DISQUS

Mathew's comments: Do journalists need — or want — Publish2?

  • Michael Becker · 10 months ago
    I still can't figure out whether Publish2 is worth my time. What benefits does it really offer over other social bookmarking services like Delicious and Diigo? Apart from publishing to Delicious and Twitter at the same time, the only real benefit is having access to the linking lists of so many journalists all in one place. Though from what I've seen so far, not that many of them use Publish2 with much regularity.

    I'm curious. I know this is an old post (on this blog) but anybody want to explain for me the benefits of Publish2 over the other services I've listed?
  • mathewi · 10 months ago
    I think you put your finger on the main benefit, Michael -- although it's one that is still mostly a potential benefit -- and that is the appeal of a service that aggregates links from journalists who are researching a specific story.

    In practice, Publish 2 is very much like Delicious or Diigo, but Scott's idea was to try and get journalists in particular to use a social tool, so that their bookmarks could be aggregated as a news-gathering tool.

    So it's really just a specialized version of a social bookmarking tool, and you are right that its real utility doesn't become obvious until a bunch of journalists are using it regularly. There's an example of what becomes possible at that point in a recent blog post at Publish2: http://blog.publish2.com/2009/01/09/networked-l...
  • Michael Becker · 10 months ago
    I read that article this morning. It was brilliant that things came together like that for the journalists out in Washington.

    I guess I can see how it works for groups of journalists, and I don't doubt its usefulness for journalists who are just getting into social bookmarking and link journalism. For me though, I guess I'm too entrenched in Diigo and Delicious to switch over.

    Of course, my opinion of Twitter was "meh" at first too, but then I came back to it with a vengeance. Perhaps the same will happen for Publish2.
  • mathewi · 10 months ago
    I used to be a big user of Delicious, with almost 10,000 saved items, but I've given it up and switched to sharing items through Google Reader instead. It's an RSS reader and social-bookmarking tool in one, and people I want to share items with can just subscribe to an RSS feed of my shared items, and I can subscribe to theirs.