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Social News Aggregation is big business – take a look at Digg, arguably one of the most popular sites on the internet & all powered by user-submitted content.

Well I’m a big fan of social websites, and news aggregators… and I have recently found a new(ish) site that I have a feeling may definitely be the way forward.

Current.com is a social news sharing site with a difference – it has it’s own TV channel (in the UK, Sky channel 183 and Virgin channel 155). It’s the perfect menagerie of services… think Digg, but televised. This helps fuel submissions to the site, as if you comment or submit material, there’s a chance your content may end up featuring on TV making you a pseudo celebrity in the process.

When you submit content to the site, you add tags to your story as well. The tags you choose denote which show on the Current TV channel may pick it up for use. For example, the majority of the stories I submit are orientated towards technology, movies and gaming – this places my submissions in the “Upstream” category – you can also manually add the preferred show’s name to your tags as well.

When an item or comment is picked for TV, you’re uploaded avatar is displayed with your username and your story is read out like a news story, usually explained in more detail… or your comment is displayed in full. You can also add webcam comments, so you can actually feature on TV properly, instead of just your name & picture.

All-in-all I’m enjoying the site a lot – the users comment and submit a lot, so there’s always something to read a-la Digg, and there’s a LOT less dupes. The staff members are also rather awesome. And if you go a little submission-crazy, then you can often end up having several mentions per show… as has been my habit for the past week.

I’d definitely recommend the site – it comes across as a more laid-back version of Digg, with less elitism going on, and more fun.

In fact, I’m so much of a fan that I actually hacked my very first WordPress Plugin so I could enable easy submissions to the site. I’ve modified the Sociable plugin by Joost de Valk to support Current (rather easily… there wasn’t much to edit in honesty), and as you can see below it works fantastically.

You can download the new file here: http://drop.io/sociablewithcurrent

All that has been altered is an image file for the Current favicon has been added into the images folder, and the code altered to include the Current submission link from their own wordpress plugin.

Anyway I urge you to check out Current.com, and the TV channel too if you’re able. And if you use my modified version of the Sociable plugin, please let me know!

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 20:57 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.