The pair had just wrapped up a panel discussion on social media and the news. Although each provides coverage of overlapping spaces, they both had unique insights on gathering and reporting the news, as well as using social media to reach the public.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

The latest news stories display on your profile page, and by opening the app you can browse all your news feeds. You can post any news story and your comments to your profile, or send to a friend. Video and audio podcasts play inside NewsFriends.

One note: the press release has the best use of the trendy new phrase "social graph" that I've yet seen - it says that NewsFriends will allow bloggers to "expand their readership by tapping into the social graph of their current readers". Right on! Here are some screenshots:

Homepage of NewsFriends app

Adding friends

Adding news

From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

Building popularity on Twitter is about gaining followers, and the most fundamental and important concept to learn about building popularity is the idea that when you follow someone, they'll get an email about it and there's a good chance they'll follow you back. If that doesn't work, try responding with an @ to something they said. If they check their "replies" stream, they'll see it and possibly follow you.

1) Match Your Usernames and Avatars

Most social news sites allow users to have an avatar associated with their account and they all use usernames. When you setup your Twitter account make the username match your social news username, and use the same avatar as well. This way, when someone who's familiar with your account on another site sees your tweet it will catch his attention.

2) Search Twitter for Twitter Users Mentioning Your Favorite Social Site

Log into your Twitter account, and search for the name of the social site you want to be more popular on in the "Find Folks" box on the right. Go through the results and follow active users who seem to like the same site(s) you do.

3) Search Google for Profiles on Your Favorite Social News Sites Mentioning Twitter

This is similar to the last trick, but this time, go to Google and type in: site:digg.com/users "Twitter" "StumbleUpon" and you'll see a lot of Digg users with Twitter accounts, who have linked to Twitter in their user profile. Follow the link to their Twitter profile, see if they're still active and follow them. The reason you're searching for StumbleUpon as well is that it increases the likelihood that Google will return results where Twitter appears in the About section of a user's profile -- try substituting StumbleUpon for other social networking sites to change your results set. You can try this trick with any social news site.

4) Link to your Twitter Account from All Your Social Profiles

Make sure that a link to your Twitter account appears in every possible social media profile, blog or social network page that you have. If someone you know from a social site is on Twitter, you want them to know and be able to follow you easily.

5) Ask Readers of Your Blog to Follow You

If you have a blog post or other piece of content go popular on a social site, ask readers to follow you on Twitter if they liked what they just read. This will increase your presence on Twitter, which will help increase your profile elsewhere.

6) "Twitter-jack" Active Social News & Twitter Users' Friends

When you find a popular Twitter user who's also using your social sites a lot, go through the list of people they're following and follow them too, look especially close for names and avatars you recognize from those other sites. This can be a recursive process, take hours, and ultimately lead you to a lot of new Twitter friends.

7) Ask Questions

When you ask a question and one of your social media savvy followers responds, his (probably also social media savvy friends) might see him talking to you and come follow you too. This is a more passive version of the Twitter-jack mining technique described above.

8) Don't Just Spam Twitter, Add Value

Of course this should go without saying, but don't ever spam Twitter. If all you do is constantly drop stupid Digg links all day nobody will follow you for very long, so make sure you're actually adding value, not only by tweeting cool links other than your own, but also join the conversation. Congratulate people, answer questions, say hello to new followers, be social.

9) Post the Title with the URL

If you post a URL to Twitter that is too long, they'll shorten it with tinyurl for you. This means that no one can see the source link and get an idea of what the page is before clicking it. Preface any links you share with at least the title of the page, if not a short description as well.

10) Consider Using a Social Media Specific URL Shortener

If you're trying to get more popular on multiple social news sites, the tendency may be to post a link to the story on every social site you want it submitted. This will annoy your friends and followers. Instead, try something like Votrs.com which will not only create a short URL for tweeting long links, but the landing page will also include buttons and badges for easy submission and voting on various social sites of your choosing.

The news of the move was received quietly, deemed proof by some critics that the project was just a failed Digg-clone; that its paid editors, friendly design and broad topic areas just didn't have the raw masculine power to discover great stories that Digg offers in its wild, untamed model of social news. That sounds ridiculous to me, but I don't spend any time on Netscape, either - I like Digg. (See also TechCrunch's mockery of Propeller, pirate style.)

The way the service works is interesting. For those unfamiliar, news on Netscape/Propeller is submitted by users but highlighted and shepherded by a team of paid power-users and editors. That paid team also does some original writing.

The whole arrangement has been highly controversial since it launched in June of 2006. Paying power users was a move widely criticized, and not because they were hired away from other sites like Digg. Critics alleged that news discovery was best done for the love of it.

A social news site that hired people to tend the news also attracted users old enough to have jobs. Project head Tom Drapeau confirmed for me today that the user demographics of the site are older than other social news sites, something he says leads to a "better perspective on news." He also told me that the number of paid Anchors and Scouts (the two job types) has almost tripled since the program was put in place.

The Future of Propeller: Personalization

What does the future of Propeller look like? Drapeau says the company is working on a new social news platform that will increase usability and put personal relevance at the center of the user experience. It would be great to see a whole new site that adds personalization based on user profiles to the combination of editorial control and group decision making that's there now. Automated personalization or recommendations are things Digg doesn't offer at all.

Digg underwent its own set of changes today, expanding user profiles to resemble a traditional social networking site. I asked Drapeau about those changes to Digg. He said he hadn't had a chance to see them live yet but that communication between users via sitemail has been a very popular feature at Netscape. Did you know, by the way, that Propeller also supports login by OpenID? It's a little clunky - but Digg's been waiting for OpenID 2.0 to go live before implementing it.

Perhaps then the Netscape team got a few things right after all. Digg's turn towards social networking looks to me like a move toward a more standard model. If Propeller can successfully build a new system powered by personalization algorithms - they could become the innovation leaders in the social news space.

If this deal goes through (and strange it should follow this week's news of Yahoo's online advertising woes and subsequent stock price drop), then most likely it will top News Corp's acquisition of MySpace last year for $580M. And it'll be more proof that social networking sites are seen as prime online advertising fodder for new media and technology companies. Note that last month Viacom was rumored to be after UK SNS sensation Bebo.

The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but here is the link. Thanks Honor Gunday for the tip.

Vanno is still in private beta testing, but we were able to get 500 invites for our readers. You can find a link to the sign-up page at the end of this post.

Vanno's basic feature set is comparable to that of other social news sites like Digg, Reddit, or Mixx. You get to vote stories up or down, search for companies, comment on stories, and you can filter your stories by popular or upcoming submissions. Vanno also provides a separate RSS feed for every company in its index.

As Vanno is still pretty new, a lot of companies are not yet associated with a lot of stories, though the Vanno team and the early beta testers have done a good job at seeding the index with stories. Vanno also displays a set of basic information about every company, including information about its employees' political contributions.

It should be noted, however, that Vanno's focus is clearly on the U.S. for now.

Submitting Stories

Vanno uses a bookmarklet for all the major browser for submitting stories to the site. However, submitting stories to Vanno is a bit more complicated than submitting a story to Digg or FriendFeed. With every submission, the submitter also has to identify the aspects of the company's reputation that is discussed in the story, as well as whether the story strengthens or damages a company's reputation.

Reputation Index

The core feature of Vanno, besides the social news aspects, is clearly the 'Company Reputation Index,' though Vanno doesn't detail how it calculates these numbers exactly (besides vaguely referring to Bayesian statistics in its FAQ).

This 'Reputation Index' is broken down into a few main categories: Community involvement, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, environment, patriotism, and social responsibility.

For now, it is hard to tell how realistic these reputation scores are, as there are simply not enough votes and stories in the system yet.

Verdict and Invites

Vanno definitely looks like an interesting experiment. Overall, its feature set is very complete and the only feature we really missed was an embeddable widget with company information.

As is typical for social news sites in their early stages, Vanno's success will depend on how many users will start submitting stories. If you would like to get involved, Vanno has given us 500 invitations for our readers. Just head over to Vanno's sign-up page and claim yours.

• Apple Making Huge Social Software Push - Josh Porter digs into Apple releases to find a Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing, iChat Screen Sharing, iTunes Social Features Survey, and Teams in Leopard Server. Andy Baio notes that "social networks will eventually be built into the OS".
• Marc Canter reports that Facebook is now offering open APIs for people, friends, events, and more.
• Microsoft To Enable User-Created Xbox 360 Games - the aim is to "democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike..." (via)
• Online video continues to grow, according to comScore, with Myspace Video doubling traffic in July and YouTube breaking into comScore's Top 50. (via)
• Also there's the prospect of Internet-based TV.
• XuQa Combines Social Networking With Games
• Yahoo! Answers API now available.
• More talk from the BBC about "liberating" their content
• US cable operator Comcast "has Yahoo-size ambitions" on the Internet

What do all of these things have in common? It's all about expanding networks to enable more social functionality - and in cases like Facebook, actually opening up the platform to external developers.

A lot of people think the social aspect of this era of the Web is its defining characteristic. And judging by all the news above, it's hard to argue against that! It's fantastic too that Apple is getting into the spirit of things, while Microsoft and Yahoo continue to set the pace for the big companies. Social networking and Google are uneasy bedfellows, but hopefully even they will get into the act soon.

Some of Ning's most popular networks include Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Network, a network for the Ellen DeGeneres show, and rapper 50 Cent's social network. While Ning has a number of competitors, including KickApps and Crowdvine, Ning clearly leads the pack in terms of its user-base.

Ning is also very popular among academics and teachers, who often use it to set up networks and blogs for their classes instead of relying on more commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace or having to use cumbersome class management software.

The foundation of Socialmedian is its user created 'news networks.' Right now, there are over 1000 different networks on the site. Given the nature of the service, it is no surprise that most of them deal with technology in some form or another. Users can add links to these networks, but Socialmedian also automatically suggests stories based on keywords users can add when creating a new network. This is a very smart idea, as it allows even small networks to have a constant stream of updated news.

Vote Till You Drop

To share items on the site, users can either use a bookmarklet or 'clip' any story already on Socialmedian and share it on another network. One of Socialmedian's most interesting aspects is that it allows its users to vote on almost everything on the site. Users can, for example, vote on the ranking of the keywords and sources that are used to seed the networks.

With all this voting, it would be easy to consider Socialmedia as just another Digg, reddit, or Newsvine clone, but its personalized networks and extensive social networking features set it apart from most of its competitors. While both Digg and reddit are moving towards more personalized experiences, Socialmedian has made those the foundation of its product right from the beginning.

Keep Following

Out of all its core features, Socialmedian's social networking features have probably seen the most extensive remodel. Most importantly, users can now 'follow' each other. This is, of course, a similar model to what other social networks have done in the past as well, but this feature also allows you to see what topics and posts are most popular just among the people you follow, which puts a nice twist on the following/follower scheme.

Among some of the other new features are the ability to directly post to Twitter, as well as Socialmedian's use of Google's Social Graph API to help seeding new networks and recommending stories to its users.

Socialmedian is a very nicely designed social news network with a feature set far too extensive to cover in this short post. Thanks to its extensive alpha test and close interaction with its early users, almost everything on the site feels very well thought out and we did not come across any major bugs. Overall, we would be surprised if Socialmedian couldn't carve out a very nice niche for itself in the social news market.

Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr Brent Coker, from the Melbourne Department of Management and Marketing. Got that? You can spend as much as 20% of your time at work dorking around on the internet and still end up 9% more productive than people who don't! Print this article and put it in your wallet for the next time you get in trouble for browsing on the job, eh?

In fact, this isn't an entirely worthless insight. We like to use StumbleUpon every once in a while just to run some cool water through the pathways of the brain associated with imagination.

Really, though, reading news feeds at work and using social networking sites (especially Twitter) can lead to so many multiples in productivity that any surprise over this 9% finding is hard to wrap our heads around.

On-demand access to geographically dispersed, topic-specific knowledge and feedback through both synchronous and asynchronous communication over multiple technology platforms is what social media use at work can be and that is a game changer. Could someone please study that?

What this study says to us is that the social web is so incredibly powerful that even people who don't know how to use it find themselves made 9% more productive because of it - on accident. Studying that seems like missing the point, though it is interesting.

Photo: Shock-ed by Flickr user CarbonNYC.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, though, it is also important to note that eMarketer predicted a 10.2% growth in ad spending for 2009 in December 2008. For the upcoming years, eMarketer predicts that the market will rebound and it predicts a 13.2% increase in ad spending in 2010. However, given how far off eMarketer's prediction for 2009 was, we will just take this projection with a grain of salt.

More Bad News for MySpace

Overall, this is obviously even more bad news for MySpace, which is already struggling to just keep its current user base from moving to other services. Even as the MySpace team tries to improve the service and streamline its business, it faces an extremely tough challenger in Facebook, which also has a lot of momentum behind it right now.

As the Burst Media survey notes, boomers actively look for different things online than younger users. Young adults look for entertainment news (49%), games (41%), local and national news (37%), and social media sites (36%). Boomers, on the other hand, are far more interested in local and national news (55%), shopping info (41%), and health info (40%).

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Boomers make up 34% of Internet users in the US, and as a recent report from Forrester Research pointed out, this group is quite comfortable with creating and consuming social media. Social networks, however, still haven't quite found the right angle to draw these users in.

Bonus: Would Your Life be Disrupted if You Couldn't Get Online? 83% Say So

83% of respondents to this survey say that their daily routines would be disrupted if they couldn't get online. 41% even say that their lives would be 'significantly disrupted.' Interestingly, slightly more women (43.9%) than men (39.3%) think that their lives would be significantly disrupted without access to the Internet.

These are pretty impressive numbers, though we have to keep the methodology of this survey in mind. All of the respondents were Internet users, and this was an online survey. If Burst Media had also surveyed offline users, these number would probably have been slightly different.

• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.

The USA Today re-design has predictably caused a massive weekend scrum at Techmeme, with many bloggers excited about the changes. But as Don Dodge precisely points out, 92% of USA Today's own readers dislike the changes. This is reminiscent of the Netscape re-design last year, when the portal Netscape changed overnight into a Digg clone - causing howls of outrage from Netscape's traditional user base.

So to the poll. We're interested in the high level trend here. Are newspapers going to morph into social networks over time, a place where people not only read the news but socialize with other readers (and journalists)? Or is this more evidence that the MySpace craze has gone too far...

"A few counterpoints:

- while to a degree an important story, this is also the culmination of nearly 2 years of Castro in effect already having been out of office in all but name

- sure, there are some immediate reactions across the blogosphere, social media sites and "old media" sites (and given that the lines between the two keep blurring to non-existence it gets harder and harder each day to separate out the "old" from the "new" (NYTimes has many blogs, provides liveblogging of some things such as election returns/voting, CNN streams video to the web and has clips that might not make it on air) I go to a site such at The Atlantic mostly for their diverse group of bloggers & the active comments on many of those blogs (the occasional long form article being a pleasant bonus). They covered Castro on most of their blogs and in longer form.

- again I'd come back to the point that this is not a story that has to be covered and "done with" quickly - it's not a disaster, or even all that "breaking" of news - it is a transition that though the timing of it was unknown had been predicted for a long while (though many people did assume that Castro would die in office)

One further point - most of the sites you checked were, I suspect, in English. Have you looked at Spanish language sites? Just guessing randomly - but I'd predict that there was more and more active coverage in Spanish language social media sites - whether the Spanish part of wikipedia or Spanish language blogs (especially by Cuban ex-pats). I'd also suspect that many sites across Latin & Central America have a great deal more coverage than here in the US (or for that matter sites across the rest of the world which don't have the same embargoes that the US has with Cuba)

That said I think your points about testing whether social media is living up to the potential are worth exploring. I have seen some pretty interesting discussions via Twitter - in that case I think who you follow has a major impact (but your point about Twitter itself not having a good search or logged out page is a good one)."