Meh News?
NDTV has a nifty feature by which users can vote, via SMS, on stories they’ve seen through the day. The top 10 (?) stories with the maximum number of votes are then featured in a bulletin. The concept is quite interesting and it also encourages a safe kind of participation from the user, but it has one major flaw: why would anyone want to watch a story they’ve already watched once before?
It is a sort of a mini Digg model for television, but the problem with replicating that model in a restrictive environment like television is that you have only a limited subset of content to work with. There is no entry point for content from outside of the network to seep into it. Honestly, I think it would have been a better idea to have given the viewers a set of five choices. They could make the anchor wink at a certain point in time, do a jig at the close of the bulletin or even sing a song. That should have been really amusing.
