Online Media Cultist

Sure, I understand that “useful” is a general and sometimes useless term. It’s relative and subjective; what’s useful to someone may not be to someone else.

But I pose the question nonetheless about social news sites, Digg being the grand daddy of the lot: are they useful anymore?

To be sure, Digg continues to be popular, clocking in at a stellar 113 in Alexa’s ranking system these days. But as some have noted, its expansion has caused it to include an increasing burden of non-tech articles. Going non-tech doesn’t necessarily translate to less useful stories, but I believe that Digg and other social news sites are trending toward factoid stories, “weird news,” and shock value headlines and less toward news that may be truly useful to an online media consumer.

Flashy headers with no substance, in other words.

Let’s take an anecdotal look at the front pages of Digg and Reddit – two of the leading social news sites – and then contrast it against meme-trackers Techmeme and Memeorandum.

Digg
The top three Digg stories – or the hottest stories burning up the huge Digg community and therefore blasting to the top of the front page – as of this writing are:

* Vaccines do not cause autism!
* 60 Photography Links You Can’t Live Without
* When burning gas is good for the planet

Scanning down the rest of the page, we do find some headline tech news (HP’s purchase of EDS) mixed in with stories about Albert Einstein’s religious beliefs and “coffin tables.”

So, you could argue that the Digg community is stronger than ever and that these are the stories that the community chooses to vote for and showcase on its famous front page.

However, I’d argue that Digg is increasingly becoming a place to browse idly as you’re about to glaze over at your work desk and you’re desperate for a few seconds of distraction.

But don’t we already have Fark for this?

Moving on…

Reddit
Top three stories:

* Does this girl Ever close her Mouth? [Pics]
* One Dollar [pic]
* US confession: Weapons were not made in Iran after all

I actually used to visit Reddit on a fairly regular basis, but I don’t anymore. If you dig (pardon the pun) hard enough you’ll find some interesting stories, but I don’t have the time or energy to do that when I can find more useful ways to get news elsewhere.

Now let’s look at Techmeme, with its focus on Internet and tech stories, and the political and general news tracker Memeorandum.

Techmeme
Leading off, we again get the story about HP’s acquisition of EDS for $13.9 billion. In this case though we get 35+ publications covering the story, nicely grouped and easy-to-read in a cluster format. We get the original source story from HP as the lead, and a bevy of traditional media (NYT), heavy hitter blogs (GigaOM), and lesser knowns to give a wide array of coverage.

We then have stories about new Apple technology and HBO’s entry into the iTunes store, again with the same cluster format and surrounding conversations on the web.

Memeorandum
Memeorandum is set up in the same format as Techmeme: story clusters with the most important story as the headline. Right now there’s a large cluster fronted by a USA Today piece called Democrats say let the contest continue. Following that are stories about racist incidents and the possible effect on the Obama campaign, and James Carville comments about Obama likely winning the Democratic nomination for president.

No, it’s not completely fair to compare Digg and Reddit directly against Techmeme and Memeorandum. They are different kinds of sites with different purposes.

And my argument is not necessarily a scientific one. That said, my sense is that a year or two ago, I felt that Digg and Reddit were pretty good places to visit to find out what’s going on in the world, or at least to discover interesting stories. I just don’t feel that way anymore, and I know a number of people who feel the same.

I’ve long felt that social news sites are great but could probably use a helpful dose of editorial curation, which means having site editors choose “featured stories” or some such to help seed conversations and set the tone for the site. Propeller does a pretty good job of this, but I believe there will eventually be a new wave of sites that will come around that will improve upon this model.

Pretty interesting and at times fascinating going on in the so called Twittersphere, that world of applications and services that have sprung surrounding Twitter. TechCrunch,UK edition, points out a pretty hilarious and intriguing one called Tweetmeme, which takes Twitter conversations and presents them in the style of Memeorandum.

I’m tempted to say that Tweetmeme is a send-up of Memeorandum, except it’s not. It’s a legitimate attempt to cluster Twitter conversations and present them in real time, evolving and flowing around buzz words and terms that are making the rounds on Twitter.

I wonder if some Twitterers will be given “influence” based upon how Twitter followers they have, or by how often they’re mentioned on Twitter. And will this influence then be used as a means to be selected as a Twitmeme “headline” more often?

My favorite Twitter mash-up by far, by the way? Twittervision.

Scott Karp performs an interesting and thorough investigation of where the best place was to find breaking news about the New Hampshire primary. After reviewing Digg, Google News, and Memeorandum, he determined that the latter was the best place to figure out what stories were both the most important and most up-to-date.

I would have to agree, both as a news junkie and an admirer of Gabe Rivera’s suite of sites, which include Memeorandum for politics and general news and Techmeme for tech news. The cluster format of stories breaks down what stories are important – at least according to the mainstream media and the blogosphere both – and what conversations are surrounding them, in nearly real-time.

It’s a great way to get the facts and a huge bevy of opinion, analysis, pontification, and thoughts very quickly and very often.

By the way: I was as shocked and excited by the results from New Hampshire as every other political junkie out there. Now we have two wide-open races running through to Super Tuesday and perhaps beyond. Great stuff!

TechCrunch reported over the weekend that social news superpower Digg will expand its categories in “the next 6 to 12 months” to cover reviews of products and services.

This is the most significant development to hit the social news/social bookmarking world in a long time.

Here’s why: The “big three” (Digg, Netscape, Reddit) of social news sites – where the readership submits news stories and then votes the most popular submissions onto the front page – do a pretty good job of covering general news and opinion stories. Digg, the overall market leader, has pretty much cornered the market on tech, while Netscape covers a broad swath of stories for a more general web readership, and Reddit is the most eclectic of the lot.

There’s a hunger, I’ve been wagering for some time, for social news “niche” channels that the Big Three – as well as a host of so called “Digg clones” – has as yet failed to address.

One area that is currently ill served is reviews. Let’s say you’d love to go to a site to find the most popular music reviews on the Internet today. Or the most popular stories criticizing or praising a recent Nintendo Wii release. Or you’d love to be able to easily sort and sift through the upcoming avalanche of Harry Potter, Volume VII reviews. There’s no place like that right now.

Digg, smartly seeing the huge space in the market it dominates, is looking to fill it up itself.

The recent launch of MySpace News proves that simply launching an all purpose social news platform – even when tied to branding of a social networking site that boasts many millions of users – doesn’t cut it anymore. There’s still plenty of ways to create value within the social news space, for the right kinds of companies who can find and execute on good ideas.

A social news version of Memeorandum, for instance. In other words, a social news site that just covers politics, or better yet, political stories and analysis just coming out of the blogosphere. My own personal favorite would be to see a social news platform that just focuses on Internet-related stories, or stories coming out of the blogosphere, or media-related stories. One custom-suited to the online media cultist, you might say.

Digg’s expansion into product and services reviews will delight a galaxy of web publishers and web companies to no end. Of course, it will also need to take on that much more effort to combat gaming, but that’s a somewhat small price to pay for success.

Mashable and news tracker site Megite have partnered to launch Mashtracker, a “memetracker” that focuses on blog conversations stemming from stories published by Mashable.

This is an interesting development on a few fronts. Gabe Rivera’s suite of memetracker sites – anchored by politics-centric Memeorandum and tech-centric Techmeme – does an excellent job of selecting hot stories (based on an algorithm that uses factors such as links and “influence”) and then surrounds them with related stories and blog articles in story clusters. These clusters change and evolve and move up and down the page fluidly, so it’s easy to see which stories are hot and being talked and buzzed about across the Internet.

Included stories cover a wide range of subject areas and are selected from both mainstream media publications as well as the blogosphere. The new Mashtracker narrows the focus by just tracking social news stories published by Mashable, and the related conversations that spring up around them within the blogosphere. Mashable has a unique opportunity here to be successful, I’ll wager, because it already is a trusted source for social news. (No one does a better job of keeping up with the current blizzard of social networking start-ups, for example.)

And the particular focus on blogs is another step forward in terms of the blogosphere’s credibility. In essence, this is another way in which the blogosphere is declaring that it is in many ways a better source of Internet news, reviews, and opinions than traditional media.

While Mashable’s layout is similar to Techmeme’s, the design is a bit more clunky. That said, I do like that company logos are used to anchor the lead stories. I imagine they’ll clean things up and streamline as the new site matures.