Online Media Cultist

MSNBC.com and Conde Nast (which owns a bunch of print and online properties such as Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, Self, and Glamour) announced a content partnership last week that will allow MSNBC.com to feature stories from Conde Nast’s assorted offerings.

MSNBC.com already has a pretty great array of offerings, including NBC news and Newsweek stories. Conde Nast on the other hand owns social news engine Reddit.

It would be really interesting to see a new social news site built off the Reddit platform that encompasses MSNBC.com, Conde Nast, Newsweek, and perhaps some additional content partnerships. So, people could vote on stories across MSNBC.com, and then view a “most popular” tab that would take readers to a social news view that shows the hottest stories, the most voted on stories, and so on, and lets everyone comment on all stories.

In my view, such an offering would immediately compete with Netscape, the only real player in the “general news” social news space (market leader Digg is tech-centric). As a Reddit product, it could be offered as its own tab on Reddit.com (call it MSNBC.com News or give it its own branding) or perhaps use Reddit’s “sub-reddit” system.

I’ve been saying and writing for a long time now that the future of news is social news. While many large news sites use some measure of voting or content rating, I think MSNBC.com and Conde Nast are in a perfect position to partner to create a compelling news, opinions, reviews, and lifestyle social news offering.

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.

Check out this really smart and comprehensive look at “the wisdom of crowds” and how it applies to popular social news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Netscape, written by my man over at Blogcritics, Technical Director Phillip Winn.

If you’re into social news, or websites where the community (in theory!) controls the front page by voting or ranking content submissions, it’s an exciting time because we’re at the very very beginning. Digg, the most popular social news site, is making it up as it goes along just like everyone else and is certainly making some mistakes and taking its lumps along the way.

Personally, I tend to visit Reddit the most. While I appreciate the stripped down and clean design, it’s the interesting and eclectic mix of stories that keep me coming back. So in the end social news sites are more about the people who make them up than anything else. Which is why I think that there’s room for a dozen or more popular social news sites in this space, but that’s a topic for another day!

While I was writing about Digg’s “good problems” caused by its own success, it came to my attention (thanks to Reddit!) that a Mr. Steve Baker of “The Digg.com Team” is apparently no one to be trifled with when it comes to addressing user concerns.

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.

Yeah, I feel a little bit silly and sheepish about it, but I must admit that I don’t really get StumbleUpon.

The idea behind the site is pretty simple: a downloadable tool bar add-on allows you wander around the Internet (via pressing the Stumble button) with the presumption that the more you interact with the tool (rating sites along route with a thumbs up or down) the more it knows what you like and helps you to discover cool sites that you would likely never find on your own.

I get that part. It’s not something that I would personally get into, but it’s a nice little service. Where I start to lose grasp is in understanding how StumbleUpon has become “a substantial driver of traffic,” as Mathew Ingram and many others have noted, and how publishers are supposed to take advantage of the site to harness the stumblers.

Getting the toolbar installed and logging into StumbleUpon was a somewhat clunky experience for me, but perhaps that was an aberration. Figuring out what to do next as a publisher was, however, where I really got lost. I was eventually able to figure out how to submit a site URL, but I was left confused as I’ve seen other writers note how they’ve used StumbleUpon to drive traffic to individual stories.

After spending a fair amount of time investigating, I realized that there’s a tagging feature in which you can add tag words to individual “pages.” I’m not sure if adding tags to an individual “drilldown” story page in effect submits that story into the StumbleUpon system with those tag words attached, or if you’re simply associating tag words with an entire website or blog.

I like to think that I’m a relatively savvy Internet user, so if I’m confused, I’m guessing others are as well. For non-publishers, for those people just looking to stumble around and find cool sites, the service is likely less of a headache to figure out. But I’m genuinely curious to hear from bloggers who utilize StumbleUpon as part of ongoing promotion efforts. Is it necessary to tag your own pages every time you publish a story, for instance? Or is some other action involved?

There’s also a social networking side to StumbleUpon where you can find and socialize with other stumblers who have interests similar to your own. Again, I’m guessing that there are those that find this to be an engaging feature, but I’ve never really believed that social news or social bookmarking sites have an overwhelming amount to offer in terms of social networking. In other words, when I visit Reddit I’m interested in finding stories that I’m into and don’t really care connecting with others who may be as well. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly electronic loner though, who knows?

A standout exception to this is MyBlogLog, which does a great job of building community around the blogging experience, playing into the inherent need for bloggers to self-promote and connect with fellow online scribes.

In any event, I’d love to hear from those who have had some experience with StumbleUpon, particularly from the publisher/promotional perspective.

In essence: is there more to get than I’ve gotten?

One of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is that a great deal of the browsing and clicking and reading and interacting are done at the office, on the boss’ dime. And when you’ve hit that post-lunch lull and you’d like nothing better than for your desk to auto-magically transform into a luxuriant cot, scanning around your favorite sites can usually tide you over to when the mid-afternoon caffeine buzz kicks in with attitude.

Of course, there’s no end to diversions online. But interestingly, there are relatively few sites that constantly update. As in, hit refresh and see something different appear. That’s likely why social news sites such as Digg and Reddit have become popular, as you can watch a diverse array of stories getting voted onto the front page and take part in the community-powered action.

One of the indications that my personal viewing habits had entered the “2.0″ era was when I started browsing around Reddit instead of refreshing Drudge Report during idle moments. While I disagree with Drudge’s political slant, it was and remains a great place to find a strange and often striking block of up-to-the-minute news links. However, Reddit’s clean design, interesting selection of stories, and social news features (I maintain that there’s very few things online more satisfying than voting down someone you disagree with) make it a compelling downtime attraction.

For breaking news junkies, Google News is an easy choice, and one of the best places to search for information about a story or issue that may have been covered over the last few days. Getting confirmation on breaking news is usually best served by looking out for what’s usually a red bar running across mainstream media news sites like CNN.com and ABCNews.com. And for those with a taste for the truly tasteless and sophomoric, Fark is a standby, with specially crafted news headers like “New Jersey is all ‘whoever smelt it, dealt it.’ New York is all ‘whoever denied it, supplied it.’”

Checking RSS feeds is a great and efficient way to quickly check up on what’s going on in the subjects areas you’re interested in. I’ve recently made a significant shift away from RSSFwd.com - a nifty little service that sends RSS feeds directly to your e-mail account - to Bloglines, a more traditional RSS reader. Bloglines is great because the functionality is simple and the interface very clean.

Finally, one of the biggest time spenders/wasters of them all should not be overlooked. One of the keys for social networking juggernaut MySpace is that people have an innate desire to express themselves and connect with one another. As social networking tools and companies grow more sophisticated and savvy, niche and themed social networks are developing that are geared toward older (read = above 21) audiences.

Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington announced the “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” for 2007 today. The list of 15 web services – including Digg, Flickr, Gmail, Skype, Techmeme, Wordpress, and YouTube – is interesting as a collection in several ways.

My first thought is that while most of these services didn’t exist two or three years ago, they really are indispensable to the daily life of many web users as 2007 dawns. And that’s striking because it shows you what a flattening force technology (and “web 2.0″ as its modern Internet equivalent) really is. I can look at the list and know that I use many of the same information-gathering and communications tools as “influential tech blogger Michael Arrington,” for instance.

If e-mail was one of the Internet’s earliest (and some might still argue only) “killer apps,” I agree with Mr. Arrington that Gmail is just about its perfect web-based incarnation. The ability to tag messages (you can put label a message however you like and have it saved to multiple folders), instant refreshing (messages pop up without you having to do anything), and threaded messaging make it an essential everyday tool.

Two of the selections – Amie Street and Pandora – are music related. I’ve intrigued by a service called eTunes of late, which has kind of an “early beta” look to it but is a really easy way to gather music online and then stream it at will.

While I think that Digg is probably the best current incarnation of the new breed of “social news” sites (though I think the future lies with hybrid models spearheaded by the Netscape, a meshing of an editor- and user-controlled experience), I’m partial to Reddit because of its simplicity and the mere fact that it casts its net to a range of stories that I happen to find interesting. Reddit’s innovation to allow users to vote stories “down” may actually be its worst feature as it encourages active news submitters to vote stories down. However, voting comments down, which Reddit employed before Digg added the feature, is great. Nothing’s more satisfying then clicking a down arrow on someone you disagree with!

While Mr. Arrington uses NetNewsGator and NetVibes to read and organize RSS feeds, I’m partial to a combination of Bloglines and RSSFwd. NetVibes, part of the new breed of “web 2.0 start pages,” is a great product but the prospect of staring at a bunch of boxes crammed with news headlines doesn’t quite work for me in general. That said, I’m nearly awed by what a super-cool product yourminis is.

The other things that I use everyday include Basecamp, project management software put out by the 37 Signals folk, and AIM for instant messaging.

What’s finally intriguing is that there is not one social networking product on Tech Crunch’s (or my!) list. I wouldn’t be surprised if this will change in the next year or two, as companies fall all over themselves developing more sophisticated social networks that cater to an older/more mature demographic and an ever wider array of specific interests and lifestyles.

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!