The paradigm that Digg has popularized, letting users vote on which stories should be on the site's front page, is now found in any number of other places. From the programming geeks at StackOverflow, Reddit and Hacker News to the customer service requests at Dell Ideastorm, Uservoice and elsewhere - "it's like Digg for..." is now a commonly used phrase. No where, though, has Digg itself faced a bigger challenge than in Yahoo's new site Buzz.

In its announcement today Digg said it was going to use the new infusion of cash to double its staff to 150, expand internationally with local sections and languages and offer publishers new analytic services. The New York Times got an exclusive interview about the announcement and it's publishers of that scale that Digg will undoubtedly be focusing on with many of its new features. Very large content publishers will probably be willing to pay for services telling them which of their content "is popular with Digg readers," the rest of us little people know that about our content pretty easily!

Can Digg localize effectively? It's easier said than done and requires more than just translated language in an interface. This is something that Yahoo! is very well practiced in.

The Buzz Challenge

Yahoo! Buzz is a site that works much like Digg but sends selected stories to the front page of Yahoo.com, one of (if not the most) visited websites in the world. In April, traffic analysts Comscore reported that Buzz had already passed Digg in traffic. Digg now says it sees 30 million visitors per month.

Can Digg continue growing in the face of such a challenge? Raising a big pile of money isn't a bad idea at all right now. Digg will need to promote itself, to localize intelligently and to continue growing outside of its initial tech-focused subject areas in order to stay on a path of growth.

We like Digg a lot and we're excited to see what it does with this money. Acquisition of the company would have been interesting, but CEO Jay Adelson says very few suitors could maintain a position of neutrality with regard to their own content if they bought Digg. Google presumably could, but apparently that sale fell through.

For now we'll wait and watch as this trailblazing company tries to stay at the front of the parade that it made popular in the first place.

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.

All the excitement aside, the most logical question to ask is this: will links that get rewarded by prominent placement on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? We don't think there's any reason to believe they will.

When Yahoo! launched Buzz, guest author Muhammad Saleem wrote one of the only positive reviews of the service here at RWW. He called it brilliant and predicted that Buzz and other similar sites could co-exist peacefully. Admittedly, that was before it opened up to all comers.

A month later Richard MacManus wrote here that Buzz was big and spelled trouble for Digg.

In May RWW hit the front page of Yahoo! via Buzz for the first time and saw substantial traffic and a whole lot of comments, despite making an appearance at an obscure hour. The post that hit Yahoo! was by Sarah Perez, about Wikipedia going to print.

One week later, traffic analysts ComScore reported that Buzz already had more traffic than Digg.

It's all good news for Buzz and the sites that get on it, right?

Questions Arise

Are stories making the jump from Buzz to Yahoo.com based on the number of votes they receive? There's no indication of that and you can't blame Yahoo! for exercising some editorial control in defense of its brand. The story of Buzz may in fact be that user voted news sites are most viable when they operate as a hybrid of voting and editorial. Just what the criteria are remains a mystery, though.

The second question that has to be about the ad sharing agreement that Yahoo! required users to join as a part of being added to Buzz. Yahoo! told selected publishers that they had to be a part of the Yahoo! Publishers Network instead of AdSense. That didn't seem very realistic at the time and presumably the requirement goes out the window now. Or does it? Editorial and advertising weren't separated in the first iteration of Buzz - how separate will they be now?

Buzz is big news, it represents a big shift in the media landscape. Inevitably there will be questions of transparency, etc. that have to be dealt with. We hope they can be dealt with well so that Buzz can be a strong entrant into a new web of collaborative discovery.

The below graph shows minutes spent on site. Once again it's sorry reading for digg, which is trending downwards while Buzz goes up.

Finally, here are charts showing that Buzz is almost identical to the mainstream men/women Internet split, while digg users are 61% men.

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.

That sort of traffic is what has publishers clamoring to get accepted into Yahoo! Buzz (the company will eventually open the site up to anyone who wishes to participate).

But actual participation on the Buzz property itself is likely lower than competing sites like Digg. The majority of stories listed as "Buzzing Now" on the Yahoo! page have just a handful of votes -- some have just 2! Compare that to Digg's front page where most stories have hundreds or thousands of votes shortly after being made popular. Today's feature release is an attempt by Yahoo! to spread Buzz and up participation in the site.

The widget (seen above showing top stories from the Tech/Science category) should help spread awareness of Buzz if it can go viral, while RSS feeds of the top buzzed categories will help bring people back to the site once they've subscribed.

One of the things Muhammad Saleem mentioned Buzz was lacking in his review in February was the ability for users to submit stories to the site. That still isn't something you can do with Buzz -- and given the requirement that publishers be a part of YPN and be approved by Yahoo!, it may never be an option -- but the "First Buzzed By" denotation that was added today is a step toward building a community around the Buzz property.

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.

Here at RWW we love the fact that we have a loyal and growing crew of readers who like to share their favorite stories from our site. Digg traffic is a big help in putting food on our tables so we can keep writing the things people like here. We've had more than 150 posts hit the front page of Digg in the last year and we really appreciate your support. This is what we at least have seen work best so far. If your experience has been different please let us know.

All that said, we've noticed some things that don't work so well on Digg. Any URL that gets submitted has only one chance to try and make it to the front page within the next 24 hours. Whether you're submitting stories from here or from your other favorite sites, here are some tips that will help your submissions be more successful.

1. Think of Your Submission Like a Mini-Article

A good title and summary in your submission is a make-or-break matter. An indecipherable title or a summary that doesn't really summarize the article means very few people are gonig to click through or vote for a story.

Sometimes the title of the original blog post may be more suitable for the blog's regular readers than it is for Digg - you might want to consider coming up with a new title for your submission. There's room for some artistic license.

Good

Remember - the goal of Digg is to write a submission that the largest number of Digg users will find honestly interesting enough to click on and vote for in order to share it with more readers. Put yourself in the mind of someone scanning over a tech and news stream - what kinds of titles would you feel are most appropriate and effective?

Or, as Digg says on the page you see when submitting articles (apparently many people didn't read this) - "Convince people that this is great content. Write a concise and accurate headline. Don't assume that people will understand just from the title... explain in your description." Simple enough!

2. Snark is Almost Always Better Than Wow

"Wow" is actually good, but thankful appreciation for a high-quality article from a site you know and love; that's not going to fly in the big ocean of content that is Digg. If you can think of anyone to make fun of (present company excluded of course!) people like that.

Saying that a post is really good, though, is wasted characters. Everyone's assuming that you think it's good because you submitted it; spending precious space saying it's good in the summary just irritates readers and makes it seem that someone who doesn't know what they are doing thinks the link is good.

Also good
3. Leave Personal References Out

Some degree of professionalism goes a long way on Digg. Risk taking does as well, but one thing that doesn't work well in many cases is referencing the site or author you're submitting. It's in the URL field already.

We really appreciate how many of you like RWW - but the majority of Digg users still have no idea who we are. So referencing RWW, or one of our author's names, in your submission just comes across as presumptuous. You can put yourself in the place of a Digg reader who doesn't know this blog. That's the best way to submit stories from here.

If you're submitting stories from the blog of some crazy tech-geek-rockstar hero then that make sense to reference them. There are almost no tech blogs that have general name recognition on Digg, though. Even TechCrunch, the king of name recognition, gets blank stares sometimes on Digg. Ars Technica, though I dare you to name more than one author there, does have that kind of name recognition on Digg.

It's been four months since a story that contained the words ReadWriteWeb in the headline or description hit the front page of Digg, though. It didn't use to be that way, but that's the way it is now.

Sorry, but this one's not so good
4. Consider Submitting to Unusual Categories

This is a tip we first heard on The Drill Down podcast, and it's a good one. The vast majority of our stories that get submitted are submitted in the Industry News category. The vast majority of all stories go there. This makes it much harder to get over the hump and hit the front page in that category.

Last week our post on How We Use Twitter For Journalism was reported in comments to have hit the front page with only 25 Diggs - and 17 hours after submission! That would be going exactly nowhere if it was in Industry News, but the submitter added it to the Lifestyle >> Educational category. There was a much lower bar there. The idea is that Digg wants to front page to serve a diversity of interests, so submitters should recognize the diversity of interests that can be served with their submission.

Ironically, the person who added this story to digg (thank you) did so under Industry News!

5. Contribute in Other Ways to the Site Too

Not all votes are equal on Digg. People who regularly submit articles that do well get their votes counted more heavily. People who vote early on stories that end up being validated by the rest of the community carry more weight as well. Digg stories around the site, leave comments. Every time you participate meaningfully, it's an opportunity to help your own future submissions do all the better.

This is why nepotism isn't rewarded on Digg. If a user Diggs a story that the rest of the group hates, then that user's vote will suffer in the future. There's a strong disincentive. algorithmically, to try to game the system. Almost as strong as their is an incentive otherwise.

6. Consider Voting for Stories on Other Sites, as Well

Here at RWW, we've been lucky enough to be accepted into the closed-garden of Yahoo! Buzz, so you can vote for any of our stories there, too. StumbleUpon is a good place to share things with like minded people as well. Mixx is an up and comer. SlashDot is still a great place to share stories. The list runs very, very long in fact.

Spread your love around and check out different social news sites. You might find that you like some of them better than others, or that your personal taste in stories might go over better in one place or another.

We hope that these thoughts are useful and interesting. We thank you again for your support here, but we find social news sites of interest whether we're on them or not. They are a great way for us all to learn together.

I also understand why people might think that this launch is a competitor to Yahoo!'s own Del.icio.us, but I think that notion is a little mistaken. While socially driven news is ultimately an evolution of social bookmarking, the latter has evolved to the point where the two concepts can live largely independent of each other. For example, I use multiple social news sites, but use them predominantly to submit for and share with large groups of people (whom I don't even know in most cases, hence socially driven news). At the same time, I use Del.icio.us (and Instapaper more recently) to specifically bookmark a piece of information that I will have to recall later (or want to save for the long run), or that I want to share with a small, relatively defined circle of people. As long as Yahoo! can make the distinction between bookmarking information (long-term, more intimate) and driving news (more current, for the mass audience), I think both products can peacefully coexist.

Yahoo! is moving in the right direction, and a very exciting one for all parties involved, and here's why.

Why Yahoo! Has Me Buzzing

1. Integrating Search

Anyone who has ever used Google Zeitgeist knows how interesting and useful search statistics can be for determining what's hot and capturing people's imagination right now (i.e. Hot Trends that update throughout the day) as well as what people are interested in over the long-term and depending on the season (i.e. Trends). Now imagine the same principle being applied to social news. If people are searching for what is important and relevant to them (and often looking for more information on breaking news or other events that are happening at the moment) using that as one of the many 'popularity factors' ensures that the content is always generally popular and relatively current. Of course, that is just one of the many factors they take into account, but for now, this is a factor that is unique to Yahoo! Buzz.

2. It's Still Social

Too many people have unfairly characterized Yahoo! Buzz as not being social. A more fair characterization would be to argue that Yahoo! Buzz is not as democratic as some of its competitors, but it's still very social. First, the fact that user search patterns is one of the 'popularity factors' means that Yahoo! Buzz content is being dictated by its audience, not to mention that people can still buzz (vote for) stories they like, from the pool that has been preselected for them. Additionally, people can still share stories directly with their friends/contacts and further socialize the content by posting it to other social sites (which are all factors taken into account when measuring an article's popularity). While users aren't allowed to submit content and some advanced features, such as user groups, don't exist in the current build, the site is a solid half-way point between traditional media and new media. The sources are limited and largely mainstream, but what's popular is in the hands of the people.

3. Only Publishers Need Apply

There have been two major problems that people have had with Yahoo! Buzz. The first, as discussed above, is the users' inability to submit stories, and the second is the limited sources from which the information is taken. Yahoo! Buzz only allows sites that are a part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network (i.e. sites that run Yahoo! text ads alongside their content) to be included in the index of content users can vote on. Honestly, I think this is the smartest move Yahoo! could have made for itself. However, does this mean that we won't get all the niche content that we have learned to love? Let me put it this way, in case you didn't read the fine print:

"Every day, a few of the top Buzz articles will be bumped onto the Yahoo.com main page, giving the story potentially the widest audience possible on the internet. Reports suggest that, in tests, links to Wired.com received over 2 million unique hits in 2 hours."*

* Note: Yahoo! says that they are able to rotate coverage on the main page for smaller sites unable to keep up with the traffic.

Now let me ask you, have you gotten your Digg fix today?

I agree that the limited selection is off-putting, but being realistic, I don't see this as a problem at all. With the prospect of being featured on the Yahoo! main page, or even being featured among the top stories on Yahoo! Buzz (which I think will have no trouble building traffic) is an incredibly lucrative proposition that no one in my mind would decline just because it requires you to be a part of YPN. As soon as the site is taking applications (I'm not sure how the inclusion process will end up working), you can bet that every site out there will want a piece of the Buzz and niche content wont be hard to find at all.

More generally, with social news, it's always a chicken and egg game. You need a community to get good content, you need good content to build a community, but that community won't come if there is no good content, content that they are supposed to provide. Well here's where Yahoo! gets lucky. Yahoo! already has millions of registered users and millions of people visiting the site daily that can actively be converted to Buzz participants by either driving traffic or integrating the new site with search and news features on the portal. Just as important, Yahoo! doesn't immediately need a large user base (for submissions) because the content (from pre-approved publishers) is automatically indexed on the site and users can browse and vote it up.

Why Yahoo! Should Be All Abuzz

Yahoo! Buzz is a great proposition for everyone but the most active and most passionate participants of socially driven news sites (all 1,000 of us). Without making this too long, Yahoo! is giving you, as a publisher, the opportunity to reach fairly good circulation directly through the Buzz site, and a chance at fulfilling your yearly traffic and exposure quota and all you have to do is three things. First, make sure that you are a member of the Yahoo Publisher Network, second, join Yahoo! Buzz, third, create relevant and quality content that people want to read. And as a reader or member of the social news community, Buzz gives you the quality and breadth of Yahoo! News and, as of now, 100 other high quality publishers from across the web (likely to increase massively), while at the same time letting you have some say in what gets exposure and experiment with social news elements.

This is an excellent move for Yahoo! in many ways. This is the easiest way to explain what Yahoo! is about to create: Imagine if Digg had 10 times the incoming traffic, and got a percentage of ad-revenue from each of the sites that were promoted to the front page. Yahoo! Buzz does essentially that. The site, combined with the possibility of being featured on the Yahoo! main page, comprises of tens of millions of potential page views and because you have to be a member of the Yahoo Publishing Network, whenever content is promoted and trafficked by the Yahoo! audience, Yahoo! gets a piece of the advertising revenue pie. Not only does this increase the conversions for Yahoo! Publisher Network, but it also increases the revenue per conversion for Yahoo!. In essence, they're getting their ads on the sites and then creating traffic for the same sites.

Ultimately, Buzz is very much a beta product - but it has massive potential. The site should certainly allow user submissions (though I think it's okay to require sites to be a part of YPN), and is missing a host of other features. But even in its current state, I think everyone wins - Yahoo!, the content producers/publishers, and even most of the readers.

If general or specific are two ways to categorize social news sites, let's look at these two categories in terms of:

• Quality of news
• Speed of news
• Detail of news
• Community feel

Quality of news

In theory, big social news sites have the advantage of using large groups of people and correspondingly strong algorithms to discover and vet high quality content on any topic. In reality, though, this effect is often mitigated by the imperative to limit coverage to a single story concerning each news event. The big sites usually see the first good story on a topic promoted to the front page and subsequent quality coverage is left in the dust. The fact that something happened at all becomes much more important than deliberation over which coverage of that event is most worth reading.

The small niche social news sites don't suffer from this dilemma but depending on the breadth of your social network or niche userbase, important news may simply go unnoticed and not be covered at all. That's a risk you run on these kinds of sites, but on the other hand the wealth of resources that your friends can share is often much richer. Small social news sites don't care about repeat coverage of common events and don't revert to a "lowest common denominator" method of determining what's important.

From the outside niche sites may turn up a lot of content that doesn't look important at all, but the closer you are to a topic - the more important the details become.

If you can find a niche site for your niche, or an active set of like-minded contributers as contacts on a site like FriendFeed - then the quality of news will be vastly superior. Otherwise, and to supplement those small social news experiences, the big sites work well enough.

It's notable that Digg has been trying to create those kinds of small experiences within the big site, but I don't think it's worked very well so far. The Digg user experience is just not built for small communities of interest.

On the small social news side, two things worth checking out are FriendFeed's fantastically executed friend recommendation feature (it just goes on and on with suggestions) and social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia's seemless implementation of groups. Both are great examples of how to nail a small social news feature.

Speed of News

Nobody likes being the last to know about important news, so speed is an important metric. Sometimes, very rarely, the big general interest sites see something burn up the charts and hit the front page in less than an hour after submission. Far more common, at least at Digg, is for news to take 6 to 24 hours to get to the most visible place on the site. Big social news sites are so reliant on explicit user validation of news as important, and require that this goes on in the context of a terrible signal to noise ratio, that these are not the sites to go to for early news if being early is important to you.

Traditional mainstream news sites beat big social news sites on stories all day long, and if our new web can't beat the old-school then I don't know what it's good for. Joking aside, there are many things more important than being fast, but it is important in a news source.

All those criticisms being as they are, check out the Propeller Tracker on the right hand side of that site for a good example of a big site tackling the speed problem.

Small social news sites are much faster at unearthing news, if someone happens to catch that news at all early in the news cycle. Different sites handle this in different ways, though.

FriendFeed gives you a firehose and doesn't privilege the important stuff over everything else. The new Tumblr looks like it is going to highlight content as soon as a handful of people have linked to it, that's great and something I'll bet other sites will start doing soon. Sphinnn, the online marketing version of Digg, falls somewhere in between. Less populated voting sites have a lower threshold for popularity but less energy driving good news forward fast, too.

Detail of news

Big sites ought to have rich discussions in comments and offer greater detail on the news, but they rarely do. Slashdot and Propeller might be the exceptions so far. How's discussion over at Newsvine? I don't know, perhaps someone can let us know in comments.

For the most part though, mainstream audiences are still often not used to, don't feel compelled to or are unable to leave high-quality comments on social news stories. That's where the richness in detail comes from in the current model. How hard would it be to pull in related content on these news topics from sites like Del.icio.us and Twitter? Not very hard. That would be cool.

Niche social news sites lose out on some detail because of the smaller sample set of contributors, but they are clearly better for detail overall. There are more and more finely grained links discoverable on topics of interest to you in a niche site that suits your needs. Like the question of quality, detail is a criteria that niche sites clearly win on if a healthy niche site is appropriate or available for you at all.

Community feel

I prefer to spend my time in the company of people who have the same interests and who already agree with me about things that are important. I'm just kidding about that.

That's the trade-off you often make when choosing to spend your time on a niche social news site. You trade opportunities to make new and diverse social connections for the opportunity to develop a closer connection to a smaller, more homogeneous group of news lovers. Both have their place, I wouldn't want one and not the other in my life.

Final Thoughts

The complimentary nature of community on big and little social news sites is a good snapshot of what's probably true in all of the above questions - getting the best of both worlds is ideal.

I find myself spending about 75% of my news consumption time in niche social news sites (Twitter and Ma.gnolia mostly) and 25% in big social news sites. I wish I had more time for both. I intend to spend some more time on FriendFeed and I'm jealous every time I see a good Tumblr blog.

We've been having some slow times at Digg lately, so I'm interested in checking out Mixx.

What does all this mean? I think it means that big social news sites are at risk of losing substantial amounts of user engagement once users discover that more targeted news environments are available to them. Big sites will probably always be big, but the social news landscape is quickly growing richer day by day.