At the time of the sale, Newsvine was promising to integrate some of those web 2.0 features into the main MSNBC properties. CEO Mike Davidson told ReadWriteWeb in 2007 that "over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense." Has that actually occured? Let's check in with Newsvine to find out.

Newsvine is a "Citizen Journalism" site; a news publication built using the voices and recommendations of ordinary citizens. It also syndicates content from its parent company MSNBC, Associated Press and others. Newsvine has a lot in common with social news sites like Digg and Slashdot - only it has more mainstream topics.

Slow Development, But Keeping Abreast of Trends

What's new at Newsvine circa 2009? There is nothing overly different from what we saw in 2007, but the site continues to look elegant and is still packed with social features.

Newsvine appears to have kept up with current trends - we noted today a Real-Time Web feature, called Newsvine LIVE. This is a rapidly scrolling view of emerging stories, displayed as a pane on the right-hand side of the homepage.

However as with many startups that get acquired by big companies, the pace of development at Newsvine slowed considerably after being bought. A scan of the Newsvine blog this year doesn't show much development. There was some administrative work done on groups and a hook-up with Facebook. Not much else is noted in the blog, although Newsvine has been active in developing widgets for sites like Netvibes and Yahoo.

Mike Davidson blogged in August that "things, for the most part, are going swimmingly [at Newsvine]." He admitted though that "building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being."

Traffic: Steady

When we last spoke to Newsvine, in July 2007 just prior to its acquisition, Newsvine was getting about 1.2 million unique visitors per month. It was said to be growing at an average rate of 46% per quarter. The top topics in Newsvine in mid-07 were Politics and Technology, echoing the popular topics in the blogosphere of that time.

Traffic over the past year at Newsvine has been fairly flat, at least according to Compete - which puts the US unique visitors at around 1.2 million and shows little growth.

However in an August 2009 post, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson claimed that Newsvine now gets "over 4 million uniques a month." So perhaps Compete's statistics are too low (which wouldn't be the first time).

Conclusion

All seems fine and dandy at Newsvine, despite slow development of new features on the site.

However, as yet there is little evidence of Newsvine functionality on MSNBC sites - certainly the readers don't contribute much content to them. Hopefully we see more of that over the coming year, as Mike Davidson did say integration would occur "over the next few years" back in 2007.

Overall, it's good to see that Newsvine's community is still relatively vibrant. As of time of writing, a story entitled 'Dick Cheney was a Lying, Treasonous Coward' has 239 comments. Evidence that it is an MSNBC site after all!

Over the past few weeks, we've heard of several different ways we can use the web to keep track of the U.S. Election coverage. We can use Google to locate our voting locations, record our voting experience for YouTube, and even Twitter our voting issues. Now that E-Day is finally upon us, it's time revisit those tools as we prepare for the most digitally enhanced election ever.

• Visit Google's 2008 Election site to get voter information, directions to the polls, or your state's voter hotline. (And once you know your polling site, you can catch a ride with the Carpool to the Polls Facebook app).
• Vote411 has a poll finder and other related election information, ideal for last minute information.
• Can I Vote? If you're not sure if you're registered to vote, head over to Can I Vote to confirm your details.
• Overseas Vote Foundation: Information on voting if you're living or traveling outside of the United States.
• Pew Center on the States: Information on poll opening and closing times.
• Election Protection: Monitors voting problems. Place to report issues or track them as they happen.
• Track voter rights news and resources at the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition's 866ourvote.org.
• Check out a map-based overview of voting machines used in each state from VerifiedVoting.org and the Verified Voter Foundation, both run by technologists advocating for reliable and publicly verifiable elections.

Record Your Experience

With Video

• Bring a video camera with you to the polls to capture your voting experience on YouTube's Video Your Vote channel. Google is using Google Maps to track these videos across the country - and to see where polling problems might be occurring during the day.
• Document the irregularities or other problems you encounter with your cell phone camera, Flip videocam, or other device, and then upload that content to the CBS News social-media site CBS Eye Mobile. Alternatively, you can submit by e-mail to the address politics@cbseyemobile.com. The CBS News Investigates team will monitor those submissions, and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.

Via Twitter

TwitterVoteReport is a Twitter app that will aggregate all the election day tweets that use the Twitter hashtag #votereport. Just include "#votereport" in your tweet in order for it to get tracked by the service. More advanced Twitterers can also include other hashtags like:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you're voting; ex., "#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. "L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC"
• #machine for machine problems; ex., "#machine broken, using prov. ballot"
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., "#reg I wasn't on the rolls"
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., "#wait:120 and I'm coming back later"
• #early if you're voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

From Your Mobile

• Send a text message to 66937 and start your message with "#votereport"
• Download and use the iPhone app for VoteReport
• Find the "votereport" app in the Google Android marketplace

From Your Phone

• Enter a report by calling 567-258-8683 (VOTE), 208-272-9024, or 617-960-8900
• If you have a problem voting or see one, call the CNN Voter Hotline at 877-GOCNN-08 (1-877-462-6608).

On The Web

• If you find yourself having trouble casting your vote, VoterStory.org can help. This non-partisan site is designed to let voters report problems with their local polling place.
• If you have a problem voting or see one, share your early voting experience with CNN's iReport.

Get The Election Results

Videos

• CNN, MSNBC and ABC News will stream their election coverage live.
• MSNBC's feed is already up. Watch it here.
• Watch up-to-the minute election news on Hulu with their MSNBC Decision 08 coverage.
• ABC News will stream using Windows Media Player, but will make its feed embeddable for local affiliates using tech from live-streaming service Ustream.
• Watch John McCain's official Ustream feed to see his final stump speech at 11:30 a.m. MT in Colorado.
• Watch Barack Obama's official Ustream feed at 9 p.m. CT in Chicago to see his concession/victory speech.
• Politico's James Kotecki will stream live on Tuesday evening 7 p.m. to midnight.

On The Web

• The New York Times will publish a dashboard to track results as they come in at the county level. NYTimes.com will also keep track of which races the major news organizations have already called. More on the Times' efforts here.
• Visit TwitterVoteReport.com to see the reports flow in.
• The CBS News Investigates team will monitor video submissions (see above section), and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.
• Political videos will be featured on the Google homepage all day, including videos made especially for Election Day by both the McCain and Obama campaigns.
• Current is incorporating streams from social media sites, Digg, Twitter, 12seconds.tv, along with music from DJ Diplo.
• Access news and results as they occur on the Google Maps Elections Gallery (you can even embed the results onto your own site), or via the Elections section of Google News.
• Socialmedian is pulling in all sorts of media from tweets to blog posts to Flickr photos, widgetizing all the updates they find, and featuring them on web sites like the washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk, and mediadeluge.com.
• Ask.com launched Election Poll Smart Answers that give local polling information in just one click.
• Twitter tracks election-related tweets at election.twitter.com
• Upload photo messages about the election, the candidates and the issues to Giveusahope.com.
• Follow and contribute crowd-sourced election stories and add your two cents on media bias at Skewz.com.
• Take a look at the aggregation of election-related news stories, blogs, polls, video and commentary on Electicker2008.com.
• Contribute election-related news stories and video and blog posts to Politics.com.

Just The Polls

• CNN will post their exit polls here.
• Gallup.com - The election 2008 poll results from Gallup, one of the best known polling companies.
• Pollster.com - Tracks various polls and gives you updated charts on how each candidate is tracking. Also offers an electoral map as well as analysis of what each poll means.
• RealClearPolitics.com - Features poll breakdowns by state. You can also see a national overview that shows you which candidate is in the lead in each state and by how many points.
• USAElectionPolls.com - Brings together information on national and state polls, battleground polls, house & senate polls, and more.
• USAToday.com - While USA Today's map looks like an electoral vote tracker, it is a map of polls with color coding to give you an idea of the percentage of difference between the candidates.

From Your Mobile

• AT&T and Verizon's live mobile TV streaming provider, Flo TV, is offering all manner of coverage of the election, including content from NBC, CBS, FOX News, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and MTV News--such as "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" and "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams." Flo TV will also offer special Election Day versions of "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show," along with content from MTV's "Choose or Lose" and recap up through the first 100 days in office.
• Sprint will also have live streams and TV clips on election day, featuring content from ABC News Now, CNN Mobile and FOX News Channel.
• Election 08 application ($0.99)  delivers the latest McCain and Obama polling numbers for every state, graphs historical polling trends, and charts voting patterns in previous elections.
• On your mobile phone, head to m.google.com/elections to locate your voting location as well as access the latest news.
• Get SMS text alerts about the election from the New York Times by messaging 698698 with the text: Newsalerts (to stop, text: Stop newsalerts) or text Elections and your zip code (eg, Elections07407) (to spot, text: Stop Elections)
• Viigo has just added a real-time results for tomorrow's US Election. The Live Election Results Feed will provide both Overall and State By State results throughout the evening as each contender demonstrates a Firm Lead, or is declared a Winner in each State. Results will be updated every 5 minutes. Download it for free from here.

Reward Yourself!

Now that you voted, reward yourself with some free stuff! If you go to Starbucks today and tell them you voted, you get a free cup of coffee. If you go to Ben & Jerry's today and tell them you voted, you get a free scoop of ice cream. If you go to Krispy Kreme today and tell them you voted, you get a free donut.

Thanks to Silicon Alley Insider for video sites, Inquisitr for voter info sites, AppScout for mobile voter sites, GigaOM for voter info sites, Mashable for poll web sites

(Image credit: Zappowbang)

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.

These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May.

Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the "fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers," but it is also clear that Mixx's strategy of partnering with large content providers is finally starting to pay dividends for the company.

Our initial impression of Mixx was very positive and the new features the company has added since then have only solidified our opinion of Mixx as a very useful social news site for mainstream users.

At the same time, though, it is also worth pointing out that Digg now gets about 30 million unique visitors a month. Digg's Kevin Rose has admitted, however, that the site needs to become more relevant to mainstream users if it wants to keep growing. As Mixx is already geared towards mainstream users, we think that is should be able to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future.

Besides the closer integration with Twitter, Socialbrowse also switched from flat files to using SQLite as its database back-end. This, according to Socialbrowse co-founder Zack Garbow, resulted in a 10x speed increase over the old system.

Also, the sidebar now features a 'Hot' tab which displays the most popular and active shares or discussions in your network.

How Does it Work?

At the core of Socialbrowse is a Firefox extension that displays your friends' activity on the service in a sidebar. It's important to note that Socialbrowse does not aggregate your online actions the way FriendFeed does. Instead, Socialbrowse adds three icons to your Firefox navigation toolbar that let you toggle the sidebar, share and tag a site, or comment on it. Every time you share something or comment on a page, your updates will instantly appear in your friends' sidebars.

Twitter

In this newest version of Socialbrowse, you can also send your links directly to Twitter to share it with your social network there. Interestingly, Socialbrowse is using its own URL shortener in these Twitter posts.

Sidebar

In the sidebar, you can chose to either see all of your friends' updates, or you can chose to only see their latest shares or comments. It would be nice if you could comment on a page as you are sharing it, but for now, Socialbrowse is keeping these two activities completely separate from each other.

Once you close your sidebar, you will still get update from your friends through little pop-ups at the bottom right of your screen. This is a nice feature, especially if you have a small screen and you don't want a sidebar to take up a lot of your space.

Ranking

One other interesting feature in Socialbrowse is its ranking system. You get a 'social point' every time one of your friends shares a link you discovered first. Based on this ranking, Socialbrowse then creates a list of highly active users that new users can chose to follow when they sign up.

Annotated Links

One really nifty feature of Socialbrowse is that it analyses every page you surf to and then adds little icons to links that your friends have already shared or commented on. As you hover over these icons, Socialbrowse will display a list of your friends and the comments they left. To us, this feature itself is worth the price of admission.

Invites

Socialbrowse is still in private beta, but Socialbrowse gave us 500 invitation to hand out to you. Just follow this link, sign up, and you will get an invitation immediately.

If you want to follow me on Socialbrowse, my profile is here.

Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.

ReadWriteWeb's one (and so far only) appearance on the yahoo.com frontpage - Wikipedia story bottom right

1. Yahoo! Buzz is not a social experience. The process of being featured on Yahoo! Buzz is socially driven (based on votes, shares, and search patterns), but if you consider the site's place in the overall structure of Yahoo's strategy, the experience isn't social. Yahoo! Buzz is the picking ground for the content that ultimately gets featured on the Yahoo! main page, which means it is social in the exact same way Slashdot Firehose is social. Your votes may get a story to the main page of Yahoo! Buzz but after that it's up to an editor's judgment whether a story gets featured on the Yahoo! main page or not. So the final result, or the process of getting featured on Yahoo's main page is not entirely social. Furthermore, there Yahoo! has turned off the comments so there are no conversations, and because there is no networking aspect to the site, there are also no relationships.
2. Your votes don't mean much. Number of votes is one of the metrics used to determine content popularity. Even then, I've learned that the impact of votes is arbitrary. I know people whose content was featured on the Yahoo! main page with 0 votes, and people whose content didn't even get to the Yahoo! Buzz main page after 75 votes. The other metrics are the number of times content is shared via email and on other social sites, as well as search volume.
3. Exposure is very limited, inequitably distributed. The Yahoo! Buzz main page presently is less significant than even the upcoming/most page on Digg. Although being on the page may increase your odds of catching an editor's eye, you don't get any exposure unless you are featured on the Yahoo! main page. Furthermore, such an insignificant number of stories cross from Yahoo! Buzz to the Yahoo! main page that for the average person, participation in the quest for exposure is an act in futility.

To summarize, Yahoo! Buzz is social insofar as a community of users gets to submit content, and vote/share it. Anything more than that, Yahoo! Buzz doesn't do.

That said, the site also doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is. It doesn't consider itself to be a competitor to other social news and networking sites, in fact it allows you to and even recommends you to share Buzzed stories on other social sites and then counts 'shares' as another metric to measure content popularity. As the popularity of Yahoo! Buzz grows and more people start frequenting the Yahoo! Buzz main page to read and at some future point discuss stories, that will all change. Until then, that page is just a stepping stone to the Yahoo! main page, which is the end goal.

Who should participate on Yahoo! Buzz?

From a content producer's/publisher's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz should without question be used by anyone publishing multiple posts a day on a site, or anyone that owns a network of blogs publishing content for different niches (heck you can automate the submission process). Networks like Hearst Digital Media and Conde Nast Publishing come to mind, but the strategy should also work for networks like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media. From a community member's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz's features are so limited that they would probably appeal to someone with a passive interest in social news, or someone just entering the space and wanting to get his or her feet wet. If you are interested in making friends, participating in heated discussions, etc., look elsewhere.

What kind of content works on Yahoo! Buzz?

It's a wry twist in the story. The people most interested in exploring Yahoo! Buzz and participating on the site are the digerati. But the kind of audience Yahoo! Buzz is designed to cultivate is quite the opposite. Before you give up in frustration, understand that the audience the site is supposed to appeal to is the same audience for the Yahoo! portal for news and entertainment. That's why you won't see a lot of insider Silicon Valley news featured and instead you'll see content from mainstream news outlets (a lot of syndicated content from Yahoo! News) about mainstream news events or entertainment.

What's the future of Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is an interesting service because it has become an awkward balance between social news and mainstream news, where some of the basic social news and networking elements are intentionally missing. At the same time, it is also interesting because although the site made some buzz for supposedly dethroning Digg, the prevailing social news champion, the site doesn't compete with it and is not cannibalizing the social news audience. If anything, people who use Yahoo! Buzz may very well over time switch to sites with more robust social news and networking capabilities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, this isn't about Google's apparent plan to penalize sites that frequent the front-pages of social news sites and how any decisions to lay such a penalty would diminish everyone's experience (good content is good content). This article is about how the next evolution of social news sites needs to be a much more important role for and much more deeply integrated search functionality, and why traditional search engines need to understand this role of socially driven content sites and work with them not against them.

Every single social news site not only needs to integrate with search engines (like StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us do) but also needs itself to be a social search engine. Similar to social search engines like Searchles (that uses tags and saves much like Del.icio.us) and a multitude of others, but with robust social networking features and the ability to catalog all the most popular content and make it searchable (and contextually retrievable) based on user submitting/voting/commenting habits as well as relationships within the system. Not to mention an emphasis on the two different actions, "bookmarking" for future reference and long-tail importance as well as "voting" for real-time relevance but not necessarily long-term value.Let me explain.

Google determines the importance of a page based on it's associated PageRank.

PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organizational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

Similarly, social news sites function when "people" (rather than pages) are voting for pages using "actual votes" (by whatever name) rather than using links as other web pages do. Though they may not use the term PageRank for this process, all social news sites they have their own algorithm they use to determine the importance of a page and whether or not to promote it on the front page (and once on the front page, whether it is important enough to be a top story of the day). In effect, search engines as well as social news sites are both markets for the most important and most relevant information on topics, whether you are searching based on key terms or general categories - although the latter tend to be more transient and the former tend not to have a community or a "popular-now" aspect to them.

Ultimately, however, what differentiates social news sites from search engines is that even though they are both routinely indexing information and the goal of both is to show the best information first (based on PageRank or algorithms), social news sites focus too much on present-day and do an incredibly poor job of indexing information for future retrieval. You can see that in practice if you look at traffic statistics for any story made popular on one of these sites. You will see a massive spike that diminishes by 50% every page you move forward, but is essentially 0 as soon as you're 3-4 pages deep. And search is generally so poorly implemented (for example, you can only search by title, summary, or url, and guesswork is usually futile) and search algorithms are nearly useless in performing in any way intelligently, that the general user mentality is to check a few pages deep and what's not there is irrelevant.

Now, think for a second about a social news site and its entire index of popular content (as well as not-so-popular content) along with a search feature that works. What you get is a social news site becoming a smaller, but much more focused, search engine of its own. And why shouldn't it be? It's a search engine that only returns the best results (as determined by you, the community, based on one user one vote), can return them based on time frames (popular right now versus popular-when?), can easily filter between trusted and not-trusted sources (based on popularity and how many times the community has buried content), and completely behaviorally-target your results and make superior recommendations (based on your past submitting, voting, commenting, and searching habits) all from the same place.

The expectation of the socially driven content sites has evolved in terms of what people want to use them for, but the sites themselves haven't evolved fast enough to provide usable infrastructures to allow this kind of interaction. These sites aren't just for bookmarking information or just for breaking news stories anymore. Social news sites are decision markets for determining what content (audio, video, pictures, or text) is good (based on popularity, an unfair measure of quality) and bringing that information to the masses not just as a one-time thing , but to highlight good content above all in an index of it's own (imagine Digg Content Search, with its own refined index). In fact most of the content on these sites nowadays isn't actually news, it's rich media or commentary that isn't time-sensitive and certainly deserves to be archived for easy future retrieval.

Of course it would be foolish to think that implementing search will fix all the problems on social news sites, but it is one of the more important things that needs to be implemented (along with recommendation engines) if the socially driven content experience is to be progressed further. An addition of robust searching methods would actually solve numerous issues on the site as well. For example, there doesn't need to be a 24-hour limit on content shelf-life. StumbleUpon does a good job of maintaining attention towards good content but even then problems with searching (the StumbleUpon index, not StumbleUpon results in Google) persist. If at any point enough people are searching for and voting on a specific piece it can be promoted. Also, if search on these sites is fixed, the duplicate content problem can virtually be eliminated, all the votes can be aggregated to one source and the right content can be made popular. Finally, good search ensures that stories are linked well together and related content or related recommendations can be easier to find (or people can browse content based on current interests of the community as shown in search, almost like a combination of Stack and Swarm but actually useful).

Conclusion

Social search is the future. And socially driven content sites - with their massive indexes of websites, huge communities and decent social networking features, and ample information on user habits and preferences (based on past behavior) - are in the best position to take the lead. Ultimately, imagine a combination of Digg, Google, Facebook, and Techmeme. To the minute, timely content, large index and approximately 20,000 or more new submissions indexed per day (this works fine for a smaller, Mahalo-level search engine), the best content is promoted to the top by an active community of millions of networked users, and conversation-mapping based on content promotion, comments, and search habits on the site.

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.

For some reason, though, it doesn't have much traffic. Mixx will issue a report tomorrow summarizing progress since work began on the site one year ago. The company is releasing traffic stats that show a nearly 3X increase in visitors in May. The surprise after all this good news? Fewer than 1 million people visited Mixx last month, less than 5% of the traffic that competitor Digg saw. Given the circumstances, Mixx's glaring lack of success to date calls a number of things about this industry into question.

Mixx functionality is now baked into the websites of USATODAY, LATimes, CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, NPR, Slate, Weather.com and an unknown number of blogs. The company has taken investment from the LA Times, undoubtedly a part of why all these other publishers are willing to consider working with Mixx. No doubt those sites also want to see a phenomenon like Digg that they can win on; publishing partner sites get preferential display on Mixx. That's something that would-be repeat visitors might not appreciate.

You would think that if that integration was executed effectively and if those sites' visitors had any interest in voting on news stories - Mixx should be getting far, far more traffic than it is. There are many sites around the web who get more than 1 million unique viewers each month without links in every story on some of the biggest sites on the internet. Something in implementation or strategy is going very, very wrong.

Mixx users might really like having a small, focused community on the site. That makes sense for them. Having this small a community on the site does not make sense for Mixx's owners and investors though and is not likely to prove a viable situation over the long term. Maybe the site's traffic will more than double next month, though, and perhaps that will happen again in July.

Introduction to User Experience Has Been Weak

Until only recently, first time visitors to Mixx were greeted with an incredibly hostile landing page containing a joke that couldn't have gone over well with new visitors to the site. When they clicked on the Mixx button on a partner page, to vote for a story, visitors were taken to a page that read: "Stop right there - we're going to have to see some ID." Thankfully that page was replaced with a proper landing page days after the CNN partnership began, and it could only have hurt unique visitors so much, but it sure seemed wacky.

Mixx isn't bragging about the number of registered users it has, why does it require users to register in order to participate on the site? Traffic from CNN is a beautiful thing, why not be thankful and let all of convert to users who have interacted with the site whether they've created an account or not?

Does Mainstream Media Even Want to Get It?

More to the point, just like CNN puts links to headlines from The Onion on its front page with no mention of them being satire - so too do these big publishers' efforts with Mixx seem poorly executed. Integration with social media services, particularly ones that take readers off-site, appear to be something that big publishers are doing begrudgingly and in a half-baked way.

Maybe mainstream media readers don't want to click on widgets, don't want to create more accounts on websites unknown to them and maybe they don't even want to vote on the news! Those seem like potential takeaways from a glimpse at Mixx's traffic. It's an awful shame and we hope that something can be done to expose more people to the innovative work going on there.

"The Knews" gets published every morning, featuring the previous day's top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment. -- Knewsroom description

You can participate in the Knewsroom in several ways.

1. Propose a topic: Any user can speak up and propose a topic for coverage. The propositions are based on future occurrences that you think will take place, stories that might break, or events you would like to see covered. Once a topic has been proposed, any user from the community can create content based the proposition and you have a chance at getting published and getting paid. This feature works a lot like Newsvine - where you can create a column on your subdomain and get a shot at being featured as a columnist on the front page - but the problem is Knewsroom only shares 20% of its revenue with the community, and that 20% is divided between writers, readers, and evangelists. Newsvine on the other hand, gives columnists 90% of all revenue generated from their columns.

2. Submit or create relevant content: Story submission has two sides to it. First, as mentioned above, you can write original content based on a story someone from the community has proposed, and second, you can submit a link to an external source to be syndicated as a response to the story proposal. If the community deems your content "Knewsworthy," you will get published on the site's front page, and if the content is your original work you have the chance to earn an additional $150 on top of your cut from the 20% shared with the community. What you have to do to earn this additional money is not clear (but I imagine it is based on the popularity of the content).

3. Decide what content is deserving: Once a story idea has been proposed and someone else has either created content in response to it or submitted an external link related to it, the Knewsroom community gets to decide whether the story is worth publishing or not. If enough people agree that it is worth covering, it will be published as a column in the next day's Knewspaper.

What I find really interesting about Knewsroom is that the more you participate and the more the community appreciates and respects your participation, the more power you have to shape the Knews. This is a good way to incentivize regular participation and is the exact opposite of the way Digg treats its most passionate users. As you get more involved, you accumulate watts, a form of currency on Knewsroom, that you can 'invest' in proposed topics or created stories to show how much importance you attribute to them and how important you think it is to cover them in the next day's paper. You accumulate these watts - in the same way you accumulate actual cash on the site - by suggesting topics, writing stories, voting, and referring other members to join the site.

Just like on Wall Street, your return on investment is determined by the risk you take. You can invest in Topics -- which are kind of like mutual funds (lower risk/lower return), or you can bet on Stories -- which you can think of as individual stocks (higher risk/higher return). Of course, you can diversify and do both. Like everything else at Knewsroom,^TM it's entirely up to you.

At the end of each day (at deadline time), Knewsroom uses its "sophisticated matrix algorithm" to determine what the most important topics are in each category and what the most important stories are within each topic. If your topics or stories are picked, you get a return on the watts you invest as well as real cash credited to your Knewsroom MasterCard.

Problems with Knewsroom

As I was signing up for the service, I immediately saw several issues with it. For example, unlike traditional social news sites Knewsroom's Knewspaper doesn't update as people participate on the site and invest watts into stories, rather there is one Knewspaper per day and once it's published there is no changing it. This feels like a step backwards, toward daily print news cycles where if a news story breaks in the evening you don't know about it until the next day. It's as if they've taken something static (a print paper) and put it on a dynamic platform (web publishing) but refused to take advantage of the dynamicness.

For example Knewsroom's coverage in the technology section yesterday had no mention of Yahoo!, Facebook versus Google, CBS's acquisition of CNET, or any other stories that broke later in the day and were all over Techmeme and Digg almost immediately. In fact, I saw some of these stories in the queue for tomorrow's paper, by which time they will already be old news.

Furthermore, the revenue sharing, while a good idea, is not enticing enough to attract people already contributing to Newsvine's social news and content publishing hybrid that pays out a much larger percentage for your efforts. And while I like the idea of 'investing' in stories rather than a simple positive or negative vote (because it allows for degrees of approval and also limits how you distribute your watts among stories), the implementation of the feature on the site feels a little contrived. For example, rather than simply submitting a story, you have to first select a category, then pick a topic (or create a topic), then invest in it and hope enough other people do too (not to mention waiting for someone else to find a link to write original commentary on a topic you proposed), before it gets published. And you have until 5:00 AM CST for the entire process to complete, meaning a story that breaks an hour later would have to go through a 23-hour gestation period before it gets published (if at all).

If at first glance you find yourself simply comparing the service to a combination of the existing social news services with a newspaper-style presentation of the content, you're not far from reality. Knewsroom uses the existing services as models to build on and even though they are moving in the right direction, they have made some grave missteps that keep them from the prize. In the end, it's the site's slogan that sets it up for failure...

The best news isn't up to the minute -- it's up to you.

The problem is, a lot of incredibly important news is up to the minute and if I can't get it on Knewsroom, I will go somewhere else where I can.

What's more, many of the comments to the Wikipedia post were thoughtful and added to the discussion. OK many of the comments were critical of the post, it must be said. But still, you could tell that people were passionate about the topic. Here's an example, comment 64 from Sandy:

"I use Wikipedia almost everyday. It's a great and very informative website. I look there for info before I check other information websites. And I see how they can get away with this but do I think it is fair and right? Absolutely NOT.

In fact, Poetry.com does the same thing. They have these poetry contests and people from all over are enticed into sending in their own personal work thinking they will be made famous and receive a big prize if they win, etc. But that doesn't happen at all. [...]"

So Yahoo Buzz is not only sending large quantities of traffic to blogs, it is also sending people that want to comment - and who leave interesting, informed comments. By contrast, digg and slashdot traffic usually doesn't result in many extra comments on blogs - those people usually leave their comments on digg / slashdot. That's fair enough, as those two sites have thriving communities. But to me and many other new media publishers, it's yet another plus to Buzz over digg and slashdot.

RWW on yahoo.com

Listen Up, Digg

Also, and I don't mean to harp on about this (but I will), digg's continued systemic problems are not helping them. Favoritism of certain publishers (whereby only a few publishers in each category dominate the digg frontpage), manually taking power off power users, manipulating the topics that get to the digg frontpage, issues with gaming, charges of censorshop, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage - all of these things and more have damaged digg's brand.

Quite simply, Yahoo Buzz is looking more and more like the future of social news. Digg needs to take a few pages from Buzz's book if it's to survive in the mainstream.

Bigger and More Engaged Traffic

ReadWriteWeb has been pretty bullish on Yahoo Buzz. We published one of the few positive reviews of Yahoo! Buzz when it opened, and in March we published some traffic statistics from Yahoo! and called the site a game-changer. As we noted in a recent update, the "Buzz-effect" is potentially orders of magnitude larger than the similar "Digg-effect."

Yahoo Buzz isn't perfect - it is a select number of publishers (although still in my personal view much fairer to publishers than digg) and participation on the Buzz property itself is lower than on digg.

So it's not perfect... but the traffic it sends publishers is both bigger and more engaged with the original content than traffic sent by digg or slashdot.

You may have heard about BlogRize's launch earlier this month, when they kicked off their private beta with pre-built communities for a handful of top sites, including ReadWriteWeb.

The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog's articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting. 

Our BlogRize Community

By focusing only on the news that a reader of ReadWriteWeb finds interesting, for example, you wouldn't have to sift through loads of posts you don't care about to find the best news. Instead, the content you find is relevant to your interests.

Determining Relevance

BlogRize is different than aggregators like RSSMeme and ReadBurner, as those sites only focus on one thing to build a popular page - number of shares. But to become "popular" on BlogRize, an article is rated using a more sophisticated algorithm.

Without giving too much away about that process, we can say that the algorithm uses more than one factor. Instead, it looks at factors which include the article's popularity, relevance to readers, and attention data, among other things. What this means is that an article from another technology-focused blog would have a good shot at becoming popular on ReadWriteWeb, but it would take a lot more for an article from, say, TreeHugger.com, to achieve that same level of popularity.

BlogRize's Voting Process

The first thing you'll notice about BlogRize is that the voting system for articles is a bit different than what you'll see on other social news sites like Digg or Mixx. Instead of just voting for a story, the news item is classified as "interesting," "funny," "insightful," "lame," "disagree," or "facts wrong." This system was created by BlogRize's creator, Jesse Spaulding, as somewhat of an experiment to see if he could get people to vote in a way that has more meaning and offers an opinion.

The system could use a little work, since terms like "interesting" and "insightful" are somewhat similar in meaning and because stories can, obviously, be both. Also, voting for things as "lame" seems a bit juvenile. However, for now, the system remains, although Jesse hints that he may be working on a slight modification of this interface in the future.

BlogRize Voting Buttons

Join Our Exclusive BlogRize Community!

Although BlogRize is still a private beta, they're now opening their doors to fans of ReadWriteWeb, and are offering us 1000 invites to distribute to our readers. To get access, just click this URL: http://www.blogrize.com/join/readwriteweb.com?code=readwriteweb. You can then began sharing and voting for the stories that interest you in a community filled with other blog readers like yourself.