For those who already have established communities on reddit, being able to point your own domain to reddit without having to host the open source version of the service yourself is a great step forward. Also, being able to customize your CSS stylesheets gives you the opportunity to make reddit fit into the design of your own brand. This makes using reddit a lot more palatable for those with established names who would like to experiment with social news sites, but shied away from it so far.

Reddit definitely doesn't seem to be afraid of giving up control. In the end, though, this move is only going to help it grow its audience - and while the audience might sometimes not even be aware that they are looking at a custom reddit site, reddit itself will surely run advertising on those sites, so its bottom line is only going to benefit from this.

One thing reddit doesn't allow you to do, though, is to create your own voting algorithm - though judging from the direction the developers have been moving in lately, this is probably only a question of time.

Contest

Also, reddit has announced a contest for those who want to start their own community on reddit. Whoever manages to create the largest sub-reddit within the next month can take away a Macbook Air and a reddit bobblehead.

Reddit Keeps Growing

Reddit also announced that they have seen a 300% increase in subscribers and subscriptions since unveiling their latest redesign in May.

While reddit is still much smaller than Digg or Yahoo Buzz, it is definitely driving the development of its site forward a lot faster, and, at the same time, pushing its competitors to become more open and creative as well. While Digg is trying to keep very tight control over its service, reddit is moving in the opposite direction and judging from the numbers cited in this announcement, it is working out quite well for them.

Slate.reddit is populated automatically via Slate.com's RSS feeds - so there are no manual submissions, as on the original reddit.com. All that Slate readers need to do is vote and comment.

I asked Alexis Ohanian what led to the deal. Alexis told me that "the relationship with Slate began when their articles started popping up on reddit shortly after we launched last June." That was followed by numerous other front page stories on reddit, at which point emails were exchanged between Reddit management and Slate.

Reddit's Recommendation Engine

What I like about Reddit is that it aims to be a 'recommendation engine'. As it states in the Help section:

"reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web -- personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes."

Personalization is of course the holy grail for Web apps, which we've established before on R/WW is a difficult thing to achieve. But it does seem to be a point of differentiation for reddit, from digg and Netscape - both of which focus more on community recommendations rather than reddit's personal recommendations. And reddit does have some smart people working on this. Aaron Swartz announced today the new version of reddit's recommendation system:

"One major improvement is that it's faster than ever before -- it's practically live. Head to your recommended page and vote on something and the recommender should whisk it away and give you a new recommendation within seconds."

I'll have to test that out! In any case, it strikes me that at the very least Slate.com will get to understand what articles on their site appeal to readers the most (provided the new reddit tool gets sufficient take-up over time). That extra feedback loop, via reddit, will be a valuable source of data for Slate.

Alexis from Reddit told me there are some other similar white label projects in the works, but this is their first announcement. Personally I think it's great to see these community news apps being white labeled to media organizations, where I've always felt they belonged.

"Since reddit's beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open," said the announcement blog post. "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we're finally giving back to the community that has given us so much."

It makes sense for Reddit, which has grown because of very passionate and technically savvy community, might go this route. Open sourcing Reddit's code will very likely lead to a stronger product and tighter community, and not to the birth of strong competitors. Anyone who wants to create niche Reddits on topics that the site doesn't adequately cover is now free to do so, however.

Reddit is written in Python. An explanatory video from the company is below.

Not only does iReddit has all your favorite Reddit functionality: view stories, vote, comment, share, explore different subreddits, and save links for later, it also lets you 'shake' to get a new story; an idea, Ohanian says, that has been "floating around ever since I saw the Urbanspoon app."

An e-mail last summer "resurrected visions of a shake-able reddit iPhone app to cure away-from-the-computer-ennui once and for all," Ohanian posted.

Created with the help of 280North, the iReddit app is available for $1.99, with a free, ad-supported version in the pipelines.

Reddit is another to have been extensively profiled by Read/WriteWeb. Back in July we noted that Reddit was integrating its software into Slate.com, the venerable Webzine currently owned by Washington Post. The reason was to give Slate readers "a new way to find and discuss its best content." I'm assuming Reddit will be similarly integrated into Wired.

Slate.reddit is populated automatically via Slate.com's RSS feeds - so there are no manual submissions, as on the original reddit.com. All that Slate readers need to do is vote and comment. Back in July I asked Alexis what led to the Slate deal:

"Alexis told me that "the relationship with Slate began when their articles started popping up on reddit shortly after we launched last June." That was followed by numerous other front page stories on reddit, at which point emails were exchanged between Reddit management and Slate."

At that time he told me there are some other similar white label projects in the works. Well looks like Wired has gone and bought the whole company, instead of just licensing the technology!

Also check out our Personalized News: A Market Overview post, which went into detail about Reddit's technology.

UPDATE: Co-founder Steve Huffman from Reddit told me:

"We will certainly be collaborating with wired, but we also be collaborating with the other CN properties such as style.com and other sites affiliated with the company's newspaper groups. We haven't worked out all of the specifics yet, however.

The first order of business will be getting a lay of the land and seeing what we can do for whom."

Also the official press release is now out, which has this quote from General Manager of Wired Digital Kourosh Karimkhany:

"Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same."

The PR notes too that Reddit now has over one million unique users a month. Plus Wired’s parent company, Condé Nast, has already used Reddit technology to launch a beta site, Lipstick.com, for the social filtering of celebrity news.

Reddit‚Äôs technology will be used by Cond√© Nast to "unleash the power of the many communities touched by Cond√© Nast to enhance our Web sites by highlighting news that matters to them,‚Ä? said Sarah Chubb, President of Cond√©Net, the online division of Cond√© Nast.

Reddit, based in Boston, will relocate to San Francisco where Wired magazine and Wired Digital are based. The four founders will continue to direct Reddit as Wired Digital employees.

It's not perfect but it's pretty great. It's reminiscent of the excellent StumbleUpon Video but more timely, less repetitious and less full of commercials. The main question that comes to mind is: why hasn't Digg launched something like this yet?

Note that the video that appears first in the "best of the web" section is one long, juvenile joke about sexual violence from the comedy group "The Whitest Kids You Know." So not all readers here may appreciate the audience on the site and their taste. Unfortunately that's what you often get when you open up editorial selection to a vote of computer savvy folks who like to populate these kinds of sites. It's rule by the loudest voices with the most time on their hands.

The service isn't technically perfect either. On Safari we've needed to refresh the page regularly in order for it to load. You can't vote videos up or down from the Reddit.tv page - the designer says he wants to keep it simple but that may come soon. There doesn't appear to be a very high threshold for the number of votes a video needs to appear on Reddit.tv. Several we saw were just submitted. Finally, it would be great if there was a way to have continuous full-screen viewing of these videos. That might be easier said than done but it would add a lot to the user experience.

Those issues aside, though, Reddit.tv is pretty cool. It's a good way to see popular current events and cool science and tech videos in particular. The inclusion of TED Talk videos is great; those help balance out the rampant stupidity you find on any video sharing service.

This kind of viewing experience is much nicer than what Digg offers in its video section. Surely it's only a matter of time until Digg does something similar to this. In the meantime, if you want to watch up-to-date online videos that have been voted up by a crowd of geeks, Reddit.tv may now be your best option.

Reddit may have a jump on Digg when it comes to avoiding groupthink and spam, via a user reputation system it calls 'karma'. Check out the full story on ZDNet and tell me what you think: is Reddit's karma system a better - more honest - way to rank stories and users than Digg's populist approach of ranking by homepage hits? Or do you think Digg has the right approach, but just needs to address the groupthink and spam issues that come with scaling to thousands of users?

Maybe one of the most interesting features of these sub-diggs will be that those users who manage them will be able to control how and when newly submitted stories will be promoted to the front page.

For Digg's competitors like Reddit and Mixx, the sub-sites have definitely been a success. At reddit, which is arguable a lot smaller than Digg, the more popular sub-reddits can have between 3000 to 20,000 subscribers.

As social news sites like Digg grow in popularity, a lot of their early, hardcore constituents can often feel pushed to the sidelines by the more mainstream users who start using the site over time. With these sub-sites, these users can still make the site their home and take control over their experience again.

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Setting up a Mixx community is very straightforward. Besides deciding on obvious things like a name, color scheme, and categories, users can chose to pre-populate their community with content already available in Mixx by importing items tagged with up to ten different keywords.

The communities also feature their own message boards and the ability to add polls. There is also a 'member lounge', where the recent activities of group members are displayed. Karma points a user earns in one of the communities are added to the 'general Mixx karma pool', an important feature for many power-users who tend to jealously guard their status on the site.

Mixx communities are somewhat similar to Reddit's sub-reddit feature, which also allows users to create their own hosted communities. Reddit, however, does not allow for any degree of customization, but it does have more granular access controls than Mixx. All Mixx communities are open to all users, while Reddit has public, restricted, and private modes. Update: Mixx does actually have very similar access controls to Reddit's - but they are not part of the set-up procedure like Reddit's are and have to be set after the community is created.

Now that Reddit has open-sourced its code, anybody can of course create any kind of reddit-clone, but the communities on Mixx cater to a different audience.

Making Money

The 5th step in the set-up process is probably the most interesting one for publishers: Set Up Advertising & Revenue Share. Mixx allows publishers to link their Google AdSense account to their Mixx Community page and then shares 50% of the revenue with the publisher.

This will probably help Mixx to gain a larger following among small to mid-sized blogs and maybe even some larger publishers who will create their own communities on the site. Still, social news sites are notoriously hard to monetize through pay-per-click ads and I wouldn't expect most community owners to make a lot of money from this.

Making Users Happy

Allowing users to take greater control of their experience seems to be a trend among social news sites lately. As these communities grow, some users often start to feel alienated. Allowing for the creation of more formalized sub-groups most likely helps to retain a lot of these users who still feel very attached to the service.

It will be interesting to see if Mixx's competitors like Digg, Newsvine, and Propeller are going to follow suit here anytime soon. Digg especially, because of the sheer size and diversity within its community would probably benefit from allowing users to create smaller Diggs on its site, too.

"For readers of Digg (or Reddit, and to some extent, Slashdot), I'd say Memeorandum is:

- More focused (on either "Tech" or "Politics")

- More expert/authority-driven

- Better organized, visually

Of course for a certain type of reader, Digg's quirkiness, developer orientation, and community are all pluses. Many who aren't as interested in these things prefer Memeorandum. Many use both sites. It's all good!"

As I found out when interviewing digg's Kevin Rose, the 'focus' aspect is soon coming to digg - as they expand out from just tech news. The organization/design issue is one Slashdot/digg/reddit might quibble with, but where I think Gabe nails the difference is when he says Memeorandum is more "expert/authority-driven". Although this is precisely the thing that has proven most controversial in Memeorandum, as accusations of A-List favoritism and group gaming fly. But as Gabe mentioned further into the interview with Don, Memeorandum is by nature a filter. And I think he has a point...

Strong individual voices will emerge and eventually be discovered by Memeorandum's type of filtering, whereas with digg and Slashdot individual points-of-view are more likely to be drowned out by the 'voice of the community'. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because a lot of times the wisdom of the masses lives up to its moniker. But the 'wisdom of the filters' approach of Memeorandum is much more of a threat to tradional broadcast media, because it bubbles up new expert voices and 'edge' stories.

Incidentally, a Memeorandum competitor has emerged - the weirdly named Megite (but at least it's easy to spell!). TechCrunch says its a contender already - and indeed I found some useful links from it this morning. One to watch...

A final note, Adam Green is doing some mashup experiments with Memeorandum. I can't wait to see the results of that!

Of course, we can't talk about the trend in open sourcing web apps without mentioning the big news about Reddit. Recently, the social news site decided to open up so that you can now build your own version of Reddit. The difference here is that Reddit is large enough to not be considered "niche" - it has 4.5 million unique visitors per month and has grown 1000% since the acquisition by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division.

However, when compared to competitors like Digg and Yahoo Buzz, it's clear that Reddit is the underdog here. If anything, the decision to go open source was a move to compete in a way that Digg and Yahoo cannot. When speaking as to what they hope to accomplish by the move to open source, co-founder Steve Huffman said that they're hoping users will tweak what they want changed and add new features. The beauty in this is that even if users develop new features, they can't necessarily be used to go and build a competitor to Reddit - because the code is open source, Reddit could just implement those features themselves.

Small Apps Open Up

While open source might be a good thing for a community the size of Reddit, there's still concern that when smaller web apps go this way, it means the development cycle is going to slow down.

Take for example, Enso, an app which provides an alternative way to interact with your computer, similar to what Launchy offers. In March of this year, this niche app also went the open source route via the revised BSD license. In this case, the move was most likely due to the fact that the Mozilla Foundation hired away three of the principals from Humanized, the company behind both Enso and Songza. But immediately upon the announcement of the move, there was concern echoing in the comments of the blog post:

Will the Humanized folks still be leading the charge on Enso? or are leaving it adrift?

and another pleaded...

Humanized, please don't leave Enso adrift.

As to whether Enso has indeed been set adrift...well, no one from the Humanized team ever responded in the comments section and the Humanized blog is now promoting Mozilla. A May 6th entry even let everyone know Mozilla was hiring and provided an email address to apply. In addition, four other of the May blog posts were about Firefox.

When it comes to FFtoGo, though, creator Golub assured me on Twitter that he's still developing the app, but he hopes others will start sending him patches soon. (We hope so, too!) Snackr also is currently going strong, but they only went open source on June 5th. Still, they've already posted a couple of test builds on Google Code, which implement new features like the ability to star new items, change ticker transparency, customize how old the items displayed can be, and more.

Even Bigger Apps Can Lose Momentum

However, the concern for the lack of development isn't entirely unfounded. Take for example, another open sourced app, this one from Socialtext, maker business social software. In July of 2006, they released Socialtext Open, an open source version of their wiki software. But it's a good thing they didn't stop development of their own because, by the looks of it, Socialtext Open has only had one patch in 2 years:

Excited or Worried?

Those are just a handful of examples of apps going open source, but there are many more. Of course, this isn't to ignore the fact that Sourceforge does quite well, it's just to raise the question - does open sourcing a niche web app really encourage more development? When the community is so small, if the creator doesn't continue to work on the app, how does the app really fare? And has a favorite app of yours ever been abandoned?

Introduction

Personalized Content is one of the two most popular approaches in next generation news sites - the other is Power of Masses, which we will cover in a future post. The leading examples of these approaches are reddit for Personalized Content and digg for Power of Masses. In this article, we will cover the personalized content approach and in particular reddit. We will describe the technical details and compare existing personalized content solutions.

First a brief technical explanation: the Personalized Content approach uses a very similar technique to spam detection software. The idea is that everyone has their own pattern of reading. To recognize your pattern, Personalized Content services omit stopwords and extract keywords from the news you read - then use Bayesian Statistical analysis to predict what kind of news you will like or dislike in future.

Reddit, backed by Paul Graham's Y Combinator startup program, is the leading player in this field - and has put a lot of effort into having the best algorithms. Reddit has tried out 2 languages to achieve optimal results. They started with Lisp, which is known as a very suitable programming language for artificial intelligence and natural language processing applications. But then they turned to a more widely used language in the web 2.0 world, Python. 

However, as the dharmesh.com site explains in detail, many users still complain about not receiving relevant news recommendations. This might be a bad sign, because it shows that their pattern recognition technology doesn't seem to work in some cases - even in a limited pattern span.  Nevertheless, reddit appears to be on the right path - the latest code changes received positive signals from their community. 

The competition

But competition is heating up for Reddit. For instance, an Israeli startup called Spotback targets a wider audience and offers a more attractive, Digg-like user interface. Their job is harder though, as they're covering a greater span of news. See Techcrunch's recent review of Spotback for more details.

Some sites are taking a wider approach to personalized news. Instead of personalizing news flowing just within their site (as Reddit does), they try to personalize external RSS feeds. As a result, their algorithms span much wider - because theoretically this means they can personalize news sites, blogs and more. A pioneering company in this area was SearchFox, which was almost immediately acquired by Yahoo in January. SearchFox enabled you to personalize your RSS feeds. Indeed its flexibility may allow Yahoo to integrate this technology into every corner of their network. 

Personalized Start Pages (like Netvibes and Pageflakes) are also in this space, because feed filtration can be a differentiating factor for them. Imagine a start page full of your favourite widgets, RSS feeds and tools - but you see not all the news flowing from your favorite sites, only a smaller filtered set of relevant news items. However we have yet to see a working, satisfactory prototype of this. 

Greece based Feeds2.0 and San Jose based LeapTag (which was just launched in the latest DemoFall) are tackling the same "machine learning" problem of personalized news, from different perspectives. Feeds2.0 is doing exactly the same as SearchFox, filtering RSS feeds. LeapTag is still in private beta and does link recommendation via their downloadable browser plug-ins.

Feeds 2.0 process

Let's also not forget one of the longest running personalized news sites of this era - Findory. It aims to be a personalized newspaper for the Web. Findory creator Greg Linden is an insightful commentator on personalized news issues and he says it is a technically challenging space. As he noted at the time SearchFox was acquired:

"Building scalable personalization systems is hard. Techniques that work fine on toy problems completely break down at scale. The systems have to be designed from the start to do fast recommendations in real-time for hundreds of thousands of users."

Findory process

Some comparison charts

The graph below shows the current Alexa traffic of the following personalized news sites: reddit, Spotback, Feeds2.0 and Findory. It should be noted that each of these sites has a slightly different focus, nevertheless it is clear that reddit has the most traffic.

The next graph shows that reddit, the leader in personalized content, is far behind Digg (the leader of the Power of Masses approach). Therefore, we can say that personalized content still has a long way to go.

Conclusion

Our guess is that personalized content will become a more popular paradigm in about 1 to 2 years, provided of course that the technical challenges can be overcome. Which is by no means certain, since a lot of smart developers think that personalized content is a huge challenge.

Personalized news has a couple of main attractions. Theoretically, if your news is personalized then it's not as vulnerable to gaming as the power of masses approach. Plus people are getting busier everyday, so personalized news has a strong appeal as a potential solution for information overload. 

We're not sure who will end up being the key player in this space - maybe a giant like Google, maybe an existing startup like reddit, or maybe a whole new startup. But one thing we're sure of: the current personalized news services still need more work and the technical issues around personalizing content are far from solved.

Twitter Client

For most users, the most important part of EventBox is probably its Twitter client, and the good news is that this is also one of its strongest aspects though it does have its flaws. For example, you can easily create persistent searches and even though it is a bit cumbersome, you can also create groups within Eventbox's Twitter client. To do so, you have to set up a folder by right-clicking on the Twitter icon, and then you can drag and drop different users or searches into this folder.

Sadly, however, EventBox doesn't seem to feature any support for URL-shorteners, which might be a deal-breaker for a lot of users. Correction: EventBox does support URL-shorteners - the feature is just a bit hidden in the General settings. EventBox also only gives you limited control over how often it pings Twitter's API.

Other Services

The Facebook client works like you would expect it to, with support for photo uploads and status updates, and the Google Reader integration also works well, as long as you don't subscribe to too many feeds. Our standard Google Reader account, with far more than 1,000 feeds, crashed the application.

In many ways, EventBox is very similar to Skimmer, which we reviewed a few weeks ago, and which, since then, has been updated with a version that addressed a lot of our issues with the original release, but the two programs feature support for different services.

Get it Free from MacHeist

Overall, Eventbox is a pretty interesting social media desktop client. It would be great if it supported a few more features, such as easier group creation for Twitter, or the ability to sort stories in Reddit (and maybe support for Digg), but it is definitely worth checking out if you are a Mac user.

Normally, the application costs $15 after a free 14-day trial, but you can currently download a free version of EventBox from MacHeist. It is important to note, though, that while the MacHeist version is available for free without any limitations, any updates to the app that you initiate will start the 14-day shareware countdown.

While you are there, also have a look at the MacHeist bundle that is currently available on MacHeist for $39. It features a number of interesting Mac applications, and 25% of every sale goes to charity. Also, after MacHeist reaches $400,000 in sales, a number of new applications will become available as part of the bundle.

Here's a look at why the idea of a social news site front page that is newspaper-like and presents information in reverse chronological presentation has to change - and how Reddit is flirting with the answer.

The Social Hodgepodge

Almost all social news sites that exist today have a nearly-identical foundation. People submit, vote, and comment on stories, the ones that are the most active, get promoted to the site's front-page. This process repeats itself and newer stories get promoted to the site's front page and older ones get pushed down. Over time old stories get pushed deeper and deeper in to the archives and newer stories (presumably more timely and relevant) replace them. The most popular sites that follow this as a basic formula are Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Mixx, and even the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us.

This kind of a system is great if you have a small and homogenous community. For example, this worked great on Digg about 2 years ago when the site was one-tenth the size and focused heavily on technology. As these sites grow, the problems with this kind of a system become apparent. First, as communities grow , more gets submitted to the social news sites, and secondly, the content being submitted gets more and more diverse. A single, all-important front page, as you will just see, doesn't scale well, and doesn't function well under a diverse community.

When the front page is the part of the news site that has all the new and fresh content, that is the part of the news site that gets the most traffic, that is where all the content producers want to be, and that is the place everyone links to. But there is only so much content you can feature on this page.

Even if you assume that one article is promoted every 5 minutes and there are a total of 15 slots on a news site's front page. That means that at any given time, the oldest story on the front page will be no older than 1 hours and 25 minutes old. Sounds about accurate, the Digg home page as of this writing shows the oldest story, the 15th one to be 1 hour and 36 minutes old. This also means that at this rate, and assuming that stories are promoted at a constant pace, only 288 stories will be promoted to the front page per day. These stories are divided over 60 different subcategories and three types of media (text, pictures, and videos).

Furthermore, based on the current front page a story gets 1 hour and 25 minutes on the front page before it is deemed practically irrelevant. The amount of people that go to the second page after the front page are about 30% of overall front page traffic, and in comparison an insignificant number of people go from the second to the third page. What this means is that if a story is not viewed by someone within the first 75 minutes, 2 in 3 readers wont see it, and if no one sees the story in the first 3 hours, almost no one will see the story. Of course some people will check it out from the Digg RSS feed, but compared to the power of the site, that is insignificant.

At the same time however, there is an exponentially greater amount of content created everyday and much faster than older content is deemed expired or irrelevant.

So the problem, basically is that there is more viable content created everyday than can be shown and would actually be seen by a large number of people on the site (based on the current front page). And the content that does make it through, isn't on the front page nearly long enough to make a significant impact. On average, 300 stories a day get about 1 hour and 25 minutes to get the bulk of attention, after which they are gone from human eyes forever.

The Newspaper That Works

The answer to the problem is quite simple. In fact the right answer has been around for quite a while and it's called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has pages akin to the traditional social news sites' front pages, but for a majority of the users, StumbleUpon is not a destination site. You install a browser toolbar, select your preferences, and you never have to visit the actual site ever again (unless you want to change settings or post to your blog). The toolbar sends you directly to pages that match your preferences and your voting habits. The more you use it, the better the pages you get.

At the same time, however, there is no time-stamp on articles that are submitted to StumbleUpon. You may be shown an article from 5 minutes ago, or an article from 5 years ago - just depends on if it matches your (and your friends') preferences and voting habits. This ensures that every piece of content submitted to the site will get a shot at being judged by the community and that there is no limit to how much exposure something can get. In the process, StumbleUpon has also certainly diminished potential information cascades based on what seems like social proof (e.g. people vote on some stories simply because they already have votes, but you can beg, borrow, and pay for those initial votes), and they have also reduced blind voting because StumbleUpon sends you to a website before you vote on it.

The problem with this system, however, is that because it works so efficiently, and because the user experience is so genuine, intuitive, and non-intrusive, only a fraction of the community using the toolbar ever has to interact with StumbleUpon as a destination site. Therefore, it is very hard to monetize the system based on current (ad based) business models. Even though StumbleUpon has a business model that seems to be working, it's doubtful that (superior as it is) the site can be more profitable than Digg. At $0.05 per visitor, StumbleUpon asks for $50 CPM. Even for the best monetized blogs that traffic isn't worth the cost.

The Newspaper That Will Have To Suffice

From a business perspective, the idea of a monetized destination site, at least in the current Web 2.0 economy, seems to be the right answer, so let's go with that. They can't copy StumbleUpon so that's out. They don't want to move away from a destination-site business model so an off-site mechanism is also out. What if, we crossbred the two ideas?

For example, Reddit already has a StumbleUpon-like toolbar. The only difference is that this toolbar only allows shows up when you visit the Reddit front page and then click an external link from there. And the toolbar only allows you to vote on the story. If you want to do anything else, back to the Reddit front page you go.

Reddit already has a 'recommended' page so we can effectively emulate the StumbleUpon experience by using a combination of the recommendations and the toolbar, we only need to make sure that all users use the toolbar rather than voting directly from the Reddit submission page. Perhaps move voting completely to the toolbar while maintaining story rankings on the front page? The only part we're left with is the 24-hour restriction.

For that we can use an interesting new feature that Reddit recently implemented. If you go to the front page, you'll see a module at the top that rotates between some of the stories from the upcoming section, allowing you to vote on them directly from the front page (the most heavily trafficked section of the site.

What if we rethink the previous two features and reuse the module so it shows 5 random recommendations for you (regardless of upcoming or promoted, just based on your preferences and whether you've already read them or not? That way, the module can cycle between old and new, promoted and still in the queue, and you don't have to worry about missing any good stories on your favorite social newspaper. As for the final problem of scaling with diversity, Reddit solved this problem a few months ago when they introduced normalization to their front page through their unique use of subreddits.

The future of content consumption on the social web is entirely based in personalized recommendations, and this re-conceptualization of Reddit creates a better environment for fighting information cascades and blind voting, and ensures that you will see the content most relevant to you regardless of votes or time-stamps. Recommended stories are only removed once you have either read them or discarded them and content has an infinite lifespan. By integrating the model into a destination site, it also remains an easily monetizable venture.

Reddit has all the pieces to the puzzle, they just haven't figured out how to fit them together.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

By now most of you have probably seen the site 'Why Digg is Blocked'. For those that haven't come across it, the site is on a mission to convince webmasters and content producers to reject social media traffic. Here's a look at the incredibly flawed logic the site uses to justify its purpose.

1. The Ad-Block Plus Argument

The first argument that the site makes is that social media sites endorse the use of ad-blocking software which allegedly infringes on the rights of site-owners.This argument is flawed for several reasons. First, none of these sites endorses the use of ad-blocking software. Yes, there was a time when Digg used to be technology-centric and a majority of its user-base was tech-savvy enough to use ad-blocking software to improve their online experience. However, as the site has grown, and as social media sites in general (i.e. Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon and so on) continued to grow and develop a more mainstream acceptance, the demographic has expanded to the point where it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that a majority of the traffic from the sites is not actively blocking advertisements.

2. The Insignificance Argument

This argument really does more to hurt the author's case than any of the other ones (though I'm not saying the others are any less stupid). The author argues that the social media demographic is an insignificant percentage of the internet and an even smaller percentage in terms of online spending, so blocking them shouldn't matter to site-owners. But then the author goes on to argue that "users who don't click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it". Well, if the demographic is so insignificant, why block them at all? It's not as if you're losing much in the way of ad impressions or clicks, right?

Furthermore, as you will see in the next section, this 'insignificant' traffic is what actually helps put most unknown sites on the map and helps them develop any significant kind of Google traffic to begin with. Oh, and how much bandwidth are these users really stealing? At my old blog, i got dugg 7 times in a month and got 250,000+ visitors that month, while the entire bandwidth cost was just $20.00 (Media Temple + WP-Cache). So no matter how small the scale on which you're operating, as long as you're smart about your operation, social media traffic should be a godsend, not something to complain about.

3. The Low Click Through Rate Argument

The final argument the site employs is that according to a sitepoint.com survey, Digg users are 3 times less likely to click on an advertisement. What this site and Sitepoint both fail to factor in, is that even in the best case scenario (for search) Digg traffic usually comes in numbers 80-90 times more than Google traffic to the same content. Once you consider those numbers, even at 1/3 the CTR, the total number of clicks you get are still 30 times as many as you would get from Google traffic.

Furthermore, where social media sites really shine is in giving increased visibility and otherwise unattainable exposure to relatively unknown sites. For a site that is generally unknown, has little or no PageRank and no inbound links or RSS subscribers, you may be lucky to get 10-20 Google visitors a day. Once you get submitted to social news sites, however, not only can you expect tens of thousands of visitors in the next 24 hours from those sites, but your average long-term search traffic and visibility will increase dramatically. So even if you completely discount the social media traffic and the low CTR there, the fact that your Google traffic may quadruple following social media success, is alone worth the effort.

For more discussion, don't forget to follow the topic at Reddit (here) and Digg (here).