Online Media Cultist

I’m going to go slightly off-topic here this morning.

Last night, while listening to the Howard Stern show (you can listen to the show 24 hours a day now thanks to Sirius Satellite Radio, which is wonderful), I heard mention of someone referred to as an “A List celebrity.” You hear this all the time, of course. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson are A Listers, and so on.

But who gets to decide who is included on this exclusive list? And going on down the logical line, we never really talk about who is part of a theoretical B List or C List, right? Usually the lower tiers of the metaphorical “list” are reserved for has beens, wannabes, and former stars, which comedienne Kathy Griffin self-mockingly references in her reality show My Life on the D-List. What about Jason Alexander, who played the wildly popular George Costanza on Seinfeld. What is he these days, B List maybe?

So this is a long-winded way of saying that we have a vague collective sense of who our biggest superstars are, and we kind of know the lowest tiers of fame when we are provided with examples.

Now, let’s tack back to the online media realm.

The appetite for celebrity and gossip content online is voracious and unending. Gawker, Defamer, Perez Hilton, TMZ, and the like are merely the biggest fish in a vast ocean of websites and blogs keeping a panting public updated on the goings on in the celebrity universe. We also know that people interested in gossip tend to be young, so it’s not a huge stretch to say that many are on social networking websites like MySpace, Last.fm, imeem, and so on.

So here’s my idea, which I’ll throw out there for public consumption and discussion.

What if there was a social media platform that focused on allowing its community to decide who is an A List celebrity? Taking this further, why not let people decide who exactly is B List, C List, and all the way down the line? A ranking system could allow the community to vote celebrities (and barely celebrities) up-and-down in real time. A social news engine could bring the hottest (and coldest, I suppose) celebrities to the front page, Digg-style. People would be able to comment about their beliefs on the topic and argue out their opinions with others.

Breaking celebrity news stories would drive people to this website to give and take away “votes” within the ranking system. Britney Spears drove a school bus full of kids into a lake? She’s dropped from B to C for sure, some might argue.

Take Steve Guttenberg as another random example. He was a big star in the ’80s, with the Police Academy movies and a bunch of other high profile projects. He’s still around these days, but you don’t hear about him that much. Is he B List today? C List? And what about someone who got eliminated from Flavor of Love 2 after the third week, thus ending their 4.5 minutes of fame? Maybe they’re F List (for Flavor)?

If done right, this website could become something of an arbiter for who stands where in the celebrity landscape. It could encompass an elegant combination of commenting, profiling, voting, and content features. It would have an enduring ability to track the celebrity/gossip world and become a natural home for fans worldwide.

Maybe someone is doing this already, someplace. But maybe not.

I predicted that 2007 would be an explosive year for social news sites, but it really hasn’t been. With the exception of Reddit getting gobbled up by Conde Nast, not a whole lot has happened to interfere with Digg.com’s absolute dominance of the space. Netscape, an experiment in social news coupled with editorial involvement that I find to be intriguing (though it has its problems), recently announced it is jettisoning its social news presence to Propeller.com, where it may or may not be left high and dry.

I also thought that this would be a big year for social news verticals (a social news/voting site for, say, sports stories or music stories) but that hasn’t yet turned out to be the case. Then there’s the spectacular failure of MySpace News’ launch, a dead horse I’ve already applied many a spectacular beating to.

So, if you’re interested in a large community that can submit news stories and vote the popular ones onto the front page, Digg is really the only game in town. And while there’s certainly still a focus on tech stories, founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose claim that non-tech stories now outnumber them, at least in terms of pure volume.

I really like how Digg has handled its product development. From a very simple start, it has layered in new tools and features to meet the needs of its community. For its web-savvy and tech-nutty base, you have things like Digg Spy, Swarm, and Stack.

Digg user profiles have always been relatively basic as well, particularly as compared to MySpace and other purely social networking websites. In an effort to appeal to its increasingly non-tech community, Digg is now planning to roll out more advanced profile features. (As of this writing the new features have as yet to be deployed, but they are said to be “MySpace-like.”)

What I like most about Digg’s strategy is that it’s feature adds don’t complicate or confuse the core experience – if you’re into browsing popular stories, or submitting your own and seeing how many “diggs” that they’re getting (complications and complexities in the voter-weighting model aside!) you can still do that. And for those active users who are interested in exploring Digg’s huge user base, making connections, sharing stories and media, and so on, Digg will now give its biggest fans a way to do that.

Pete Cashmore makes the point that Digg’s move into more pure social networking makes it something of a competitor to his own project, Pownce. Maybe Digg will one day create a Pownce-like offering for its own community?

And Read/Write Web notes that more social networking features means more targeted ads for new ad partner Microsoft. More page views too!

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.

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.

Social news leader Digg has released a slightly new and improved home page. The biggest change is that video submissions are now integrated with regular articles. I think this change makes sense as videos are such an important part of web content these days, and that the design change makes the appearance of the page noticeable cleaner and eye pleasing.

MG Siegler at ParisLemon disagrees with me, writing that “…my initial thought beside not liking the way Digg’s look seems to be heading (’child-like’ and ‘cute’ spring to mind), is to wonder how long until videos and pictures (coming in October) completely dominate the main page of Digg?”

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.

Gleamd is a new site that aims to mesh the popularity of social news sites (submit stories, vote for the ones you like, most popular get “bubbled up” to the front page) with social networking sites. Mashable reports that people will be able to vote for other people’s profiles, with the most popular getting highlighted every few days.

This is exactly the direction that MySpace News should have taken. Instead, it’s sadly a ghost town of a social news site, its front page still riddled with stories that have zero votes.

It’s a wide open opportunity that’s just waiting to be taken advantage of. Think about it: allow the millions of MySpace members to have the ability to opt in to a voting system. Therefore, there’s no voting for people who don’t want to be subjected to the democratic (or the MySpace version of it, at any rate) process.

When browsing around social networking sites, there are a few basic things you can do: ask people to be your friend, bookmark profiles, and leave comments. A simple Digg-like system of voting would easily and cleanly tie into this online experience, and I think it would be instantly and extremely popular.

The compulsion for self-expression and mini-online-celebrity would also surely prompt massive interest. And the most popular profiles get special placement and recognition on the site.

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!

The “ghost town effect” is when you head to a web community or platform of some sort and sense… that nothing is going on, that no one is there, and therefore there’s no reason why you should be there. Just as in real life, people tend to congregate online where there are already other people.

New poster child for the ghost town effect: MySpace News, the social news site brought to you by your billions and billions of friends at MySpace, the most popular social networking site of ever.

So while getting even the tiniest of tiny percentages of MySpace users over to MySpace News would make the submit-and-vote news site appear to be rather bustling, this hasn’t yet happened. The front page of MySpace News looks very similar to the dozens of equally barren “digg clones” out there that were quickly and cheaply built on top of open source pligg software. TechCrunch calls the site “DOA” while Screenwerk goes with “MIA.”

The challenge for social news sites is that you need lots and lots of people submitting stories and particularly voting all the time. MySpace News solved the first half of the equation by pumping stories into its system from specially selected publishers such as The Superficial and GigaOM.

However, getting people to stick around and vote and comment and participate – to become the backbone and heart of the site in other words – is turning out to be a trickier proposition.

Several ideas:

* Simplify the voting/rating thing.
MySpace News lets you both rate a story on a scale from 1-5 (using little blue people as icons) and vote on stories… kind of at the same time. This is super confusing – I’ve played around with it a bunch of times and still can’t figure it out. In other words, if a bunch of people rate a story as “bad,” will that still move the story to the front page, simply based upon the quantity of votes?

I say dump the rating part and go with straight votes. This is a model that clearly works at the most successful social news sites.

* Strongly consider dumping the “News” part of MySpace News.
Who said that MySpace users are looking for a social news site as part of the MySpace brand? I think they would be much better off having a submit-and-vote system that is based on MySpace content itself. In other words, let people submit MySpace photos, videos, songs, and profiles, and rank accordingly.

* Integration is a must.
If MySpace News isn’t integrated into the MySpace profile experience (where you hit those millions of eyeballs each day) it’s nearly useless. While MySpace users would likely balk at getting what is essentially random news stories sent to them, getting MySpace-based content could become a smash hit and a great addition to the MySpace community.

Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries concludes: “MySpace News was done half-assedly, it brings nothing new to the table, and it’s definitely not a threat to any social content site.”

Ouch. And agreed.