy.
Frequent Feeds: Jeff Clavier observes in his blog that “Right now [Rojo’s frequent feeds] are wired to any explicit gestures you make: clicking on the story link, flagging, tagging, emailing, or clicking the feed itself. Each click or action produced a vote for attention, generating an interactive list of the top 20 feeds.” This is particularly interesting in the context of your social network, as you can see what news items are most popular among your friends and contacts even if they have not specifically tagged, commented, or referred and news to you.
Rojo Buzz: as Rojo’s web site states, this feature allows users to "See what your feeds are linking to" to “quickly identify links and stories that you shouldn't miss.” Your “feeds” are the RSS feeds (i.e. news sites or blog that you subscribe to), so this feature allows you to view the news that your own favorite news sources seems to consider the most noteworthy, as reflected in their links.
Rojo Wizard: lets people specifically find feeds that their contacts subscribe to by topic or publisher and then group them using the Rojo tag system.
Shared Stories: Lets you view the stories that your contacts have explicitly shared with you. The default view shows you the most recently shared stories from all your contacts. By sharing stories, your contacts can see what stories you think are important, and vice versa.
Comments from Contacts: When you or your contacts share stories, you can add comments to them. Any comments will show up just beneath the story content in the expanded story view.
Recommended Stories: these are stories that Rojo thinks will be interesting to you, which will be influenced and refined by what your contacts are reading. This feature is a combination of Frequent Feeds and your own preferences as indicated by the personal profile that you create and the type of news you often read within Rojo.

One particularly noteworthy feature of Rojo that is not highlighted in its tour is its privacy controls, which allows users to decide what they want to share and what they don't want to share: their subscriptions, their profile, their contacts, their tags, their comments.

This is similar to the closed blogging feature of Yahoo’s new Yahoo360 service. Yahoo 360 allows users to “share as much as you want with whomever you want.” In other words, Yahoo360’s highly specific privacy settings lets users limit access to their blog to a select group of friends or contacts within their social network, thereby giving bloggers more control over who can read their blog and providing a higher level of comfort and “security” when creating content.

The Yahoo360 site is still in beta so you’ve got to receive an invitation before you can sign up, but if anyone would like to check it out, just email me (aludwigATprinceton.edu) and I’ll send you an invitation from my account. I myself owe my own invitation to Charlene Li at Forrester Research.

Interestingly, though, Rojo does not actively encourage its users to create their own content that they might refer to friends and contacts, like Yahoo360 does. Is this an oversight, a perception of a lack of demand for such a service, or an indication that Rojo’s creators feel that such user-generated content (as opposed to user-filtered content) may dilute the effectiveness of their service by degrading the quality of news and information being passed through it? Of course, Rojo does allow users to subscribe to any RSS feeds that they chose, so users could hypothetically subscribe to their own outside blog then refer their blog to contacts through Rojo. So the lack of emphasis on user-generated content within Rojo is most likely due to Rojo’s decision to focus purely on socially organizing, distributing, and filtering news, rather than creating new content.

As Jeremy Zawodny notes in his blog, Rojo is essentially based on a human aggregation model (rather than the computer-driven news aggregators such as Google News). This allows users to filter news through their friends, rather than an algorithm. Such a social networking system may even serve as a substitute for editorial decisions, as the collective opinions of peers, friends, co-workers, et cetera point you toward the news that is most relevant to your "world." This social “editorial process” is particularly promising in the case of blogs.

As Aaron Brown remarked during our visit to CNN, “blogging in its current form lacks any kind of editorial process or oversight.” However, blogs within the context of a social network (such as those networks of contacts within Rojo) provide credibility through personal contacts and reputations in the same way that social networking sites such as Friendster have attempted to use trusted friends as a filter for online dating and LinkedIn has used trusted contacts as a conduit for business referrals and employment. Rather than subscribing to a particular magazine, author, or editor, users of Rojo can essentially subscribe to a network of trusted contacts in which they may both actively participate (by commenting and sending news to friends) and passively consume (by reading what others in their social network are interested in). In this way--through socially networked distribution systems--people can regain some of the trust that they’ve lost in the news media.

This form of networked media consumption will increase the personal relevance of news, but some may argue that it also undercuts the function of news as supportive of democracy by filtering an individual’s news stream too narrowly. In the same way that Cass Sunstein expresses concern over the creation of the “Daily Me,” a network system dominated by very tight cliques may create a fragmented news environment in which there is no shared background of information, no common knowledge upon which to base democratic political discourse.

But if networks include just a few bridges between diverse groups (and most do), common threads of information sufficient for political discourse will pass through these networks. And while current research on social networks does indicate that people have some tendency to cluster based on homophily (i.e. people have some tendency to associate and communicate with others similar to themselves) , a greater degree of clustering occurs around geographic foci, where users currently subscribe to local publications such as city or campus news dailies. The presence of these dailies, which have been around for centuries, has not discouraged or the coverage and discussion of national news or preempted the presence of national news media such as a CNN, and there is no reason to believe that socially networked news aggregators/filters will have any drastically different effects.

While news distributed through Rojo is more likely to be filtered, it is also more likely to reduce information overload and bring readers' attention to relevant news that they would have otherwise over looked if a friend had not noticed it and passed it along. In this way, systems like Rojo may actually broaden the potential scope of media consumption, providing users with a greater breadth of information and sources than ever before. Any blog or small newspaper with something worthwhile to say can spread its information as rapidly as a major publication. For example, a relatively obscure tech news blog, “Boing Boing,” already has 4174 subscribers through Rojo, compared to 557 subscribers to the New York Times editorial page.

Perhaps a more apt comparison than Sunstein’s “Daily Me” would be Robin Good’s fictional “Googlezon” or “Newsbotster”—“a social news network and participatory journalism platform that ranks and sorts news, based on what each user’s friends and colleagues are reading and viewing and allows everyone to comment on what they see.” (sounds a lot like Rojo)

Unlike in Good’s mockumentary, however, it appears that the New York Times may not be standing still as digital media platforms began to gain ground and steal readers away from more traditional media sources. Len Apcar, editor of the Times web site, NYTimes.com, has indicated an interest in online social networking technology, and even visited the San Francisco head quarters of Tribe.net, an online social networking company that has not yet entered the news business, but includes Knight-Ridder and the Washington Post Company among its investors. The two newspaper giants had been interested in Tribe.net for its potential as an online classifieds marketplace, but with the launch of Rojo, it’ll be interesting to see if traditional media begins to reexamine the broader role of social networks in online news distribution, perhaps acquiring an already developed network such as Tribe.net and reshaping it as a news network or perhaps developing original social networking services for their own web sites.