Who will be the Caribbean’s DIGG, as mainstream Caribbean Media’s relevance dwindles?

Barbados- Without question the time is now for the Caribbean and Latin American region to experience the dot come boom already experienced by the United States. Right now, Caribbean startups are all about creating a regional spin on phenomenally successful American and European internet brands ad hope to be just as profitable and successful in reputation as they are. One of hue internet brands is Digg.com “a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.”

Digg.com started as a place where users share, find news, videos, reviews, podcacts on all things technology and science but have since evolved to have a greater range of news topics such as Business, Entertainment, Gaming Sports and Offbeat news. The site has over 20 million unique visitors and a multimillion dollar valuation to match.

Enter CaribScoop.com (Jamaica), caribdaily.com,onspotreport.com (Jamaica) and now herrd.com ( Barbados), fresh faced Caribbean startups mapping the global online trend of news via social networking. Gunning to be the number one in the region, like Digg.com is now globally.

Read the Interview

Our 2centsBased on what we know on what it takes to be successful in this space, we hand the Caribbean startup most likely to succeed in this space at this time, to herrd.com. While the race is yet to see all the players, Herrd.com understands fully the role, the trend, the market they are seeking to serve (The Caribbean Region and over US$40bn annual purchasing power Caribbean Diaspora) and out of all the above mentioned sites, they nailed site design and user interface. We interviewed Herrd which bills their site as Caribbean News Social Network. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote Caribbean stuff that’s important to you!

SC: When did it launch?HERRD: The website itself was launched on 27th of July 2007

SC: What is your goal for the site? HERRD: The goal of the website is to data mine the nooks and crannies of the Caribbean blogsphere/websites and organise and display all this information in a manner that users can easily access and have their say on. We also want to drive quality traffic back to such resources with the hope that the new users of such resources will discover new information there and feel excited about sharing it with others through herrd. Somewhat like a symbiotic relationship in which both the resource and herrd benefits.

We strongly believe that the best news out there rarely comes through the mainstream media, but from the citizen journalist who maintain these blog and website resources. Best of all we are very interested to see if this can be done through people power. Our motto? We intend to bring you the good, the bad, and the funny. In a nutshell we want to assist in the decoupling of dependence on mainstream media for news and provide a legitimate alternative (the blogsphere) in the eyes of the people. An alternative that is highly competitive with the mainstream media.

SC: What prompted you to launch such a site anyway?

HERRD: Traditional media rarely publishes “the good stuff”. And if they do, it is days or weeks after it surfaces on websites such as herrd. We realized that using similar websites, we started to use main stream media websites less, because they did not have the depth or breath of news that resources such as herrd can have or even the frequency at which new stuff is published. We also noticed the phenomenon whereby when visiting mainstream media websites that the news there was “old” because we had seen it all already on the community driven news websites. And most importantly what was missing was the public discussion. Once you get hooked on seeing what your peers have to say about a certain topic, just reading an article and moving on now became meaningless with out seeing what others had to say about this topic. This added depth to the topic. Finally there was no such site that we were aware of that focused on the Caribbean. We like our news a little different I believe, more with a political or sports slant, as opposed to say technology a.k.a Digg.com. A Caribbean based clone was just crying out to be implement to see the response to it. We want Caribbean news, and we don’t want to wait for it. We don’t even want it filtered to us with an agenda of a few selected people. We want to hear what or peers have to say about it. And we want to have our say on it. Hence herrd.

SC: What are your plans for the next 3 months ? in terms of increasing visibility, users.

HERRD: Over the next three months we want to1) Achieve high visibility among the blogsphere through linkages2) Implement a “herrd it” button strategy for the blogsphere and mainstream media3) Improve our search engine rankingsWe are currently boot strapping the system with articles so that as users arrive they have some fodder to work with. We are taking a consistent sustained measured approached to the visibility question as opposed to something massive and sudden.We believe in this way we can retain more quality users over the long term as we build up critical mass. We have planned our drive to build the userbase following the Christmas period. Our focus right now over the next 3 months is purely visibility.

SC: What is your background, are you a Tech Entrepreneur? What’s your back ground in Technology.

HERRD: That is correct we do have a background in technology, and have that entrepreneurial spirit. But we are very careful to keep our technological background in its rightful place regarding this project. We wish user-oriented ideas to drive this and the appropriate use of technology to support these ideas where necessary.