The Huffington Post opened its social bookmarking community site HuffIt today. Similar to Digg, HuffIt is a great concept that enables the (progressive-leaning) Huffington Post readership to aggregate and posts of interest from around the Web and recommend them to the community. Still VERY new — and potentially a little too 2.0 for most HuffPo readers to grasp at first — the most “Huffed” articles still have less than ten total “huffs.”
Very interesting to see such a prominent blog and news site take this approach. It will be interesting to see if any newspapers or other dominant webzines like Slate and Salon take a similar — or alternatively community-building — approach.
On the turning away suggests that we’re approaching the point where Journalism 2.0 emerges as perpetuated by the Long Tail:
The driving force behind the buzz is the thinking that the public “have different expectations about the media they use and expect to be able to find and use their voice to participate in the community around itâ€. From a business perspective, if you have more engagement you have more loyalty, which will translates into more revenue, as communities will be “very attractive environments for advertisers†who’re convinced of the long-term benefit for their brands.
