These social news sites such as Digg, with their armies of citizen journalists, will sweep all media before them. Right? Uh, actually, the pioneer of participatory media, a Korean site called Ohmynews, has stalled. In 2003, when articles about the future of news still seemed fresh, Wired magazine gushed that the Asian guerrilla news operation pulled an astonishing 2 million daily readers. By now the audience must include the country's entire web population. Not so much. Ohmynews gets 800,000 unique visitors a day, according to an estimate given the San Francisco Chronicle, which concludes: "It faces growing competition in South Korea, has failed to catch fire beyond its borders and, most important, has lost its luster as the must-read, latest new thing."

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