Breaking.Sg – Singapore’s Digg Clone

Time is a finite quantity. Information or rather little tiny morsels of snack ready data seems to be increasingly online till the noise is drowning out the signals. How does one find and choose information to read?

Breaking.sg, a clone of Digg, is a Singapore focused social bookmarking website. Like Digg, users can submit links to articles and web pages they find interesting and the users help provide ‘the wisdom of crowds’ to filter the content.

Forgetting the little inconvenient truth that the crowd isn’t always wise, breaking.sg faces the standard problems that all sites dealing in user-generated content face.

1. Getting users to join.
2. Getting users to contribute.
3. Quality control of content either by:
– filtering out spam during the content submission phase.
– trusting the users to participate effectively in the voting and burying of content.

Looking at the ‘Recently Popular’ stories, it seems that most of the stories being posted ( or rather pulled in ) are from mainstream news sites like The Straits Times, Asia One and Channelnewsasia. Herein, lies the problem of a niche news site for a category like ‘Singapore News’. There aren’t that many sources of first-hand news and content and there are even less sources of quality first-hand news and content.

Singapore social media and social news spaces are arguably still in their nascent stages despite offerings like STOMP from established player SPH. Sites like Ping.sg and Singapore Daily have approached the problem of aggregation with two basic types of solutions: crowd-sourcing and editorial control.

Which kind of solution will provide the best filtering for signals from the noise in the Singapore context?

It is interesting to see entrepreneurs like the founders of breaking.sg try to tackle this problem. Their success will probably depend on them being more than a Digg clone and innovating to create solutions unique to Singapore considering the size of the social media and social news spaces.

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