With Digg’s recent overhaul and Reddit’s increased profile, social news sharing services have been in the news quite a lot recently. Here’s a site that takes the social news model and adds something a little different: human editors.
As with other social news sites, Spotery allows any user to submit a news story. With Digg or Reddit, these stories would be voted for by other users in order to promote them. With Spotery, a human makes the call on each story’s worth and then places it in a suitable category on the site with a “Spotted by” credit for the user who submitted it.
New York-based founder and CEO, Limor Elkayam tells me that she thinks of Spotery as a “TV news” way of consuming online content. “In TV news everything that’s happening in the world has to be condensed and curated into a 30 minute show versus a newspaper that has a wide range of stories that can be read for hours.”
While at first glance, Spotery may seem to miss the “mass curation” benefit of other social news sites, it makes more sense if you think of it as a broader, more mainstream version of Gabe Rivera’s family of specialist curated news sites like Techmeme and Mediagazer.
Having human editors, Spotery is always going to lack some of the excitement and unexpectedness of Digg and Reddit, where anything can become a hit if enough people like it. Those wanting the hottest news fast could be disappointed as some of the current ‘Editors picks’ are a couple of days old. However, if you happen to like the editorial direction of Spotery and are more interested in “What’s big” than what’s breaking right this second, it could be a useful addition to your bookmarks.
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