Call them memediggers, community moderated news sites, or digg clones. User submitted news moderated up or down by other users and available for comments. Call them whatever you wish, this new class of social media warrants close examination in order to make the most of the potential it presents. Which of these sites get the most use, see the most conversation and are most useful to their readers? How should people looking to launch new digg-style sites organize things in order to maximize adoption and impact?
One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.
An overview of some observations:
Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.
For each site I counted:
the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
the number of items listed
the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
the total number of comments listed on the front page
the estimated number of registered users in the system
The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world. The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes! It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).
The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English.
Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters. Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world. The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch. Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.
Charlene Li has a good post about a recent panel she participated on about social media in a traditional media context. She summarizes well, I think, with these words: "...if you take the social computing view that as a publisher, you can't serve ALL of the needs of your customer yourself, then the best that you should do is to be the FIRST source of information for your audience. In that way, News.com ensures that although it may not be the ONLY source of technology news, it has a fighting chance of filtering and aggregating that news for its audience better than anyone else."
I think that's a great way to explain it. Li mentions Digg.com, for example, as an example of a media publisher that does not create or control content - yet provides added value and branding and thus has built huge loyalty in this new social media context.
This is along the same idea as John Palfrey's explanation of news reading habits in a new world that I highlighted yesterday. I think that refining the stories we can use to explain these new media to new participants will only help accelerate the truly social nature of the phenomena. That and being able to point to examples of social media that cover more than just tech. Commontimes.org is a digg clone of sorts about politics, for example.
There has been a lot of complaining around the web lately about Feedburner - even Dave Winer is discussing alternatives to Feedburner's controlling the domains of everyone's feeds. People say they are worried that if Feedburner dies or turns evil then all is lost. I do not think that's the case. Number one reason, look at this code: <channel> <title>Marshall Kirkpatrick</title> <link>http://marshallk.com</link> <description>Know more, faster. And then share it.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2006 22:55:20 +0000</pubDate> <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.2</generator>
<language>en</language>
That's the first 5 lines of the code from my personal blog's Feedburner landing page. Our RSS readers all show both the RSS URL from Feedburner feeds and the HTML URL of the sites those feeds originate from. No disconnect there. Look in your OPML file. It's going to be ok.
If we had to, I'll bet someone could write a script that could look over your OPML file, visit the HTML URLs and replace the Feedburner URLs in your file with the standard RSS URLs for WordPress, Blogger, MT, LiveJournal or whatever type of blog each one was. It's going to be ok. Now go enjoy Feedburner's statistics, autopinging, javascript plug-ins following feed items (FeedFlare, with API), plagarism monitoring ("unusual uses"), baked in support for email delivery of feed items and goodness knows what else. Am I wrong about this? That's how it seems to me and I'm usually not a big fan of trusting authority - but really, the RSS freak-out over the last few days has been over the top.
Bloglines just announced support for flash-based items inside feeds, like YouTube videos. Though I'm not a big Bloglines fan and I don't care for the now ubiquitous adjective "pimped" (see Ask ad highlighted on Bloglines news page - ok, I laughed anyway) this is nonetheless good news for everyone. Flash is clearly a major format, multimedia is subscribed to and should be - so three cheers for this announcement. Bloglines can now do something that not every feed reader can. That and good search spam elimination.
I use Grazr for my blogroll on my personal site, saving huge space with a more interesting, dynamic display of my favorite feeds live. I also add it to the end of interviews I do with people, providing a preview of an OPML file containing their feeds and other related feeds. Mathew Ingram of Toronto's Globe and Mail uses Grazr on his personal blog to preview the writings of participants in this month's conference in Canada about Web 2.0, Mesh. Lots of potential here, and I'm glad to see the project is getting support. Hopefully this won't be another cool tool that dies on the vine.
Here's an example of a Grazr implementation. Click around inside it, the left border will move you up a level.
CyberJournalist covers an announcement today about a Reuters move to provide financial support to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Global Voices Online in particular. That's going to mean ongoing work by GV, more support for Russian and Arabic language bloggers and more trainings in places with little blog activity. Pretty cool move by Reuters. I've been told that many GV bloggers are aspiring MSM journalists, so we'll see how this plays out in terms of bloggyness. Nonetheless, if you've never checked out Global Voices Online you really ought to. It's a great example of blogging's international flavor and reach. Glad to see it will be able to continue its work. Nice also to see another example of old media/new media coming together.
Big discussion around the web about this weekend's New
York Times story on MySpace's anemic revenues relative to its huge traffic. My favorite contribution to the mix
so far is Tim O'Reilly's
post about the part of the story reporting that 10,000 MySpace users have accepted a friendship with the bouncing
square of ground beef from the Wendy's commercials. [Correction - that was 100,000 users!] What were you saying about
MySpace users again? Meat market jokes could abound...
Regardless, O'Reilly posits a theory that
relationship marketing like this between brands and consumers could be the next big thing. It could be as big as
the creation of contextual advertising ala Overture and then Google, he says. Thoughts?
My only
thought initially is that if I want to maintain a relationship with a vendor (and I do, many) then I'll subscribe to
their RSS feed (so I can catch square burgers in my aggregator, I guess). Is that what this is, if not on a
technical level then on a semi-functional level? Maybe that's the level of sophistication that will be needed in
order to see mass adoption of syndication/subscription technologies - click here to make friends with a square
burger. It seems possible.
As the press release said: “Adding RSS aggregation to Newsweek.com
brings a new dimension of customization to our site,” said Kevin Stuart, audience development manager of
Newsweek.com. “The NewsGator Hosted Solution allowed us to customize the offering based on criteria that
was important to us, and gives us great flexibility to rapidly augment, modify, or edit the content we make available
to our users.”
One question I have after looking at the example account is wether readers are able to
import and export their subscriptions by OPML. I don't see that they are, and the way that Newsgator supports
OPML is one of it's best traits. Gotta have that.
Gabe Rivera, proud pappa
of Tech.Memeorandum and a growing number of other automated memetrackers on
various topics, today launched one on baseball. Ballbug tracks the most linked to posts about baseball around the
athleto-blogo-sphero. When will he stop launching these kinds of sites on various topics? He seemed to
indicate to me
in a rather cryptic comment here awhile ago that it couldn't go on forever, but he wasn't about to stop
either.
I'd like to take this opportunity too to say that I don't think these kinds of sites, which
are fully automated, can be described using the same word as we use for sites like Digg.com - where storyies rise to the top because of human votes inside the system.
The word "memetracker," is I believe, misused when it's applied to Digg and other systems directly influenced
by humans. Plus those types of sites are tracking, if anything, specific URLs more than general memes defined by
URLs grouped together - aren't they? That's my two cents on the subject.
Om Malik has posted an overview of some of the most
prominent personal home page services, focusing on Netvibes. Apparently the
company just got a million dollars in funding from the founders of FON and Ning. A few thoughts:
These RSS feed displaying pages seem low
on the functionality and high on adopt ability to me. It's basically the same thing as MyYahoo, isn't it? More functionality than MyYahoo, perhaps, and NetVibes released
an API earlier this month - so perhaps greater differentiation is just around the corner. I know I have no
interest in reading feeds in headline only format and without folders. But this is how a large number of new
users are getting into reading RSS feeds. MyYahoo was the first RSS reader I used - for about an hour.
There's no mention of the funding on the company's development blog.
NetVibes has been around for a while, though, and is quite popular. If it's funding is now coming from other
start ups, themselves VC funded, does this speak to Nicholas Carr's supply/demand funding bubble
argument? Carr argues that the Web 2.0 scene isn't a bubble right now because there's not an excess of VC
funds looking for projects to fund and thus funding lots of stupid ones. That someone large hasn't thrown lots of
money at NetVibes before now seems to me to support Carr's analysis.
OK folks, I figure if anyone can tell me if such a thing already exists, it's you. I love NetNewsWire like it wuz my own chillren, but it kills me that I have to
categorize all my feeds singly. This is bad. I have to decide whether danah goes into "friends" or "web 2.0" or "women
in tech." She needs to be in all of them! Does supr.c.ilio.us belong in
"friends," "web 2.0," "tech commentary" or "snark" (which, luckily, now
warrants its own category)? You see my conundrum.
Web-based readers are out for me because I track too many
feeds and performance quickly becomes an issue. Does anybody know of a desktop newsreader for the Mac that allows me to
tag my feeds and see them in multiple places? Thanks in advance!
There's quite a number of anemic Digg clones out there, a real testimony to the community
building skills of the original. But an interesting new service I found this morning is CrispyNews, a site that lets you create your own topic specific subdomains
for Digg-style newswires voted up and down by users. Adsense all around and site creators share revenue after a
certain point.
This is probably too much like Newsvine to really
take off, but who would have guessed that Digg style services would hit utility status so quickly? What exactly
is the word for them even? It only makes sense that some day soon we'll all be clicking up and down on FeedFlare
type links after each item in many of our RSS feeds and have top 10 or 20 lists reflected accordingly on our
dashboards. Or some combination of RSS and Digg-style up and down for our community of interest or work.
Anybody else read the recent Harper's excerpt (in print) on Chinese media gaining or losing points and thus pay
according to who in the government praised their stories? Hmmm....
Another gem from eHub today, Keotag is
a beautiful, multi-functional search engine that finds items tagged with your search term in 14 different tagging
systems (Technorati, del.icio.us, shadows, 43 things, etc.). Search results are returned quickly and displayed
with a very nice AJAX interface. There isn't support for Flickr or other photosharing apps, nor for video apps
that support tagging, but it is so smooth and fast that I'll be probably be using this instead of TagCentral from now on.
See also the tag creation function for your
blog posts. Now if only they'd turn this into a bookmarklet or blummy plug-in.
Systems like this are notoriously fly-by-night, but this one has AJAX, pastel colors and rounded corners.
So it's gotta be for real, right?
Gabe Rivera's robot army (producing Memeorandum and Tech.memeorandum) has expanded to cover celebrity gossip news in the form of a
site called WeSmirch. The Memeorandum formula appears to be a secret-sauce
of link tracking blended with "authority" and some editorial "wisdom." It's an excellent way
to find what is the hot in at least some parts of the online world.
Celeb gossip makes sense. Will
Rivera add any more sites on different topics before selling or launching ads? I don't believe that sports,
science, market analysis or food (the most likely topics in my mind) would work well with the Memeorandum formula
because I believe those blogospheres don't engage in nearly as much cross linking and the subtopics in many of them are
of less universal interest than is the case with tech. So I'll bet that this is it and now someone will buy all
three blogs. Any guesses who?
Gabe Rivera, proud pappa
of 
