Jun 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The news that Daylife — the social news-aggregator that Jeff Jarvis is involved with, and craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark has helped financially — has gotten a second round of funding is an optimistic note for the idea of social news, although I’m not quite sure Daylife is there yet (or Newsvine, or Gather.com for that matter). Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he thinks the perfect media product for the 21st century would be a mix of Techmeme, Digg and Topix.com (which doesn’t get as much attention as I think it deserves).
I think he’s probably right, in the sense that all of those use some combination of “crowdsourcing” and editors/moderators, along with some algorithms (or robots). And that’s why I would argue that when it comes to Stan Schroeder’s question at Mashable — Who Will Bring Us News: Robots, Crowds, or Editors? — the answer should be: All of the above.
Digg takes links that people submit and lets users vote, and also uses algorithms to help determine what gets to the front page; Gabe Rivera uses an algorithm at Techmeme.com, but also tweaks it himself constantly, using his dark geek magic 
I think it makes sense to use readers as a resource — either to submit news links, or vote on them, or rank them based on clicks or comments, or some combination of all three — but it is also important to have editors who make judgments as well, and algorithms to smooth the process. It doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) just one or the other.
Jun 21st, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Came across a fascinating local news site in Wisconsin called Storybridge.tv, which was started by a couple of local TV journalists — a cameraman and an on-air reporter — along with several other staffers who handle the technical and operational side of the business. The site is extremely well-designed, I think, with a front page that has several major video pieces displayed, most of which will play right in the page without requiring you to click to another page.
The pieces in question aren’t exactly earth-shattering in terms of their news value — one recent feature was an interview with a local hot-dog vendor — but there are several pieces that I thought were excellent, including a feature on a woman who has decided to live virtually without any possessions so that she can spend six months hiking the 2,000-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Watching her describe how this took shape after her father died was quite affecting, and proves how effective video can be.
There’s a story about the site in the Madison Capital Times newspaper, and the founders of the site discuss their startup here.
Jun 21st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
From Press Gazette comes news the the Beeb is sending reporter and techno guru Ben Hammersely to Turkey to cover the election using a number of social networking tools, including his blog, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook:
“The BBC has dispatched reporter Ben Hammersley to spend two weeks using new social media web tools to cover the run-up to the July general election.
He will visit four cities and report for BBC World, World Service radio, News 24 and BBC News online.
In what is a first for the BBC, Hammersley will file to his personal blog, he will upload photos to Flickr, video to YouTube, post snippets of text to the microblogging site Twitter, bookmark research on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and network with people through Facebook.”
Should be interesting to follow this experiment in distributed media. If I were a large media outlet, I would paying very close attention. Ben has a bit more detail on the deal here.
Jun 20th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
From Mark Potts, who blogs at Recovering Journalist, comes a fantastic collection of quotes from the CEO of CareerBuilder, the job-listings site that is co-owned by a number of newspaper chains including McClatchy (the quotes come from a synopsis of the CEO’s comments at PaidContent). I know that CEOs are paid to talk tough and dismiss their competition, but this is a little much:
“I don’t think there’s a free model in the future… If CraigsList were trying to manage 2 million jobs and 22 million job seekers, it would be very difficult for them to match those two sides up. Quality is like beauty; it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Almost anyone who comes to our site is a quality applicant. It takes 200 engineers who are focused 24/7 on matching those 22 million applicants with the right employer. You don’t get that in a free business. It doesn’t impact our business today.”
Keep on whistling, friend.
Jun 18th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a great post about how newspapers can work with aggregators and the distributed ecosystem of the Web, instead of just moaning about how Google and Yahoo are stealing their business, as Tribune owner Sam Zell and others like to do from time to time. Scott nails it when he says that:
The problem that newspapers and other traditional media brands have is that they still see branding as a function of controlling the distribution channel, rather than branding each unit of content that must now live and survive on its own in a disaggregated online media ecosystem.
Using aggregators and search wisely can make a big difference, Scott points out, using the New York Times “Topics” pages as an example. Putting together pages of content that match what people are searching for is a good way of making the rest of your publishing entity that much more appealing. And Scott notes that this works for his site as well.
Publishing 2.0 gets 73% of its traffic from search and referring sites, which include aggregators like Techmeme. Some of my content is also syndicated in full text on Seeking Alpha, Yahoo, and Digital Media Wire (with links back to the site, which yield significant traffic) — this is anathema to the traditional media mindset.
But the result, he says, is that his RSS and email subscriptions keep growing, and so is his brand — by effectively leveraging search, and by giving his content away.
