ReadWriteWeb

Two years ago social news site Newsvine was acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture. The site had launched publicly in March 2006 and was considered to be one of the best designed new breed of 'web 2.0' news sites. Features include user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more.

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.

Everything you need to find voter information, report on your experience, and track election results using social media and the web.

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.

We have surely seen our fair share of Digg-style social news sites over the last few years. The latest entrant into this market is Vanno, which puts an interesting and novel spin onto the social news experience. Unlike other social news sites, Vanno's focus is exclusively on news stories about companies and Vanno then uses its community's votes to calculate a company's reputation.

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.

Mixx, the social news site that competes directly with Digg, just celebrated its first birthday by announcing that traffic to its site has grown rapidly over the last few months and that it now attracts more than 4 million unique visitors a month.

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

Browsing the web is typically a very solitary activity, even if the Web 2.0 revolution has given us easy tools like FriendFeed or SocialMedian to share our online activities. However, a different breed of services like Browzmi or the Y Combinator funded Socialbrowse are trying to make the actual browsing experience more social by displaying your friends' actions right in the browser. Socialbrowse is releasing a new version of its service today which, besides being faster, lets you post any link directly to Twitter.

Since our initial review of Yahoo! Buzz earlier this year, not much has changed about the service. At the same time, however, the perception, acceptance, and impact of the service has changed drastically. The service has shown that it can send enormous amounts of traffic (very talkative traffic), and has displaced Digg as the most active 'social news' community. In the process, they added widgets and rss, and most recently (and most importantly) have opened up participation to everyone.

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.

The social news and bookmarking site reddit today announced that it will allow its users to completely modify the CSS for their custom reddits, as well as pointing those sub-reddits to any domain they would like. You can now also choose your own header image and replace the reddit alien with your own creation. After opening up the sub-reddits and open-sourcing its code, this is yet another radical (but logical) step, and reddit's users are likely to greet it with joy.

After 4 months of private, invite-only alpha testing, social news network Socialmedian is now open and available in a public beta. During the last 4 months, Socialmedian has taken its motto of shipping fast and iterating faster quite seriously. Today, the service looks nothing like it did 4 months ago when we first reviewed it. Since then, Socialmedian has added a large number of new features and made the UI a lot more functional.

According to various reports from the last Digg Townhall/meetup this week, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced that Digg will soon let its users create and manage their own 'sub-Diggs.' Digg's main competitors like reddit and Mixx have already given their users this ability, and Digg has been rumored to start adding this feature for a while.

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.

Social news sites such as Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon, where the community decides what content is worthy and what content isn't, are powerful enough to drive tens of thousands of visitors to some lucky content producers, and thus have become an incredibly valuable marketing platform. One good day on any of these sites can get you more than 60,000 visitors in less than 24 hours.

Mixx.com is a social news site that seems to have everything going for it. It's got more and better features than Digg, it's been integrated into the websites of a healthy list of huge mainstream media properties and, for the developers out there, it's got one of the most interesting APIs available today.

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.

The way we create, interact with, and share information on the web is continuously changing, and at a very rapid pace. The end goal, most would argue, is the create a medium that completely democratizes the entire process. This evolution has taken us through editorially driven community sites (Slashdot), socially driven bookmarking sites (del.icio.us), and socially driven news sites (Digg), but none of them have really managed to figure out how to make the newspaper of the future. Just launched Knewsroom, one of the first apps from Kluster (ReadWriteWeb's coverage), believes that it has gotten it right, but has it really?

Last night ReadWriteWeb got its first link on the Yahoo homepage, thanks to Yahoo Buzz - the beta social news service that is letting blogs get coverage on the world's most trafficked website. Our initial turn on yahoo.com happened late at night, 10pm PST, and lasted around 3.5 hours. It happened to our post about Wikipedia getting a print version. The verdict? While it didn't result in the avalanche of traffic that other publishers have reported, it still sent 45,000 page views to RWW in 3.5 hours outside prime time and where our link was the bottom-right of 4 links. That is more than a typical prime time digg or slashdot homepager. But what surprised us the most was the number of comments that Yahoo visitors left!

The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

The mainstream media backed social news site Mixx announced today the availability of its new Application Programming Interface and the offering gives developers an opportunity to do things that no other social news site has done so far. The API will allow news items and media to be viewed, submitted and commented on from any other site around the web.

Mixx is a service that lets users vote on top news stories. Though far, far smaller than Digg, Mixx has innovated at a pace that makes Digg look like it's standing still.

Sk*rt, the small but quickly growing Digg-style site for women, announced tonight that it's changing its name and is asking its users to vote for what the new site will be called. The much smaller and just-a-touch younger women's magazine Skirt.com has been trying to get its hands on the Sk-rt.com domain name for some time and clearly the name is an odd one anyway (I like it, but so goes life). Regardless of why the name is being changed, it's pretty cool that the company is deciding with a vote.

Social news site Digg has long been the big kahuna of sites where users submit and vote on tech news stories. Though tech content there has dropped dramatically (as we wrote about in this post) and Yahoo Buzz promises audiences that dwarf Digg's - it's still fantastic to get a tech story on the front page of Digg.

We get enough of our stories submitted that we thought friends of RWW might appreciate a chance to read our thoughts about what works best when you submit content from this, or any other site, for other people to read on Digg.

If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

Sometimes, news on the web is noticeably slow - especially in the weekends. It's ironic in a way, considering that millions of articles get written everyday and many go unnoticed. To address this need, here are six social media sites to help you find more great content. 

This is a guest post by Corvida, from the social media blog SheGeeks.