Finally I woke up. Thanks for you valuable opinions on my unfinished blog post “News and Information” (esp. Tai Tran and ePi.Longo, you guys have some really good points). Now let me finish what I started.

Back to the question Long asked me was: “If people used SE to search some information outside the online newspaper sphere, why did they still go to Baomoi (or any online newspaper) again?”. Tai actually had a pretty decent answer for that (You can track full converstation here).

SE is just a tool for search, not a content site. The keywors here are “News” and “Information”. You go to a search engine to search for “Information”, and go to a newspaper to read “News”. News gives us Information, but you can find Information in News, in people’s reactions, analyzation, etc. The top priority for News is “hot”, while for “Information” it is “deep”. I know it’s confusing, but let’s make it clear step by step.
First, suppose that you hear about **something** and want to know more about it for a variety of reasons (Read Tai.tran’s 2nd comment). It means that you hear a “News” and now you want to get more “Information”. People don’t use the built-in SE inside some newspapers ‘cos we know that it sux, and there are many sources of Information rather than some single newspapers.

Baomoi’s blog introduced a series called: “Why Social Works” (You can read the Vietnamese version here). A nice coverage. But actually I don’t really like it ‘cos “social” doesn’t reach the bottom of it. What do social news sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit do?? Why they work? It’s b/c they don’t give users only “News”, but also lots of “Information”. You submit a link, if it’s interesting & attracts a lot of people, it will get to “hot” very soon. Then people comment, introduce related links that can suplement a full story that give you deep Information. Social power makes it work! You see, that can satisfy: make News hot and make Information deep.

Then comes another question: In Vietnam, is there any source for Information other than newspapers? Blogs, Social Sites, Wikis, Micro-blogs??

Tags: baomoi, information, news, social news