Online Media Cultist

After a week or so of swirling rumors, it has been revealed that Netscape is going to move its “social news experiment” (read = Digg clone) to a new URL at www.propeller.com. Meanwhile, Netscape.com will revert back to its old school portal roots.

In my view what all of this means is as yet unclear. The big question:

* Will Netscape spin the propeller once and leave it to its own devices?
The major players in the social news space are Reddit, Digg, and Netscape. If Netscape is left to wither and die (think = Myspace News… shudder) it will basically be exiting a space that I strongly believe has an enormous future that is just in its very opening stages. So it will be very interesting to see if AOL puts money and resources behind Propeller, or if the rebranding is simply a subtle way to get rid of it.

Netscape scout Muhammad Saleem is enthused about the news at any rate, while Mathew Ingram perceptively asks why the announcement was made ahead of the new site launch.

Referring to the announcement, written by Tom Drapeau, Ingram also fires off a great one-liner in noting that “at least Jason Calacanis knew how to market something with a little energy.”

Meanwhile, back at AOL/Netscape headquarters, you have to wonder why they’re putting their eggs more firmly back into the portal basket. Sure, a bunch of longtime AOL subscribers and ancient Internet users who hearken back to the Netscape browser days might enjoy finding their news and information in one place… but they can already do this at AOL.com.

I can’t help thinking that Netscape as social news engine is an experiment that is being killed before its time.

That said, like most experiments it has its imperfections. The site design and user interface is clunky, the decision to pay people to submit stories controversial (which isn’t necessarily bad), and the site performance is at times frustratingly slow (which is inexcusable for a large commercial site well past its launch).

But the mix of human editors and user submitted and voted upon stories is the future of online news, which translates more broadly to the future of news. It’s just that simple. I firmly believe that the vast majority of online news sites (social and “traditional”) will be doing some hybrid of this, and probably much sooner than later.

Netscape is (or was) the only large site experimenting in such a way, which means it had the pole position to become a major online news leader.

Maybe Propeller can spin its way to such a position, but I’m not optimistic at the moment.

TechCrunch is reporting that AOL is considering killing off the current incarnation of Netscape, “the ‘Digg Clone’ social news site that they launched a little over a year ago at Netscape.com, and redirecting traffic to the Netscape portal instead.”

If true this is one of the most surprising moves I’ve seen this year. Reports about the success of Netscape’s shift to people-powered social news has been varied, but the bottom line is that while Digg dominates the space that it helped to invent, there is very little major competition in what should be a wide open marketplace.

I continue to believe that social news is the future of news. My prediction is that many major online news platforms in the future will evolve to what I call hybrid social news: a combination of submitted and voted upon stories, original news content, and news stories selected by editorial staff from around the web.

The right combination of professional and community-driven content will be a winner when executed properly. Netscape in my view is a great experiment in that direction, combining its news “anchors” with user submitted stories and voting. Of course, it’s far from perfect, but the very fact that it stands with only Reddit as significant competition to the tech-driven Digg should give AOL execs pause before they pull the plug.

Former Netscape GM Jason Calacanis, who has been Netscape’s biggest cheerleader even after his departure, writes “No idea what is going on over at Netscape…”

Search Engine Land alerted me to the fact that Tom Drapeau, current head of the “Netscape.com social news site,” angrily commented on the TechCrunch story that the rumors are false, and that the story is nothing more than hysteria caused by a newly added option on Netscape to access the “old” portal / non-social news experience.

However, a number of bloggers, including Susan Mernit, translate AOL’s early official response to the story as corporate-speak for buh-bye to Netscape as social news platform.

That would really be too bad.

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.

The biggest fallacy that social news sites like Digg perpetrate is that their voting systems are organic, run by the community, that every story has an equal chance – based upon its merits – to reach the front page and find acclaim, and so on. It’s just not true, and likely never will be. The problem is that the more popular a social news site gets, there are that many more people submitting stories, that many more people trying to rig or manipulate the system to their benefit.

So it behooves social news sites to continually tweak the rules to appease each of its groups of users. I really like former-Netscape General Manager Jason Calacanis’ 80-19-1 rule here. This states that 80 percent of your audience will never participate (they will simply consume information), 19 percent will partake in such activities as voting and commenting, and one percent are your hard core users: the engine that keeps social news sites alive by submitting volumes of stories and participating in all parts of the site.

So the “big three” of social news sites – Digg, Reddit, and Netscape – all do tweak the rules, but Digg in particular is cagey about this, always harkening back to how the community rules the kingdom.

The truth is though that many people feel that a small group of “power users” controls a high percentage of stories that reaches Digg’s front page. Therefore, it can be construed that the community has relatively little influence on Digg at all, that a small oligarchy of sorts actually forms the editorial board that selects the stories that hit the front page (and therefore finds a huge audience of readers) each day.

Brian Carr, in “Is Digg Broken Beyond Repair?” asserts that Digg’s top 25 “power users” control as much as 70% of what reaches the front page. He then offers four solutions to “break” the oligarchy. Three of these, in my view, aren’t all that useful as they involve voting for spam, not voting at all, or boycotting the submissions process.

One solution though does point to the reality of the modern popular social news site: create alliances. Digg itself allows for this in that you can add friends to your profile. Theoretically, people can visit their friends’ profiles each day and vote for stories submitted by each one. However, the line here between friendly cooperation and “gaming” the system can get somewhat hazy.

But the fact is that for a story to have any chance at all of reaching Digg’s front page, it needs some level of pre-determined support. Once Digg publicly confronts this reality, it will be able to better respond to the complexities manifested by its own success.

I’m still sifting through the avalanche of e-mail that piles up during a month away from the laptop, but I must make mention of the most interesting article I read today, sent to me around a week ago from my partner and buddy over at Blogcritics, Phillip Winn.

It’s a little experiment that Annalee Newitz of Wired pulled off: create crappy content and then buy your way onto Digg’s front page with it. That Annalee was able to do this when purposefully creating low-grade content (a blog that’s mission is to take pictures of crowds but offer no psychology of such or any commentary at all to explain it) tells us that Digg and all popular social news sites have a ways to go to lock out gamers and spammers.

It’s a good problem for Digg in that it proves that companies (such as User/Submitter) see value in offering a service that gets submissions onto the treasured real estate of Digg’s front page and that publishers are willing to pay to cheat to get that front page exposure. However, Digg will need to continue to become more sophisticated in sniffing out and squashing gaming and collusion.

From the publisher perspective, the negative ramification is that quality submissions can get squashed for appearing to be suspicious when in fact they may not be. Human interaction from site editors should be useful here, but that is also not always the case. Netscape editors, for instance, will at their discretion switch out story links on submissions to those that they feel are more original. In essence, they’re trying to prevent “re-blogging,” where a blogger will blatantly republish someone else’s content or excerpt a story and add no real value to it. That’s all fine and well, but I’ve witnessed numerous cases where unique takes on breaking news stories were dumped for a more “original” one. That practice is dangerous in that it will turn off eager news submitters and, for hardworking publishers, is generally non-cool.

Update: Jason Calacanis makes a great point in asking Digg to make bury/sink votes more transparent. Adding to that, I’d like for Netscape to be more communicative with publishers that are accused of re-blogging!

The jury is certainly still out on whether or not the “new” Netscape.com – revamped into what some would herald as an innovative experiment in social news and others would deride as yet another Digg-clone wannabe – is a success or not.

But it doesn’t matter in the long run. I like to think of the Netscape model as a hybrid approach to social news, as it builds upon the “Digg model” of user submitted stories + everyone votes for their favorite stories = a user controlled front page of your “online newspaper.” Netscape has a strong social news base (in terms of how they feature and emphasize this form of people power) and also employs Netscape Navigators, human editors who submit their own stories, make some stories “sticky” by featuring them in an admin-controlled area on the front page, and commenting, friending, and generally taking an active social networking-style role on the site that is diametrically opposed to Digg’s human-hands-off-way-off style.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 asks if news is a fundamentally shared, social experience. I would argue that it is… to a certain extent. Scott is right in saying that people enjoy sites like Digg and Techmeme because they offer the prospect of interesting stories that you didn’t even know you would be interested in (Reddit is my favorite site that falls into this category, by the way). This activity is akin to the traditional experience of browsing through part or the full of the newspaper over breakfast, isn’t it? In both cases the consumer is browsing a trusted news source. Of course, one is selected by professional journalists while the other is selected by the audience, or some combination of editors and users.

I believe that there is a great potential audience for a hybrid social news approach that Netscape spearheaded, and much sooner rather than later many sites – mainstream media and “web 2.0″ social news sites both – will adopt a model roughly along the following lines.

The future of news sites will comprise three kinds of content, which will be mixed and matched and meshed together in all kinds of dizzying ways:

* User submitted content – This is the backbone of any social news site, and I expect that its popularity will only increase. User-controlled sites are, in the end, all about the community that springs up around the news/voting platform so I suspect that niche social news sites – based upon specific subject areas, interests, geography, or beliefs – will thrive over the next few years.

* Admin submitted content – This is the area that Netscape has innovated in. Netscape Anchors take on a variety of roles on the site: they post stories they find interesting or compelling (stories not yet submitted to the Netscape system or stories they themselves find elsewhere on the Internet), they have the ability to feature stories in the above-the-fold “Netscape Anchors Recommend” area, and they can conspicuously insert themselves on story pages to add pertinent information, provide relevant links, or explain why they feel a given story may not be right for Netscape at all.

* “Original” content – This is the new frontier to create a true hybrid social news experience. Imagine what The New York Times online edition may look like a few years down the road: original NYT content merged with a user generated submission/voting system (which may include NYT content and anything else from around the Internet) and editor selections. So The New York Times would still be The New York Times (by featuring its own content prominently in a similar fashion to how it does this now online), but it would incorporate both user submitted and admin submitted content into its model.

It also should be taken as a given that the future of news online is a full-on multimedia experience, with photo imagery, audio clips, and particularly video all grappling to take away the spotlight from the written word.

Netscape’s hybrid model takes on two of these three areas. And just recently it has delved into the third with Netscape Reports, an area of the site devoted to “original reporting by the Netscape Anchor Team.”

Look for a major, mainstream media news site to experiment with a hybrid social news approach within the next year or two. And then we’ll know that the future of news has truly arrived.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying social news sites over the last year or so, particularly digg, netscape, newsvine, shoutwire, and reddit. Trying to figure out how to get “your” story on the front page of one of these sites is a tantalizing art, a frustrating science for any publisher. And short of flat out paying top social news users to promote your stuff (which is a significant problem right now apparently for digg) it’s nearly impossible to say if a particularly story will be successful or not.

Diane Kristine’s Blogcritics piece is on digg’s front page right now, which is what brings all of this to mind. The digg community is fascinating, right down to the commenters. There’s a debate going on about whether or not Diane is justified in declaring herself a “non-techie.” Hilarious!