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.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, one of the crazy-smartest people writing about the interwebs and what-it-all-means today, continues his exploration of the over coverage of breaking news stories with a piece called The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web. In this case, Karp uses the Microsoft-Yahoo non-merger aftermath as a means to display how “it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING,” showing a numbing sampling of Google News results as a visual example of how many publishers offer nearly the same thing about the same story.

I agree that this over coverage creates a glut of stories that are nearly identical to one another, that it presents a disservice to readers who are trying to make sense of it all. But I think it’s important to explore why publishers jump on the bandwagon in the first place. Karp likens mass coverage of breaking news stories to 100 newspapers and 50 TV stations covering a factory shutdown in one single Midwest city. It’s an interesting analogy, but I’m not sure that it quite works.

The global nature of the web coupled with a 24/7 publishing environment creates a never ending chase for page views and ad revenues. In other words: publishers aren’t all covering the same story to provide a public service; they’re doing it because there’s a marketplace for huge stories – massive interest for a brief window of time – and everyone is desperately trying to cut themselves in on a piece of the action. That doesn’t mean that everyone will get rich doing this, but obviously there’s some payoff in hopping on the bandwagon.

The conclusion that Karp comes to is that everyone should “BE ORIGINAL.” Of course, this is harder said than done, and everyone will have a different definition of “original.” Scott likes to use Google News when showing examples of over coverage. And Google News is a great news search engine.

But I would argue that “the answer” – if there’s indeed an answer to this problem – is smart content aggregators and smart people networks to help individuals filter out what is the most important, the most original, the most valuable stories in a fluid environment.

The best example I can think of in terms of a smart content aggregator is Techmeme, as well as Memeorandum when it comes to general news and politics. Mixing in individual trusted websites and blogs along with a smart content aggregator or two is a great way to stay on top of breaking stories without getting lost in a sea of sameness.

And what I mean by smart people networks: this can come in many forms, but I’m particularly thinking about Twitter and Friendfeed when it comes to breaking tech and online stories. Building trusted friend/contact networks allows links to get distributed from trusted people to individuals in real time. Social networking sites like Facebook and instant messaging applications like AIM or GTalk can also provide a basis for a smart people network.

So in conclusion I don’t see the deluge of over coverage ending anytime soon. The potential to get in on the action is simply too tempting for publishers. Or, alternatively, many publishers will feel like they’re not legitimate if they don’t write something about a story that everyone else is talking about.

However, over coverage can be combated through a combination of smart content aggregators and smart people networks.

In an interesting piece, Alexander van Elsas muses that Friendfeed likely “will compete with services like TechMeme for the most important aggregation source of tech news.”

Techmeme aggregates breaking tech and Internet news stories through an algorithm that tracks stories by influence and links. It then ranks these stories by timeliness and importance and updates its single page site in real time. Techmeme does a great job of doing this, which is why I think of it as my “morning newspaper” when it comes to tech and online stories. And even better, it collects all of the conversations taking place around the top stories via story clusters. This method of “meme tracking” has been copied by many other online publications as a way to present the news and related stories.

Friendfeed, on the other hand, allows people to automatically share things that they’re publishing and sharing using other services. For example, you can have Friendfeed track your Twitter posts, your blog entries (Friendfeed will publish a link, so people have to click through to get the full text), what you’re sharing on Google Reader, stories you’re digging on Digg, pictures that you’ve uploaded to Flickr, and a bunch of other things. As a Friendfeed member, you then subscribe to other Friendfeed accounts and receive a (usually huge) stream of information coming from each person. Finally, Friendfeed lets you comment on everything as well as letting you vote on things that you “like.”

So I can understand where van Elsas is coming from: Friendfeed and Techmeme are both aggregators that tend to have a concentration on tech and webby stories.

However, I find them to be somewhat complimentary services. Stories that appear on Techmeme are likely to be talked about on blogs, Twitter posts, and other places (like Digg and Reddit) which Friendfeed will scoop up and distribute. Techmeme, while being wonderfully dynamic, is “read only” from the user perspective: you can’t comment on stories or do anything except click links and read.

Friendfeed, on the other hand, does not have Techmeme’s ability to give its audience an easy sense of what’s important, what’s breaking news, and what the surrounding voices of import in the industry are saying about all of it.

Therefore, perhaps we can say that Techmeme aggregates what’s important about tech and Internet news and easily provides links to surrounding conversations. It’s really a new kind of online newspaper, and a pretty terrific one. And Friendfeed is an aggregator of lots of stuff, of what people are reading and writing and sharing and looking at and listening to. It’s a “life aggregator” of sorts.

I don’t see Techmeme and Friendfeed as direct competitors. In fact, I see room for lots of aggregation services that find valuable and differentiated ways to provide information and help people to connect.

Recently, I’ve been trending toward using Techmeme, a content aggregator and “meme tracker,” and Twitter, a communications aggregator and “people knowledge tracker” of sorts, as a way to bring news and information that’s relevant and valuable to me. Fred Wilson of A VC seems to be of a similar mind but theorizes that the “average audience member” may still be more focused on single content publications rather than these kinds of platforms.

In other words, it’s a question of content aggregation versus visiting a single publication as a place to consume news and information.

As evidence, Fred uses a Compete chart that shows a spike in TechCrunch’s traffic while Techmeme’s growth has been relatively more modest:

Wilson goes on to state:

I have moved away from reading individual blogs. I want to read aggregation services like techmeme, hacker news, reddit, twitter, delicious popular, digg, etc, etc. I find that they give me a much better view of the top stories of the day than reading individual blogs does.

But once again, what I do doesn’t map very well to what the average audience member does. I think I need to remind myself of that fact on a daily basis.

I agree with Fred, but I might take a slightly different conclusion. I personally find following the massive volume of posts that TechCrunch and Mashable publish to be difficult. Further, the stream of product announcements, rumors, and tech business news can be exhausting to sift through.

I wonder if the massive growth of Twitter and relative popularity of sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon tell us that people are looking for a combination of algorithm-based and influence-tracking sites (Techmeme) and community-powered content aggregation (Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg) as a way to:

* Relay the most important/compelling/interesting/breaking stories in close to real time - Traditional media websites aren’t efficient at telling us what’s going on in technology and the Internet in real time. Blogs and community-powered sites are clearly filling that gap. And I would argue that “intelligent communities” like Twitter are the next step in this evolution.

* Provide analysis/commentary/meaning/value to news - Again, the blogosphere emerged as a means to fulfill a desire to bring credible opinions and commentary to the news of the day within the online medium. Because blogs are now such an essential part of distributing the news itself – and TechCrunch and Mashable are critical pieces in this – content aggregators and content-centric communities (as opposed to social networking communities such as MySpace) are becoming ever more important in aggregating stories, getting them to the right place at the right time, and relaying what communities are saying about them and think about them.

This is all to say that smart content aggregation and community-based content sharing will become an ever more important part of information consumption. I believe that that’s part of the reason why Twitter is seeing amazing growth (as well as more funding, maybe they’ll tack on a business model one of these days!) and why a range of sites, including Techmeme, are popular within the tech-obsessed crowd.

In other other words: maybe Fred Wilson’s “average audience members” aren’t quite there yet, but I bet they will be in time.

And if you’re looking for one ring to rule them all… it just might be Friendfeed, a service that aggregates Twitter conversations, blog posts, Google Reader shared stories, comments made via Disqus, social news “diggs,” and a host of other services. As bhc3 writes: “FriendFeed is emerging as the one lifestream platform to rule them all. The ability to see and interact across a range of services is proving addictive. And it may inadvertently disrupt a few other services along the way.”

For a great insider’s view of how one blogger is handling his social media consumption workflow, check out Louis Gray’s piece. It’s a great step-by-step on where things are headed.

I love Techememe. It does a pretty remarkable job of collecting the top and hottest stories going on in tech, Internet, online media, and all the business, cultural, and social issues surrounding those worlds. It uses an algorithm based on links and “influence” to find top stories and lays out those stories and the surrounding conversations in story clusters, which changes in nearly real time throughout the day.

Because of Techmeme’s popularity, it itself is often a source of news. Who is trying to game it, who is too popular, not popular enough, who is writing “bitchmemes” to get some 15 minutes of Techmeme celebrity, and so on.

Just over the weekend, TechCrunch did a study of who the top individual writers have been on Techmeme this year. Michael Arrington, Erick Schonfeld, and Duncan Riley of TechCrunch dominate, taking three of the top five slots alone. Mathew Ingram, who nailed the #9 slot himself, points out that Arrington alone towers above the rest of the field, averaging some two Techmeme headlines per day.

Not surprisingly, the reactions have been swift. Dave Winer, in a post that will no doubt provoke many in the blogosphere, writes a withering rebuke of Techememe, basically accusing founder and owner Gabe Rivera of catering to his friends. Further, he takes the opportunity to blast Rivera for not being more transparent in how Techmeme works and calls out “most” of those who nab Techmeme headlines for not knowing “the first thing about technology” because they are not software programmers.

My only thought about TechCrunch’s dominance of Techmeme is that it’s reflective of its overall popularity in the tech blogosphere. It breaks stories, it’s highly popular, and gets linked to widely by influential sites, so it make perfect sense that it will rank high on Techmeme as well. If that popularity may cause momentum of its own accord, that’s the same with any other form of popular publication or broadcast. Over time, if the quality and value isn’t there, that would surely cause less people to frequent, link to, and write about the site, which would cause the opposite effect.

A piece on Mapping the Web called Why I Stopped Reading TechCrunch and Mashable led me to consider my own take on the top tier, high volume blog publishers and how I’m moderating my own information-intake of late.

To put it more bluntly, I know I’m not alone in being terrified of my RSS reader at times. Oh man, I have 1,400 unread stories? Not an uncommon thought. TechCrunch and Mashable are great places to catch up on the newest product releases, start-up doings, and other inside the social media and tech beltway kinds of stories, but keeping up with them can be a nearly full-time endeavor.

I’ve been using my RSS reader more selectively of late, as a place to browse around when I have the time rather than looking at it as a mountain must be climbed everyday. My day-to-day strategy is to use Techmeme and Twitter as the places where I can quickly get caught up on what’s going on in the tech and webby world while still allowing my community to provide me with the latest news, insider gossip and tips, and all the other juicy stuff that gets an online media cultist up in the morning.

There used to be a saying that if you simply read all of the stories published to The New York Times front page everyday, you’d have a pretty solid understanding of what was going on in the world. I think that you could do worse than scanning all of the headlines on Techmeme a few times a day for understanding what’s going on in tech and online media.

Having that basic understanding, Twitter can then be a place to get the really good stuff, quickly and easily. The key is to set up your Twitter profile to follow those people who are going to deliver the good stuff, which can take some time but I have found to be rather fun.

In fact, my thinking in recent days has become somewhat radical. When I find a new blog that I really like – such as yesterday when Louis Gray wrote about Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren’t (I was kindly included on this list, thank you Louis!) – I considered if it would be more beneficial to me to follow the Twitter profiles of the bloggers Louis wrote about rather than add their RSS feeds.

Has Twitter become the new RSS reader?

Louis Gray provides great analysis about Techmeme’s leaderboard, which tracks which sites have the most weight in providing news within Techmeme’s ever evolving publishing system.

Says Louis: “With good content, and good linkage from others, reaching TechMeme is available to anyone. While Gabe’s algorithms are a well-kept secret, it’s unquestioned that the data is driven mathematically, and doesn’t smack of human intervention to push one site’s stories over another.”

I agree. I head to Techmeme at least several times a day as it seems to be one of the best places on the Internet to get the most relevant, interesting, and important web and tech news stories – and, importantly, the evolving conversations around them. And I’ve never gotten a sense that founder Gabe Rivera or anyone else is purposefully tilting the rankings one way or the other.

There’s a great article by Andy Beard and fascinating subsequent conversation between Beard and TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera here.

In short, Beard discovered that TechMeme’s Google PageRank had mysteriously dropped from a 6 or 7 to a 4 in a short period of time. Mysterious is the word, by the way, as TechMeme has always been and continues to be a high quality aggregator of tech news conversations and there is seemingly no reason for Google to hammer it in its search listings in such a significant and terrifying way.

I say significant because if any person on the planet started a new blog on Blogger right now, you’d get assigned a PR 4 in all likelihood. And I say terrifying because when Google hammers your relative search rank, it has the potential to cripple your business and there’s normally very little you can do about it aside from praying, hoping, and tweaking your page content and then praying/hoping that a month or two or three in the future your ranking will be magically restored.

If any of this interests you in the slightest – and it should if you’re a web publisher, interested in search, or wonder how people on the Internet end up driving traffic and making money – head over and check out Andy’s post and its comments.

People used to say (and maybe they still do?) that you can stay up-to-date and fairly well informed of the goings on in the world just by reading all of the stories on the front page of The New York Times each day. Well, in webby world, you can do worse than breezing through TechCrunch to get a quick read on all that’s going on in web land.

Which is helpful as I’ve been very very busy of late. Extraordinary things seem to go on when we’re occupied with other things, isn’t it amazing?

In any event, I’m going to quickly breeze through some of the more fascinating things I came across on TechCrunch while quickly catching up today.

AOL Finds An Obvious Use For WOW.com: A World Of Warcraft Social Network
A bunch of sites have tried to crack the code on getting the enormous worldwide community of the massively popular MMO (massive multiplayer online game) under one online social networking hood, but there’s no clear leader as yet. The key is to give these serious gamers the specific communication tools (which server are you on? When’s the next guild meet-up? Etc.) to give them a reason to use the site to their advantage.

Yahoo Search Just Got Smarter
It’s fun to see search getting multimedia-ish… except for those weird and slightly creepy Ask.com commercials. You know that Google is going to come a-knocking on this door sooner or later.

TechMeme Leaderboard In Context + New Verticals On The Way
I think there’s every chance that Techmeme is going to topple Technorati right over with this one. It’s already the go-to place for up-to-the-minute technology stories and conversations, and the new leaderboard is simply appears to be more relevant and credible than Technorati’s strange and somewhat clunky in-bound links list.

Is Favorit a Digg killer?
I keep talking about Digg needing some serious competition… will Favorit be up to the challenge? It kind of seems more like a feed reader with commenting, with voting/ranking being secondary, but I guess we’ll see!

Joost Officially Launches
Long awaited TV-on-the-Internet play finally goes public. I never quite got swept up in the Joost buzz, but these are the guys who founded Skype, so who am I to argue?

FriendFeed To Aggregate Social Network Data Into A Single Feed
I really like the concept behind FriendFeed (aggregating the activity on your various social networking/bookmarking sites, Facebook-like) and think it has the conceptual stuff to beat out a lot of the competition. As an aggregation-junkie, my hat’s off!

I’ll try to work some of the above into standalone stories over the next few days… if only I can grab some time, and the angry Internet Lordz provide me some connectivity at home!

Blog search engine and aspiring social media portal Technorati has had some well publicized troubles of late, including the resignation of CEO David Sifry and a round of layoffs.

In an effort to turn the page, perhaps, and to stay relevant in the rapidly evolving social media aggregation and search game, Technorati has announced the introduction of Technorati Topics, which is designed to “help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.”

I’m most reminded of Digg Spy when looking at Technorati Topics, as new stories refresh in real time, “bubbling up” to the top every few seconds as the page refreshes under various subject headings. Therefore, I believe that the popularity of this feature will be limited. In other words, it’s mildly interesting to see new stories “bubble up” in real time on your browser, but in most cases it’s easier to turn to, let’s say, the front page of Digg to see what that community has voted to the top, or top-of-the-fold stories on Techmeme to see what the hot tech stories are and the cluster of conversations surrounding them.

It doesn’t help that the process of how Technorati Topics stories are selected is somewhat mysterious: “We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.”

One of my longstanding “rules” about web usability is this: people need to know “why I’m here” within a few seconds or the entire game is lost, you’ve lost your audience. For example, my hope is that the title Online Media Cultist at the top of the page will quickly convey that this blog publication is going to tend to be about webby and online media-related stuff.

In terms of news stories on the web, you basically get three main varieties: new, popular, and “important” (front page New York Times stories are important because its editors are telling you they’re important). Technorati Topics doesn’t cleanly fit into any of these areas, which therefore unfortunately fails this basic usability test.

In other words, I asked myself, “why am I here?” and I wasn’t sure. Is Technorati Topics supposed to be about the newest stories, the breaking stories, the most talked about and linked to stories? It’s frustratingly unclear.

Mathew Ingram calls out Technorati’s other recent offering, Technorati WTF, as a ghost town and isn’t very optimistic about Technorati Topic’s ability to transcend past the status of undead. The usually measured Ingram breaks character to exclaim, “What the heck is this company thinking? They have no CEO, their database comes under fire repeatedly for its lack of reliability, and this is the best they can do?”

There’s lots of blogospheric agreement about this general sentiment:

* Frantic Industries: “Technorati Topics Throws a Bunch of Random Posts At You”

* Mashable: “Technorati Launches Useless ‘Topics’ Section”

* Read/Write Web: “Unfortunately, Technorati’s scroll of news moves so fast it defies usefulness.”

* Webware: “In my opinion, Technorati Topics comes up short, while Techmeme succeeds, simply because of the way that the stories are displayed.”