Towards a typology of social news apps from a Crowd Computing perspective

The Web is now both an information repository and a cyberspace supported by a participatory culture. In the domain of news and journalism, the Social Web has witnessed the emergence of Social News Websites (SNW), where users contribute for various reasons. Sites like Digg, Reddit and Storify, just to name a few, allow their users to discuss, comment, share, recirculate, tag and rate news from various sources. However, the social computing literature has described these sites so far through narrow definitions, e.g., as a synonym for social news aggregators, as specializations of social media or even as specialized forms of online social networks. In this research, we identify a broader landscape of social applications exploring citizen participation in the news value chain, and propose a broader definition and a typology for social news applications from the perspective of Crowd Computing.