Online Media Cultist

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, one of the crazy-smartest people writing about the interwebs and what-it-all-means today, continues his exploration of the over coverage of breaking news stories with a piece called The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web. In this case, Karp uses the Microsoft-Yahoo non-merger aftermath as a means to display how “it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING,” showing a numbing sampling of Google News results as a visual example of how many publishers offer nearly the same thing about the same story.

I agree that this over coverage creates a glut of stories that are nearly identical to one another, that it presents a disservice to readers who are trying to make sense of it all. But I think it’s important to explore why publishers jump on the bandwagon in the first place. Karp likens mass coverage of breaking news stories to 100 newspapers and 50 TV stations covering a factory shutdown in one single Midwest city. It’s an interesting analogy, but I’m not sure that it quite works.

The global nature of the web coupled with a 24/7 publishing environment creates a never ending chase for page views and ad revenues. In other words: publishers aren’t all covering the same story to provide a public service; they’re doing it because there’s a marketplace for huge stories – massive interest for a brief window of time – and everyone is desperately trying to cut themselves in on a piece of the action. That doesn’t mean that everyone will get rich doing this, but obviously there’s some payoff in hopping on the bandwagon.

The conclusion that Karp comes to is that everyone should “BE ORIGINAL.” Of course, this is harder said than done, and everyone will have a different definition of “original.” Scott likes to use Google News when showing examples of over coverage. And Google News is a great news search engine.

But I would argue that “the answer” – if there’s indeed an answer to this problem – is smart content aggregators and smart people networks to help individuals filter out what is the most important, the most original, the most valuable stories in a fluid environment.

The best example I can think of in terms of a smart content aggregator is Techmeme, as well as Memeorandum when it comes to general news and politics. Mixing in individual trusted websites and blogs along with a smart content aggregator or two is a great way to stay on top of breaking stories without getting lost in a sea of sameness.

And what I mean by smart people networks: this can come in many forms, but I’m particularly thinking about Twitter and Friendfeed when it comes to breaking tech and online stories. Building trusted friend/contact networks allows links to get distributed from trusted people to individuals in real time. Social networking sites like Facebook and instant messaging applications like AIM or GTalk can also provide a basis for a smart people network.

So in conclusion I don’t see the deluge of over coverage ending anytime soon. The potential to get in on the action is simply too tempting for publishers. Or, alternatively, many publishers will feel like they’re not legitimate if they don’t write something about a story that everyone else is talking about.

However, over coverage can be combated through a combination of smart content aggregators and smart people networks.

In an interesting piece, Alexander van Elsas muses that Friendfeed likely “will compete with services like TechMeme for the most important aggregation source of tech news.”

Techmeme aggregates breaking tech and Internet news stories through an algorithm that tracks stories by influence and links. It then ranks these stories by timeliness and importance and updates its single page site in real time. Techmeme does a great job of doing this, which is why I think of it as my “morning newspaper” when it comes to tech and online stories. And even better, it collects all of the conversations taking place around the top stories via story clusters. This method of “meme tracking” has been copied by many other online publications as a way to present the news and related stories.

Friendfeed, on the other hand, allows people to automatically share things that they’re publishing and sharing using other services. For example, you can have Friendfeed track your Twitter posts, your blog entries (Friendfeed will publish a link, so people have to click through to get the full text), what you’re sharing on Google Reader, stories you’re digging on Digg, pictures that you’ve uploaded to Flickr, and a bunch of other things. As a Friendfeed member, you then subscribe to other Friendfeed accounts and receive a (usually huge) stream of information coming from each person. Finally, Friendfeed lets you comment on everything as well as letting you vote on things that you “like.”

So I can understand where van Elsas is coming from: Friendfeed and Techmeme are both aggregators that tend to have a concentration on tech and webby stories.

However, I find them to be somewhat complimentary services. Stories that appear on Techmeme are likely to be talked about on blogs, Twitter posts, and other places (like Digg and Reddit) which Friendfeed will scoop up and distribute. Techmeme, while being wonderfully dynamic, is “read only” from the user perspective: you can’t comment on stories or do anything except click links and read.

Friendfeed, on the other hand, does not have Techmeme’s ability to give its audience an easy sense of what’s important, what’s breaking news, and what the surrounding voices of import in the industry are saying about all of it.

Therefore, perhaps we can say that Techmeme aggregates what’s important about tech and Internet news and easily provides links to surrounding conversations. It’s really a new kind of online newspaper, and a pretty terrific one. And Friendfeed is an aggregator of lots of stuff, of what people are reading and writing and sharing and looking at and listening to. It’s a “life aggregator” of sorts.

I don’t see Techmeme and Friendfeed as direct competitors. In fact, I see room for lots of aggregation services that find valuable and differentiated ways to provide information and help people to connect.

Recently, I’ve been trending toward using Techmeme, a content aggregator and “meme tracker,” and Twitter, a communications aggregator and “people knowledge tracker” of sorts, as a way to bring news and information that’s relevant and valuable to me. Fred Wilson of A VC seems to be of a similar mind but theorizes that the “average audience member” may still be more focused on single content publications rather than these kinds of platforms.

In other words, it’s a question of content aggregation versus visiting a single publication as a place to consume news and information.

As evidence, Fred uses a Compete chart that shows a spike in TechCrunch’s traffic while Techmeme’s growth has been relatively more modest:

Wilson goes on to state:

I have moved away from reading individual blogs. I want to read aggregation services like techmeme, hacker news, reddit, twitter, delicious popular, digg, etc, etc. I find that they give me a much better view of the top stories of the day than reading individual blogs does.

But once again, what I do doesn’t map very well to what the average audience member does. I think I need to remind myself of that fact on a daily basis.

I agree with Fred, but I might take a slightly different conclusion. I personally find following the massive volume of posts that TechCrunch and Mashable publish to be difficult. Further, the stream of product announcements, rumors, and tech business news can be exhausting to sift through.

I wonder if the massive growth of Twitter and relative popularity of sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon tell us that people are looking for a combination of algorithm-based and influence-tracking sites (Techmeme) and community-powered content aggregation (Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg) as a way to:

* Relay the most important/compelling/interesting/breaking stories in close to real time - Traditional media websites aren’t efficient at telling us what’s going on in technology and the Internet in real time. Blogs and community-powered sites are clearly filling that gap. And I would argue that “intelligent communities” like Twitter are the next step in this evolution.

* Provide analysis/commentary/meaning/value to news - Again, the blogosphere emerged as a means to fulfill a desire to bring credible opinions and commentary to the news of the day within the online medium. Because blogs are now such an essential part of distributing the news itself – and TechCrunch and Mashable are critical pieces in this – content aggregators and content-centric communities (as opposed to social networking communities such as MySpace) are becoming ever more important in aggregating stories, getting them to the right place at the right time, and relaying what communities are saying about them and think about them.

This is all to say that smart content aggregation and community-based content sharing will become an ever more important part of information consumption. I believe that that’s part of the reason why Twitter is seeing amazing growth (as well as more funding, maybe they’ll tack on a business model one of these days!) and why a range of sites, including Techmeme, are popular within the tech-obsessed crowd.

In other other words: maybe Fred Wilson’s “average audience members” aren’t quite there yet, but I bet they will be in time.

And if you’re looking for one ring to rule them all… it just might be Friendfeed, a service that aggregates Twitter conversations, blog posts, Google Reader shared stories, comments made via Disqus, social news “diggs,” and a host of other services. As bhc3 writes: “FriendFeed is emerging as the one lifestream platform to rule them all. The ability to see and interact across a range of services is proving addictive. And it may inadvertently disrupt a few other services along the way.”

For a great insider’s view of how one blogger is handling his social media consumption workflow, check out Louis Gray’s piece. It’s a great step-by-step on where things are headed.

I’ve written a few stories about Shyftr over the last week. In short, Shyftr pulls full text RSS feeds published by websites and creates community around them on its own website. Although they’ve changed how the site works (in part due to an innocent question I asked on Twitter over the weekend, which set off quite a little debate throughout the blogospheric realm) the fundamental problem remains: you can read full text stories on Shyftr and comment on those stories on Shyftr without ever visiting the original publishing source. Some people disagree with this position, but in my view that fundamentally interferes with a publisher’s ability to interact with readers and the ability to create community around the original publishing source.

Last night, I discovered ReadBurner, a site which I believe does things in exactly the right way. ReadBurner takes stories that are being shared on Google Reader and provides a space for comments and voting to be made on them. The critical difference here is that they show an excerpt only and not the full text of the article. This in my view means that ReadBurner provides a valuable and unique service in the marketplace – content aggregation and social networking features focused on RSS-based social bookmarking – while promoting publisher source content. As LifeHacker notes, it’s a sort of neat conglomeration of del.icio.us and Digg.

I contacted Drew Olanoff, co-owner of ReadBurner, and asked him if he would like to comment on what his site is doing in comparison to Shyftr. I found his response to be very interesting:

While we won’t really speak to what Shyftr is trying to do, as we’re focusing on our own strategy… I can say that ReadBurner’s goal is to not steal the conversation, but to get it started. We want to be able to send new visitors to blogs who might not have ever visited in the first place. On ReadBurner, they’ll see a steady stream of fresh stories shared from their peers and will be able to interact and re-share if they wish.

I think getting the conversation started as opposed to stealing it gets down the heart of the issue precisely.

ReadBurner also distinguishes itself in a few other ways. Its design and user interface is clean, intuitive, and blessedly straight-forward. (It’s always essential for me to have the why am I here? question answered within a few seconds of arriving at any webpage.)

And here’s another thing: ReadBurner provides two prominent links back to the original content source for each article entry: the article title itself as well a “read more” link below the excerpt. The “shares” link and comments link take you to a ReadBurner drilldown page where you can comment on the story. Again, I think this is the right approach to take. This compares very favorably to what Shyftr does, where you’re almost always forced to be at least one click away from finding a page where you can click back to the original content source.

ReadBurner was founded by Alexander Marktl and was acquired by Olanoff and Adam Ostrow last month. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one for sure.

There was a meme over the weekend (kicked off by Mark Evans and the provocative Dave Winer) posing that many bloggers blog and blog but have nothing to say, or something to that effect. I don’t necessarily agree, and would further go on to say that there’s a vast and massive galaxy of blogs out there that get very little notice or attention.

Sure, many are lame or abandoned or not worthy of attention, but there are still more – untold millions perhaps – that are interesting in some way, particularly if someone or someones out there figures out how to aggregate, filter, organize, curate, or feature them in a way that brings value to them. That in effect then makes them worthy of attention.

One such category that I talk about from time to time is all of the tech and online media companies out there that run blogs. It’s becoming more the norm than not for companies to run at least one blog these days. Occasionally, big announcements or controversies will gain some wider attention, but the other 99.9% of the time, there’s blogging aplenty going on that mostly gets unnoticed.

I’ve been aggregating RSS feeds from company blogs for a while now, and am always fascinated to take a look at what’s going on. A quick scan over the weekend provided the following random cross-section:

* blist sees bad tidings for Microsoft; seems that no one wanted Windows Vista at a charity auction held in Seattle.

* CrowdSpirit says that US consumers plan to buy fewer gadgets.

* Kindo explains how to use its new contact importer. I love when company blogs are used to help people better understand and use products.

* Ning shows off its Skydiver Network: “Skydiver Network is a network for skydiving, base jumping and tunnel-flying enthusiasts. Just looking at this network is like taking a shot of adrenaline, even if you’re looking at it from the comfort of the earth’s surface.”

* Sphere talks about itself versus the competition: “Our technology is super-flexible and this means we can generate related content results from a multitude of different formats and sources - including articles, videos, photos and podcasts.”

* mEgo is now available in 16 languages.

Great piece over at Publisher 2.0 about an experiment in getting smart folks to get together to aggregate news about the presidential election.

What’s great about it is that it came together lightening quick (48 hours!) and that it involved two smart, sharp, and forward-looking people on the new media frontier – Scott Karp of the same Publishing 2.0 and journalist / blogger Jack Lail, amongst others in Knoxville and thereabouts.

Smart aggregation – the ability to curate and bring interesting and relevant information in short and digestible chunks – is a hallmark of good blogging in many cases, of course, but I’m also convinced that it’s good business. That is, I think there’s a marketplace for those who can find spaces in the marketplace and fill them with compelling and smartly aggregated content. In any event, best of luck with the Publish2 Election News Network!

I consider myself a web cultist (or web geek if you like), a distinct difference in my view from a gadget cultist or hardware cultist. Don’t get me wrong: I bow at the altar of all things tech, but I consider the computer or device merely the means through which to access the magical interwebs.

That is to say, I don’t find myself all that taken with the ongoing, never-ending Mac vs. PC debate. I’ve always been a PC person… because I’ve always been a PC person. They gain me access to the online world just fine. That said, there’s no doubt that the visuals on Apple products are striking. And as an overall trend, I’m noticing that the Internet itself is rolling out services and applications that emphasize the simple, elegant, striking visual experience that Apple innovated on in its hardware products.

For example, Fichey is a neat little website that rotates through the top stories on a bunch of popular news aggregators, such as Google News, Digg, Reddit, and delicious. “Meta” news aggregators, or websites that simply collect a bunch of stories from other news services (such as Pop URLs) have been around for years. What Fichey does differently is that it make things incredibly simple and incredibly visual. Pick a service, click “next site,” and the entire web page rotates (very-Apple like!) to the next story, so you’re actually seeing the original webpage instead of a headline.

I think we’re going to see a lot more of Fichey-like services over the next year or two. I can see widgets that rotate through popular web stories as being popular. Instead of getting inundated with yet more text links, seeing a splash of color rotate through an application you use all day (such as GMail, for example) would be really fun. Think Bitty turned into a rotating Fichey-like application.

And then of course there’s video, which for many people is the singular reason to hit the interwebs these days. Google Alerts has just announced that it will include video search as part of its popular application (set a Google Alert for, say, 2008 presidential elections, and you’ll get sent news, blogs, other web pages, and now video if you like associated with that term as content gets published and indexed on the web).

It’s not hard to imagine a Fichey-meets-video-meets-widget becoming an extremely popular must-have for the web geek set, and perhaps the wider MySpace/Facebook-loving masses as well.

More likely it will be some wrinkle on this theme that can’t be foreseen by me or anyone else at this time, which is all part of the mystery and allure of being a web cultist!

A Mark Evans piece that muses about the possibility of a “web 2.0 aggregator” that could bring applications like GMail, Skype, and Basecamp all to one My Yahoo or Netvibes-like personalized homepage got me thinking about an only partially related idea having to do with web start-ups. But sticking with the personalized homepage thing for just a second, what I would dearly love is to have the ability to bring a few widgets right into my GMail page. GTalk, an IM application, is integrated into GMail, so why not give people a little widget for their calendar, for instance. This would make me very happy, even though I’m revealing what a slave I am to Google products!

Okay, onward. Here’s one of the things that I would love to do if someone threw a few barrelfuls of VC cash my way: run a blog that smartly aggregates blog posts everyday from web and tech start-up companies. So in other words, when MyBlogLog announces an interesting feature rollout or when Evan Williams writes (incredibly concisely) about nifty things going on at Twitter, this site would annotate it and perhaps add a pithy comment or two for good measure.

I think this would provide a valuable service for the web obsessed TechCrunch/Techmeme crowd as well as for industry insiders and journalists.

I’m a sucker for what I think of as “smart aggregation” and believe that the proliferation of web content will allow for plenty of these kinds of ideas to do well and make money when executed properly (accounting for all of the mistakes, pitfalls, acres of quicksand, and all the rest of the problems that every start-up faces!). Think about… a place that compiles the most interesting or strangest MySpace blog posts, a place for celebrity blog posts (Britney, Rosie O’ Donnell, Fifty Cent, etc.), sports figures, TV and movie personalities, and on and on.

It’s Friday. What better time of the week to let your geeky entrepreneurial dreams cry free?