Mashable is writing about a new news site called Newspond. Their "about" page boasts that the site is "the most advanced news site on the planet." That's certainly a big statement to make, given the competition that already exists. Its main function is similar to that of Techmeme, with some of the social features of Digg thrown in for good measure.
At first glance, it appears that the content that is floating to the top of Newspond is very different to what is atop Techmeme right now. It's not clear whether this is due to the sources that Newspond is drawing on, or due to differences in their algorithms. I tend to think that it is a result of the algorithm, since many of the sources for popular articles are comparable on both sites. I think that the content needs to be tweaked, although it may improve as the site matures.
As far as functionality and look goes, Newspond is at the top of the heap. Everything on the site moves so smoothly, and there are beautiful gradients and rounded corners as far as the eye can see. Comments slide out and boxes light up all over the site. The design of Newspond should be the poster child for Web 2.0.
I don't think that Newspond will dethrone Techmeme or Digg anytime soon, but they are definitely a start-up to keep your eye on. If any of their claims end up coming to fruition, we will be hearing from them a lot.
Social news site Digg launched on Wednesday night a new algorithm to try to prevent groups from gaming the system.
The update effectively punishes people who vote in groups to promote certain stories. The result of the update is that stories that reach the homepage will need to be "dugg" by a diverse group of people.
"Digg's promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page," Digg founder Kevin Rose said in a blog. "Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page."
He goes on to say that as a result of the new algorithm, it will not be uncommon to see stories with more than 100 diggs still in the "upcoming" section. As I am writing this, there are three stories in the upcoming section with more than 150 diggs, the most popular standing at 155.
(Credit:
Digg)
This is supposedly evidence of the new algorithm at work, but I can't help but think that it must be disheartening for the submitters. The other side of the coin is that Digg's top submitters do wield a good deal of power and often receive a lot of diggs just because of who they are; that's not to say they didn't deserve to get to that point in the first place. The top submitters are in this position because they consistently submit great content.
This update will certainly give the little guys a better chance at getting a story on the front page, but it may anger some of the longtime users.
If the top stories are going to be read by a very diverse group of people, then it is important that they are determined by a diverse group of people. The truth is, however, that a lot of the content on Digg has been determined by groups of hardcore users, and this update may render some of their actions ineffective.
On the whole, I think it's important to stop gaming on Digg, and this is a really good way to do that. I'm sure that a good deal of thought was put into these changes and that Digg would not want to mess with a winning formula without careful consideration.
However, as we have seen in the past and as we are starting to see now, Digg fans are very vocal when they don't like something. Digg could have another great uprising on its hands if the new algorithm does not show any apparent benefits to the community.
We haven't heard much from the social news and analytics site, Spotplex, since the initial preview in February. Today, it launched an improved version of the site.
For those who are not familiar with Spotplex, it offers up a snippet of code that blog owners can install on their site. That snippet does two things. First, it provides information about its traffic to the blog owner, much like Google Analytics. Second, and most interesting, it uses traffic data from the sites that have this code snippet installed to determine the most popular stories in a variety of categories. One major complaint with the site initially was that larger sites would have a huge advantage in getting popular stories to the home page since they get a lot of traffic. Spotplex has corrected that and it now judges an article's popularity relative to the traffic that the site normally gets.
Among the other improvements it is offering today is a new geographical tracking feature, so you can see what stories are popular in different parts of the world and blog analytics tools that are customized for the various blogging platforms.
The major problem I see with Spotplex is that in order for the stories on its front page to be accurate, a large percentage of bloggers have to have its code installed. This is a vastly different approach from what Digg or Techmeme do. They give all sites an equal chance of making the front page, regardless of whether or not they know that they are participating. This results in a much more accurate representation of the most popular stories on the Internet. Spotplex, however, maintains this approach is flawed because these sites rely on the contribution of users. Spotplex is hoping that its customized analytics tools will coax blog owners into installing the code, but I'm not so sure that this is a big enough draw.
I had the chance to talk with Spotplex's CEO, Doyon Kim, about this release and how they might go about attracting more blog owners to use the service. He clued me in that they are working on some key partnerships with the people behind popular blogging tools such as Blogger and Six Apart. This could help to significantly increase Spotplex's user base, but we will have to wait and see how that pans out.
Right now, Spotplex has served up 7,000 code snips to bloggers and it estimates that it has 3,000 to 4,000 bloggers with the code currently installed. Spotplex seems to have a good idea going in theory, but in order for this to be pulled off correctly, it will have to have mass participation by the blogosphere, which will prove to be very tough.
(Credit:
Reddit)
SOMERVILLE, Mass.--Reddit, the social news site, hosted one of its meet-ups Wednesday night at the famous local Irish pub, The Burren, in Davis Square here.
Reddit users can post links to news stories of interest that readers then vote up or down. The site also maintains a section for niche communities interested in special topics called "Subreddit."
Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder, came as...what else...the Reddit alien.
Also in attendance were many of Reddit's all-time leading users (posters get "karma" points for well-read articles), as well as several other entrepreneurs from small start-ups.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian at The Burren.
(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)This latest meet-up doubled as a Halloween party and marked the one-year anniversary of Reddit's acquisition by Wired Digital.
Wired Digital, which is owned by Conde Nast and includes Wired News, is now involved in Reddit's operations, but Reddit has managed to maintain its simple look and small community feel. Co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian are still only part of a staff of four and regularly correspond and troubleshoot bugs with users.
Full disclosure: CNET News.com includes Reddit and competitors Digg and Delicious as posting options at the bottom of each article.
Reddit anniversary/Halloween party at The Burren.
(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)Well that was quick. Just a few days after Netscape's announcement that it was shelving its social news service away from the hallowed Netscape.com domain in place of what is essentially AOL's front page, the service has already been given a new name and URL. It's called Propeller.com (link dead ends right now), and that's about all Netscape's Director Tom Drapeau was willing to divulge about the rebranded site in his announcement post on the official Netscape blog.
The new logo is arguably well done, but what's missing here are some details about any tweaks or changes to the rudimentary functionality of the site, and what really separates it from Digg besides a layer of editorial funneling. If it's just a new logo and domain, Netscape has an uphill battle ahead in attracting new users, even with the free traffic that's bound to come from whatever promotion or integration it gets with the new portal site--which in my guess is going to be far fewer free eyeballs than Netscape got before.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Jason Calacanis' personal project, Netscape's Digg clone, has officially closed up shop. When it was initially introduced, Netscape drew a lot of criticism for the site's similarities to Digg and for trying to bribe its top users to switch over to Netscape.
There have been rumors of Netscape closing down the site for a few weeks, but now it's official. On Netscape's blog, Tom Drapeau noted the reason for the shut down as being that, "...we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn't expect to find it on Netscape.com." Going forward, Netscape will be focusing on a more traditional portal site, which can be found here, but will apparently also be releasing a new social news portion of its site.
So, goodbye, Netscape social news. It was a valiant attempt, but you just can't buy strong communities.
Today I'm checking out the new news aggregator, Newser. Wow, that's a mouthful.
When I first loaded the site up, I really liked what I saw. It has a very slick design, and the news is presented really well. The concept for content selection is pretty good too.
Newser's editors hand-pick the top stories of the moment and write their own summaries of them, also pulling in images relevant to the story. This style of presenting news is going back a little bit to Slashdot's style and moving away from the more hands-off approach of Digg and Techmeme. For me, however, Newser has some fundamental flaws that I just cannot get over.
The first and most serious flaw of Newser is that there is no blog presence whatsoever. The Newser page of top 100 sources shows the 100 sites that Newser's editors most often cite. Clocking in at No. 1 (at the time of writing) is the Associated Press, with 340 stories since March. On the other hand, there is not one single story from any of the top blogs, including sites like Engadget and TechCrunch.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with having AP content on Newser. The AP is a very important and influential news organization, and it should definitely have a portion of the content, but if you are going to do an Internet news site, you have to embrace new media, at least to some extent. Having 340 stories from the AP and 0 from Engadget is just absolutely ridiculous.
The other thing that seems pretty curious about the site's concept is that on its About page, it states that "Newser seeks to offer information free of bias." As Josh Catone at Read/Write Web says, "when you add a human element, you unavoidably add a bias as well." I absolutely agree. It's impossible to be unbiased when there is such a large human element involved in the selection process.
I think that Newser could have something good going for it. I like the idea of having news sites with hand-picked content to balance out the automatically generated sites. The editors just really need to expand the spectrum of the content that their editors are picking from and maybe throw in a few social features, such as comments, just for good measure.
Social news aggregator Digg prides itself on how much control its users have over the site's content, something that was reiterated earlier this month when Digg ultimately
But according to a post Monday on the Pronet Advertising blog, blogger Neil Patel accused Digg of pulling an earlier post from the same blog and masking it as a user-generated "bury." His rationale is that the post in question didn't appear in a list of "bury" commands from that day--data that Digg makes public.
Additionally, Patel quotes a Twitter post from blogger Stefan Juhl in order to back up his speculation that Digg may be pulling the strings. In the post, Juhl says that he "got buried by Digg... not the community, but digg... last referrer before buried was crawl3.digg.internal."
Digg was not immediately available for comment.
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