If Corky Decided the News

TechCrunch has an article covering the news venture of MySpace. They lauched it about a month ago, but still have yet to garner much interest. The system works by MySpace gathering stories, and then dividing them out into categories. After they have been divided out, users can visit the different category pages and vote for stories a la Digg. From the sound of the artilce, it doesn't look like they've been able to get any interest at all.

But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two
stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the
various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no
votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

I don't know if I should really be all that surprised by this. MySpace consists of two types of users. There are the morons, and the people that are there because their friends are there. The first group is too stupid to even comprehend what important news is, and probably rely on their idiot friends or PerezHilton for world events. The second group, the ones that aren't morons, aren't likely to use MySpace for their place to read the news. More than likely, they are already visiting sites like Google News, Digg, or have an RSS reader for this. To top it all off, to prove just how dumb the admins are MySpace are, they have hardly any advertisement for this new service. According to TechCrunch's article, they don't even have a link for it on their main page (Disclaimer: I can't verify this since I've blocked MySpace). If this service ever does take off, I expect it to be driven by the first category of user so the likelyhood of anything decent showing up is pretty slim.