Reddit has a new dedicated video site called Reddit.tv for clips that have become popular on its main page, as well as on its "sub-Reddit" categories. It consists of a simple video player that streams in clips, along with a playlist that lets you jump around. Nearly all of the ones I saw were from YouTube, but there were a few from Vimeo as well. There's also the option to send the video you're watching as a Twitter message, which links back to the Reddit.tv player. Users of Ffwd's Twitmatic will feel right at home.
The site is a little more than just a video playlist though. It's also linking to the source discussion on Reddit, as well as highlighting the top-rated user comment. It's a tad sparse considering the richness of a good Reddit comment thread (which can be several hundred comments long), but for casual users who don't know much about Reddit, it's a nice way to get them in the door.
Competitor Digg has had its own video subsection since late 2006, which simply takes all the popular videos from its various categories and puts them on one page; however it doesn't have a unified player. The closest it comes is by letting users play the videos right on the site as an overlay if the video creators have allowed for embedding off-site.
Reddit.tv showcases all the videos made popular on Reddit along with its sub-sections and highlights user discussions that surround them.
(Credit: CNET Networks)StumbleUpon, an online discovery site that competes with Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, said Tuesday it has expanded its partner program to include Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com.
StumbleUpon launched its partner program this fall with HowStuffWorks, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The Huffington Post. According to StumbleUpon, its partner program tools help sites' users find articles, photos, and videos indexed by StumbleUpon without heading to StumbleUpon's site, downloading its toolbar, or registering for an account.
StumbleUpon said its feature offer more exposure for its partner sites' best content and, in turn, increase the appeal of StumbleUpon and its discovery engine.
"StumbleUpon is fortunate to able to partner with these premier publishers to expose Stumbling on the Web to an even larger audience," Michael Buhr, general manager of StumbleUpon, said in a statement.
Whether adding a handful of partner sites will yield better results for StumbleUpon remains to be seen. But as the company's executives said when the program kicked off, they hope to open it up to all publishers soon.
Social news site Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division two years ago, has announced the start of a new strategy to distribute its technology around the Web. It's partnered with the U.K.'s Independent newspaper to install Reddit technology on its Web site and encourage readers to vote up and down on the news.
While a prominent button for the Independent's internal voting system will appear on each of the publication's online news stories (these will show up in a few weeks), it will also accept links submitted from around the Web.
"It's this kind of open mentality that really excited us about working with them," co-founder Alexis Ohanian said in an e-mail.
Reddit opted to make its code open-source in June, an announcement that would presumably lead to the kinds of deals that the company announced on Thursday. It's far smaller than rival Digg, but seems to have a clear message in place: that Reddit is about distribution, not a standalone site.
After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.
"Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites," a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.
Reddit Bacon.
The site's humor-inclined team referred to the site update as "somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it." More likely, it'll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn't otherwise have it; Reddit's team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.
Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit's open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.
Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best "custom Reddit" from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!
The top headlines at a given time on Wednesday morning at OurSignal. Yeah, a bit short on relevant news.
(Credit: OurSignal)On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web's recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.
Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was "Goatse In Spore," a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don't Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.
The concept is kind of cool: "warm" colors mean a story is gaining momentum, and "cool" colors mean it's fading. Bigger boxes mean more votes on a story across the Web. And it refreshes every 15 minutes, which isn't that impressive in the real-time culture of Summize, but is still quick enough to provide a fresh take on the news.
That's the problem: news. Social-news sites, for better or for worse, have become known for being places to find the most popular Top 10 lists and funny videos in addition to the news, and OurSignal is no exception. So if you're looking to find the goofiest Digg and Reddit headlines in one place, this is a nice resource; but if you're actually looking for the news, you might be out of luck. Putting a handful of social-news sites together unfortunately doesn't do much to help the content.
I'll stick to Google News for now, thanks.
Reddit, the social news site that publishing giant Conde Nast acquired in 2006, has made a big announcement: The site's code, as of Wednesday, is open source. It's been released under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).
The Reddit alien mascot. 'You can play with me now!'
"We'll leave it to the users and see what they come up with," co-founder Steve Huffman told CNET News.com in an interview when asked what the site expected would happen. But more than anything, he's hoping users will tweak some of what they want to see changed and add new features. Social news sites like Reddit and Digg are often home to extremely opinionated communities, and by making its code open-source, Reddit will be able to let those users work on the site themselves to an extent rather than repeatedly petitioning for changes.
"It was kind of an easy decision for us," Huffman explained. "One of our driving goals is to stay as open and transparent as possible and give our users an alternative to mainstream media...this is just the next logical step toward that goal of opening up the actual system." He added that he was surprised that Conde Nast was so quick to approve Reddit's proposal to go open-source.
Reddit now counts 4.5 million unique visitors monthly, significantly smaller than rivals Digg and Yahoo Buzz. But the site has grown 1,000 percent since the acquisition by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division, Huffman said. And its open-source move is something that none of its competitors is doing, he emphasized.
Growth of news aggregation start-ups, however, could take a hit when the frenzy over the 2008 U.S. election is over. "I'm not too worried about it," Huffman said. "I think traffic will definitely change a little. We've seen that in smaller scales already. We saw when the Ron Paul movement kind of came and went...when Ron Paul kind of cooled down, a lot of those users left but the traffic stayed up."
Reddit has a history of openness, too. Last year, to celebrate its acquisition, the company toured around the country giving away free beer.
If you don't have content to populate your site, OneSpot has some for you. The Austin-based start-up joins a host of other companies in the business of delivering contextual links for publishers. OneSpot CEO Matt Cohen makes the claim that OneSpot "democratizes vertical or affinity publishing, helping anyone find, select, and deliver links to the best content on the Web."
OneSpot sifts through more than 200,000 RSS feeds to make content selections. Users provide the system with a set of sample sites, and OneSpot identifies related feeds, looking at link overlaps, Cohen told me. The selected content can be delivered via Web pages, widgets or through e-mail newsletters. For example, OneSpot can supply a retailer with relevant content links for a newsletter to customers.
An optional edit interface allows editors to curate the content, blocking or approving different feeds and pieces of content.
In addition, OneSpot offers its customers Digg-style ratings and discussion pages. Fees are based on the number of topics, page views, or e-mails, Cohen said.
OneSpot currently has less than 20 customers. For example,TheRoot, a Washington Post site for African-Americans, uses OneSpot to fill out the site with a relevant content feed.
TheRoot pulls stories from around 9,000 feeds crawled by OneSpot to surface on its news page. Every story has its own detail page and a permanent URL optimized for search engines.
OneSpot has many competitors that offer some form of contextual content aggregation. They include memetrackers, such Techmeme, Reddit, and Blogrunner; keyword-oriented and linguistic analysis-based services that provide related content such as Sphere, Inform, and Smartbrief; and feed aggregators such as NewsGator and Netvibes.
Cohen believes that the link structure approach, similar to what Google does for search, to selecting sources and content provides the best results. But the choice of content aggregation service will depend on what a publisher wants to accomplish. Other services could be better at finding timely content related to a particular article, rather than for a topic area. OneSpot is currently angel funded, and plans to raise an A series round this summer, Cohen said.
Social news site Digg has the beer-fueled Diggnation podcast, but its Conde Nast-owned rival Reddit is working on something more highbrow: a TV show on PBS.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced Wednesday on the company blog that the site will be powering the news behind YourWeek, a new show on affiliates of the public broadcasting network. In a more youth-focused spin than PBS' news is known for, the new show details the week's headlines as chosen by Reddit users. Reddit has set up a new section of the site for discussion.
"We're finishing taping on the pilot this weekend and I can confirm that the Reddit alien (the site's mascot) will be getting on-camera time," Ohanian said to readers. The site is celebrating its new show's user-generated spirit by throwing a contest for users to remix its theme song--"I suspect it won't be long before we get a Rickroll remix," he added.
Right now, there's no formal debut date as the show is not completely greenlit. The show's pilot will be broadcast online only, hitting the Web on June 6, and YourWeek will ideally launch on PBS stations in the fall.
Meanwhile, Reddit, which trails Digg in traffic and faces new competition from Yahoo Buzz, still has nothing against beer.
Web news aggregator Naubo might be one of the unholiest unions I've ever seen. It could also be one of the best places for news junkies to get their fix. The service is an unabashed visual copycat of Google News, serving up the latest stories from around the Web. The difference is that it has a technology slant, covering news on big companies like Apple and Microsoft, along with gadgets, Linux, and hardware.
What makes Naubo interesting is that it uses this same spidering technology for blog chatter as it does for regular news, so like Techmeme you get big stories coupled together with other blogs that have chimed in. The listing of blogs is put together by humans, who maintain the collective. However that doesn't mean they're the ones to pick out the stories--that's done entirely through an automated system.
To go along with these two news trackers is a user-maintained news service called Buzz (not to be confused with Yahoo's Buzz), that lets users submit and vote stories up and down in an identical fashion to Reddit. The stories are seeded by users just like any other social news service, and the highest ranking stories get promoted to the top of the page and in each of their respective categories a little bit like social news service Mixx. Users of Digg won't be too enamored with the submission process though, you have to fill in each field manually--including the image that goes with it. In comparison, submitting a story to Digg will crawl the story link you give it and fill in all that information for you.
I found a lot of overlap between Naubo, Google News, and Techmeme. The one thing that wasn't getting a lot of play on Naubo is the buzz site. Most stories only had three or four votes before being promoted, so I'd be interested to see how its algorithm scales up with more users. I'm also a little worried about the service getting sued for its design choice, which I assume will get a new coat of paint at the first sign of Google's legal department.
Update: I got a ping from Paul Almeida who runs Naubo. Almeida says the site is getting a new look in two weeks based on user feedback.
Look familiar? It should if you've seen Google News. Naubo tracks Web news, blog news, and user-submitted stories in three different places. Seen here is the latest and hottest blog stories (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Fawnt is a new font link directory that's got a variety of interesting and neat-looking fonts for your computer. I've been to a lot of sites like these in years past, and many are nauseatingly ugly and difficult to navigate. Fawnt, on the other hand, goes the slick and clean route, showing you a dozen fonts at a time in little white bubbles that can be navigated (12 at a time) with simple and large arrow buttons.
Clicking on any of the font links will take you to its site or origin, where you can go download and install it on your machine. The site also keeps track of how many clicks each font has, giving you a quick way to see what's been popular. Many of the fonts are free, but several are not--unfortunately, you don't find this out until you get there.
Like other user-generated sites, Fawnt is powered by community submissions. Its creators go through and separate the good from the bad to promote items to the front page instead of using an upcoming section like Digg or Reddit. The result is a smaller library of items, but what's there is very good-looking. There are currently just over 50 to choose from, and there's a search tool to help sort through them. If you've been scared away by some font libraries in the past, give this site a look; it's delightfully simple.
Look, it's a font directory with no flashing banner ads or pop-ups. Well, at least until you get to where the fonts are being hosted.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
