Maybe I am one of a few, but I havent visited a industry news sharing sites like Design Float or Design Bump, in a long time. I’m wondering if I am the only one. I’m wondering if you prefer the more niche news sharing sites or the major news sharing sites for your industry specific news.

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My Thoughts

I remember when Design Float first came out and it was all the rage among the community. It was almost an overnight success. As a blog owner, I found myself constantly coming back to the site to add my links and content to the news feed. That however, was pretty much the extent of my activity on the site. I very rarely went to the site looking for news items and almost never used it to promote content I found online.

In defense of Design Float, I never really did that on Digg either. I’m just not a major news sharing site player I guess.

It seems to me though, that at first glance, sites like Design Float appear to offer a lot of value to visitors. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the majority of the traffic and activity on these niche sites are from the bloggers who submit their news to them.

If thats the case, it would seem that these niche news sites are heavily influenced by whoever the most active users are. This is of course unfair to visitors and users and something Digg had to work very hard at countering. Yes, many of these niche sites have measures in place to help prevent this, but nothing that can’t easily be “hacked.”

As a visitor, I just don’t really see the value in these niche news sharing sites. But, as I said before, Im not really a news sharing site kind of guy.

What do you think?

If you are interested in sharing your thoughts, please take this quick poll: http://verifyapp.com/p/5366