Online Media Cultist

Relative newcomer on the social media scene socialmedian describes itself as “a social news network that connects people with personalized news and information.” Personalized social news seems like a worthy niche to go after, and I wish founder Jason Goldberg and crew well.

socialmedian popped up on my personalized radar today as I noticed a few click-throughs from it to a story I wrote about the rise of social media professionals.

Now, it’s always nice to see traffic coming through from a new source. So I clicked over and checked out the referring page. As of this writing, four people had voted or “clipped” the story, which is great.

The title of the story appears on socialmedian, along with the source site (in this case Online Media Cultist). Then we get to the “summary.” For this particular story, the summary consists of the first 176 words of the piece.

Is pulling that much content from a publisher’s site without permission content theft? No… but it’s getting awfully close. Readers of this site will note the problems I had with Shyftr, a site that flat out grabs entire full content feeds without permission.

There’s really no standard that I’m aware of for what’s acceptable for excerpting stories on social media platforms. However, it’s usually something along the lines of a sentence or two. Digg, the most popular social news site, caps descriptions at 350 characters. And it should be noted that the intent is that the story submitter is describing the story however they like as opposed to automatically pulling an excerpt.

Some people – Louis Gray for one – have no problem with this kind of content use. Gray notes that sites like socialmedian are moving conversations to “micro-communities where people are comfortable discussing your content with peers.”

That’s all well and good (and inevitable), but here’s a suggestion: cap excerpts at something like 350 characters or 60 words. That’s plenty to get a sense of the piece, then simply have a “more” link where people can link back to the source publication.

This is crucial as social media platforms must be partners with content publishers. It’s a win-win when source sites can be promoted within the umbrella of social media communities.

Again with the studies and the misreading of the modern online media environment.

A Reuters story cites a study which declares that user interaction on “web 2.0″ sites “remains weak” and “is far less participatory than commonly assumed.” Stats to back up this claim include .16 percent of YouTube users upload video and .2 percent of Flickr users upload pictures. The study does however grant that somehow, “despite relatively low user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 688 percent in two years,” according to Bill Tancer from Hitwise.

This proclamation of weakness is, well, weak.

Here’s why:

* First things first: web 2.0 = the Internet. There’s very little use in differentiating “web 2.0″ websites from the rest of the Internet. If you can leave comments, if you can upload media, if you can personalize a search function in any way, if you can set up a profile of some kind, you’re in web 2.0 land.

* They’re forgetting the 80-19-1 rule. I picked up on this rule from Jason Calacanis, and although it relates to social news sites like Digg and Netscape, I’ve found it very useful in framing the way in which online communities in general tend to operate. The first part states that 80 percent of an online community will never participate, and will be content simply to consume information or entertainment content.

* The 19 percent part is where the study (and its coverage) really misses the mark. According to Jason’s rule, 19% of a community will interact in some way, whether it be leaving comments, or perhaps taking part in voting or ranking on a social news site like Netscape.

What about the 900 million people who have a MySpace and/or Facebook and/or Bebo and/or some other social networking profile, you ask? Aren’t those good folk “participating” on “web 2.0″ sites by browsing profiles and friending and posting pictures and prancing and cavorting and flirting and so on?

The answer would be a big fat yes. Just because media uploads are concentrated into a relatively small group on YouTube and Flickr doesn’t mean that huge numbers of millions of people aren’t actively interacting with the Internet i.e “web 2.0″ sites.

* And what of the 1 percent, or the power users? Those uploading media on YouTube and submitting stories to Digg are the engines that keep those web platforms afloat. However, that the study doesn’t take into account the 19-percenters who comment and vote and rank and set up profiles on these sites is surprising.