News or new thinking?

After lots of buzz it was finally launched on Thursday - My Spaces new news property. Like Mike Arrington reports at TechCrunch, its will pull news items from a number of trusted sources via their RSS feeds, organize them into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories and let the including order of the news items showing be determined by user voting, taking into account the freshness of the news.

So, of course this means big business. But is this a newsservice or more of an information tool reflecting viewers areas of interest? Would you go here when a big story breaks? Or does My Space news more serve a need for users/readers/bloggers - to interact with and affect reports on the society we live in (personally I’m open to voting in American idol…)?

At Screenwerk Greg Sterling points out that this type of social news sites emerge directly from the “most emailed” sections of newspaper sites. “Social news” is a bit of a trend but largely about a larger online phenomenon: what I’m calling “the culture of participation,” he writes, and adds that USAToday recently redesigned to include enhanced social features.

At his blog, Mathiew Ingram writes that despite the fact that most people who go to “user-generated” media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories, he still thinks My Space news could turn out to be very powerful. But how long until Google News decides to add a user voting system, Ingram asks.

Thats a good question. The race is up. TechCrunch reports that My Spaces news property is built on Newroo technology, a company My Space bought last year for a rumored $7 million. Congrats to Newsroo!

Other thoughts:

Down the road users can propably submit news items directly to My Space news. Put that is perspective with the horrifying events at Virginia Tech this week, something that is widely discussed among bloggers now.

Also what about journalistic ethics, legal aspects and property rights? “We’ll be starting an office pool shortly on how long it will take for content producers to start suing MySpace,” Brad Linder writes on DownloadSquad.

Right now the top item on My Space news is a sports story with 43 votes. I’ll keep an eye on the votes today.