The Social Software Weblog http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com The Social Software Weblog http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/media/feedlogo.gif The Social Software Weblog http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com en-us Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/Four memediggers compared: Digg, Reddit, Meneame and Hugghttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/four-memediggers-compared-digg-reddit-meneame-and-hugg/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/four-memediggers-compared-digg-reddit-meneame-and-hugg/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/four-memediggers-compared-digg-reddit-meneame-and-hugg/#commentsFiled under:

Call them memediggers, community moderated news sites, or digg clones. User submitted news moderated up or down by other users and available for comments. Call them whatever you wish, this new class of social media warrants close examination in order to make the most of the potential it presents. Which of these sites get the most use, see the most conversation and are most useful to their readers? How should people looking to launch new digg-style sites organize things in order to maximize adoption and impact?

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

  • Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
  • Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
  • Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.
For each site I counted:
  • the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
  • the number of items listed
  • the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
  • the total number of comments listed on the front page
  • the estimated number of registered users in the system
Based on those numbers I then:
  • divided the average number of points held by each item on the front page of each service by the estimated number of registered users. This could be called the chance that any single item on the front page was given a point by any single registered users. This may serve to roughly estimate the breadth of participation in the system - a system where the items on the front page have received a relatively large number of votes relative to a relatively small number of users is one where there is greater agreement amongst users about what is important. This number may be more precise if it were calculated with the number of recently active users than total registered users.
  • I did the same division as above with the number of comments listed. This may provide some insight into the amount of conversation that occurs on the various sites, at least regarding the items that are on the front page.
Obviously this is very unscientific, just a starting point to look at and talk about the differences in memedigger services and communities. I hope you find it interesting.

Four memediggers compared

Digg

6923 points on 15 items = 461 points per item on the front page

Oldest item listed is from 1 day 3 hours ago, 2nd oldest 21 hours ago.

832 comments = 55 comments per item on the front page.

There appears to be 178,625 total registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users equals 0.04. That could mean that one out of roughly every 20 registered users has given a point to an item that is now on the front page.

Total comments divided by registered users equals 0.005. That could mean that one out of roughly every 200 registered users has left a comment on an item that is now on the front page.

Notes on Digg:

  • There are 5955 pages of users. Users Thuglife and Diggitydank both appear after the 1000th page of most active users, in case you were wondering.
  • The nearly 180,000 registered digg users is a far larger number than the 60,000 subscribers to Tech Crunch, lest you use the latter number to measure the impact of Web 2.0.
  • Google search for site:http://digg.com/users has aprox 4 to 5 million results.

Reddit

3179 points on 25 items front page = 211 points per item

There are several items listed as from 1 day ago.

777 comments = 51 comments per item

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. Google search for site:http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

Note: Reddit has many additional features beyond news moderation.


Meneame, Spanish-language digg clone on tech

1882 points on 20 items = 94 points per item

Oldest post is 1 day and 10 hours, second oldest 1 day 5 hours.

192 comments on 20 items = 10 comments per item

There appears to be 4940 registered users.

Total points divided by total users = 0.38 That could mean that there is a roughly 40% chance that any single user has given a point to any item that is now on the front page. This could also mean that a high percentage of registered users continue to engage in ongoing use.

Total comments divided by total users = 0.04 That could mean that approximately 1 out of every 20 users have commented on a front page item.

Notes on Meneame:

Google site:http://meneame.net/user.php gets 22,000 results.

There were items with zero and 1 comment on the front page, both with more than 80 votes.

The site also includes a wiki for discussion of the service.

Hugg

92 points on 15 items = 6 comments per post on front page

Oldest item is from 1 day 3 hrs ago, 16 hrs is second oldest.

8 comments on front page.

There are 93 registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users = .99 That could mean that every user has given a point to an item on the front page. The fact that this is unlikely demonstrates the inadequacy of this formula. I believe it indicates instead that the many of the relatively few active users find almost every item they give a point to appearing on the front page. Clearly the front page is of far less use to these readers than in other systems.

Total front page comments divided by total users = 0.09 That could mean that 1 in ten users have left a comment on an item on the front page. It is likely one or a few users have left more than one of the 8 comments.

Notes on Hugg:

Hugg is a project of the environmental blog Treehugger, for which Technorati has found 9,298 links from 2,943 sites. This indicates that the large Treehugger community is not into Hugg.

Of the 15 items on the front page, all were contributed by a total of 5 users.

One of the items on the front page when I visited was titled Jesus 'healed using cannabis'. I found that funny.

There are loads of big ads on Hugg, including from some of the biggest environmental organizations in the US.

Other memedigger or community moderated news sites that may be of interest:

Muti "Muti is a site inspired by Digg and reddit but dedicated to content of interest to Southern Africans or those interested in Southern Africa." See also the site's cool mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News on Africa and elsewhere.

Crispynews Crispynews is hosted digg-clone software used by a wide variety of communities of interest. American Idol fans, Mormons, Brazillian hip-hop fans, etc.

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]]>digghuggmemediggersmeneameredditMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-30T10:15:00+00:00Global Voices Online begins compilation podcasthttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/25/global-voices-online-begins-compilation-podcast/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/25/global-voices-online-begins-compilation-podcast/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/25/global-voices-online-begins-compilation-podcast/#commentsFiled under: , ,

The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world.  The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.  Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes!  It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).

The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English. 

Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters.  Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world.  The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch.  Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.

Found via David Weinberger.
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]]>GlobalVoicesMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-25T15:37:00+00:00On the role of publishers in a social media worldhttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/on-the-roll-of-publishers-in-a-social-media-world/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/on-the-roll-of-publishers-in-a-social-media-world/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/on-the-roll-of-publishers-in-a-social-media-world/#commentsFiled under: ,

Charlene Li has a good post about a recent panel she participated on about social media in a traditional media context.  She summarizes well, I think, with these words:
"...if you take the social computing view that as a publisher, you can't serve ALL of the needs of your customer yourself, then the best that you should do is to be the FIRST source of information for your audience. In that way, News.com ensures that although it may not be the ONLY source of technology news, it has a fighting chance of filtering and aggregating that news for its audience better than anyone else."

I think that's a great way to explain it.  Li mentions Digg.com, for example, as an example of a media publisher that does not create or control content - yet provides added value and branding and thus has built huge loyalty in this new social media context.

This is along the same idea as John Palfrey's explanation of news reading habits in a new world that I highlighted yesterday.  I think that refining the stories we can use to explain these new media to new participants will only help accelerate the truly social nature of the phenomena.   That and being able to point to examples of social media that cover more than just tech.  Commontimes.org is a digg clone of sorts about politics, for example.
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]]>Marshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-23T16:23:00+00:00If Feedburner dies - we're going to livehttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/22/if-feedburner-dies-were-going-to-live/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/22/if-feedburner-dies-were-going-to-live/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/22/if-feedburner-dies-were-going-to-live/#commentsFiled under: ,

There has been a lot of complaining around the web lately about Feedburner - even Dave Winer is discussing alternatives to Feedburner's controlling the domains of everyone's feeds.  People say they are worried that if Feedburner dies or turns evil then all is lost.  I do not think that's the case.  Number one reason, look at this code:
<channel>
    <title>Marshall Kirkpatrick</title>
    <link>http://marshallk.com</link>
    <description>Know more, faster.  And then share it.</description>
    <pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2006 22:55:20 +0000</pubDate>
    <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.2</generator>

    <language>en</language>

That's the first 5 lines of the code from my personal blog's Feedburner landing page.  Our RSS readers all show both the RSS URL from Feedburner feeds and the HTML URL of the sites those feeds originate from.  No disconnect there.  Look in your OPML file.  It's going to be ok.

If we had to, I'll bet someone could write a script that could look over your OPML file, visit the HTML URLs and replace the Feedburner URLs in your file with the standard RSS URLs for WordPress, Blogger, MT, LiveJournal or whatever type of blog each one was.  It's going to be ok.  Now go enjoy Feedburner's statistics, autopinging, javascript plug-ins following feed items (FeedFlare, with API), plagarism monitoring ("unusual uses"), baked in support for email delivery of feed items and goodness knows what else.  Am I wrong about this?  That's how it seems to me and I'm usually not a big fan of trusting authority - but really, the RSS freak-out over the last few days has been over the top.

Note: If you're interested in reading a long interview with Feedburner biz dev VP Rick Klau, I did one that's posted here.
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]]>Marshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-22T23:11:00+00:00Bloglines ads flash support so you can watch YouTubehttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/bloglines-ads-flash-support-so-you-can-watch-youtube/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/bloglines-ads-flash-support-so-you-can-watch-youtube/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/bloglines-ads-flash-support-so-you-can-watch-youtube/#commentsFiled under: ,

Bloglines just announced support for flash-based items inside feeds, like YouTube videos.  Though I'm not a big Bloglines fan and I don't care for the now ubiquitous adjective "pimped" (see Ask ad highlighted on Bloglines news page - ok, I laughed anyway) this is nonetheless good news for everyone.  Flash is clearly a major format, multimedia is subscribed to and should be - so three cheers for this announcement.  Bloglines can now do something that not every feed reader can.  That and good search spam elimination.
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]]>bloglinesflashmediaRSSsubscriptionyoutubeMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-10T17:15:00+00:00Grazr raising money, taking on a partnerhttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/grazr-raising-money-taking-on-a-partner/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/grazr-raising-money-taking-on-a-partner/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/grazr-raising-money-taking-on-a-partner/#commentsFiled under: , ,

Mike Kowalchik's very cool project Grazr, a mini OPML browser and apparently much more soon, has been quietly raising funds and has now partnered with OPML geek Adam Green of Darwinian Web.  Here's the Grazr announcement.  I think this is great, as there is so much that can be done with this little tool already.

 I use Grazr for my blogroll on my personal site, saving huge space with a more interesting, dynamic display of my favorite feeds live.  I also add it to the end of interviews I do with people, providing a preview of an OPML file containing their feeds and other related feeds.  Mathew Ingram of Toronto's Globe and Mail uses Grazr on his personal blog to preview the writings of participants in this month's conference in Canada about Web 2.0, Mesh. Lots of potential here, and I'm glad to see the project is getting support.  Hopefully this won't be another cool tool that dies on the vine.

Here's an example of a Grazr implementation.  Click around inside it, the left border will move you up a level.
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]]>fundingGrazrOPMLweb2.0Marshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-10T13:55:00+00:00Reuters gives money to Berkman/Global Voiceshttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/reuters-gives-money-to-berkman-global-voices/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/reuters-gives-money-to-berkman-global-voices/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/10/reuters-gives-money-to-berkman-global-voices/#commentsFiled under: ,

CyberJournalist covers an announcement today about a Reuters move to provide financial support to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Global Voices Online in particular.  That's going to mean ongoing work by GV, more support for Russian and Arabic language bloggers and more trainings in places with little blog activity.  Pretty cool move by Reuters.  I've been told that many GV bloggers are aspiring MSM journalists, so we'll see how this plays out in terms of bloggyness.  Nonetheless, if you've never checked out Global Voices Online you really ought to.  It's a great example of blogging's international flavor and reach.  Glad to see it will be able to continue its work.  Nice also to see another example of old media/new media coming together.
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]]>bloggingGlobalVoicesMSMnptechReutersMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-10T13:01:00+00:00Tim O'Reilly asks: will friendships with brands rival contextual advertising?http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/24/tim-oreilly-asks-will-friendships-with-brands-rival-contextual/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/24/tim-oreilly-asks-will-friendships-with-brands-rival-contextual/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/24/tim-oreilly-asks-will-friendships-with-brands-rival-contextual/#commentsFiled under: ,

Big discussion around the web about this weekend's New York Times story on MySpace's anemic revenues relative to its huge traffic.  My favorite contribution to the mix so far is Tim O'Reilly's post about the part of the story reporting that 10,000 MySpace users have accepted a friendship with the bouncing square of ground beef from the Wendy's commercials. [Correction - that was 100,000 users!] What were you saying about MySpace users again?  Meat market jokes could abound...

Regardless, O'Reilly posits a theory that relationship marketing like this between brands and consumers could be the next big thing.  It could be as big as the creation of contextual advertising ala Overture and then Google, he says.  Thoughts?

My only thought initially is that if I want to maintain a relationship with a vendor (and I do, many) then I'll subscribe to their RSS feed (so I can catch square burgers in my aggregator, I guess).  Is that what this is, if not on a technical level then on a semi-functional level?  Maybe that's the level of sophistication that will be needed in order to see mass adoption of syndication/subscription technologies - click here to make friends with a square burger.  It seems possible. 
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]]>Adsenseadvertisingadvertising2.0MySpacerelationship marketingRelationshipMarketingWendy'sMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-04-24T12:43:00+00:00Newsweek implements private label RSS readerhttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/13/newsweek-implements-private-lable-rss-reader/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/13/newsweek-implements-private-lable-rss-reader/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/13/newsweek-implements-private-lable-rss-reader/#commentsFiled under: ,

I have a strong preference for Newsgator over Bloglines so I'm very happy to read about their new partnership with Newsweek.  Newsweek readers can now use a free web based RSS reader wrapped in Newsweek branding and pre-seeded with Newsweek feeds.  There are a lot of Newsweek feeds to chose from, but they don't overload you at first. It's really a beautiful system, I think it's one of the best examples of old media embracing Web 2.0.  Newsweek is acting as a facilitator for personalized news consumption that's as open ended as RSS. 

As the press release said:
"Adding RSS aggregation to Newsweek.com brings a new dimension of customization to our site," said Kevin Stuart, audience development manager of Newsweek.com.  "The NewsGator Hosted Solution allowed us to customize the offering based on criteria that was important to us, and gives us great flexibility to rapidly augment, modify, or edit the content we make available to our users."

One question I have after looking at the example account is wether readers are able to import and export their subscriptions by OPML.  I don't see that they are, and the way that Newsgator supports OPML is one of it's best traits.  Gotta have that.

Newsweek is so cool in fact, that a month ago today they announced that they are using Feedburner to manage all their feeds.  Silly as it might sound, that's hip enough to convince me to renew my print subscription.
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]]>adoptionbloglinesmsmnewsgatorrssMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-04-13T15:31:00+00:00Gabe Rivera launches baseball memeorandum - another real memetrackerhttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/03/gabe-rivera-launches-baseball-memeorandum-a-real-memetracker/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/03/gabe-rivera-launches-baseball-memeorandum-a-real-memetracker/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/03/gabe-rivera-launches-baseball-memeorandum-a-real-memetracker/#commentsFiled under: ,

Sample image from ballbugGabe Rivera, proud pappa of Tech.Memeorandum and a growing number of other automated memetrackers on various topics, today launched one on baseball.  Ballbug tracks the most linked to posts about baseball around the athleto-blogo-sphero.  When will he stop launching these kinds of sites on various topics?  He seemed to indicate to me in a rather cryptic comment here awhile ago that it couldn't go on forever, but he wasn't about to stop either. 

I'd like to take this opportunity too to say that I don't think these kinds of sites, which are fully automated, can be described using the same word as we use for sites like Digg.com - where storyies rise to the top because of human votes inside the system.  The word "memetracker," is I believe, misused when it's applied to Digg and other systems directly influenced by humans.  Plus those types of sites are tracking, if anything, specific URLs more than general memes defined by URLs grouped together - aren't they?  That's my two cents on the subject.
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]]>ballbugGabeRiveramemeorandumMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-04-03T22:28:00+00:00Netvibes gets fundinghttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/25/netvibes-gets-funding/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/25/netvibes-gets-funding/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/25/netvibes-gets-funding/#commentsFiled under: ,

Om Malik has posted an overview of some of the most prominent personal home page services, focusing on Netvibes.  Apparently the company just got a million dollars in funding from the founders of FON and Ning.    A few thoughts:

These RSS feed displaying pages seem low on the functionality and high on adopt ability to me.  It's basically the same thing as MyYahoo, isn't it?  More functionality than MyYahoo, perhaps, and NetVibes released an API earlier this month - so perhaps greater differentiation is just around the corner.  I know I have no interest in reading feeds in headline only format and without folders.  But this is how a large number of new users are getting into reading RSS feeds.  MyYahoo was the first RSS reader I used - for about an hour.

There's no mention of the funding on the company's development blog.  NetVibes has been around for a while, though, and is quite popular.  If it's funding is now coming from other start ups, themselves VC funded, does this speak to Nicholas Carr's supply/demand funding bubble argument?  Carr argues that the Web 2.0 scene isn't a bubble right now because there's not an excess of VC funds looking for projects to fund and thus funding lots of stupid ones.  That someone large hasn't thrown lots of money at NetVibes before now seems to me to support Carr's analysis.
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]]>FONNetVibesNingMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-03-25T15:32:00+00:00Wanted: taggable desktop newsreaderhttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/20/wanted-taggable-desktop-newsreader/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/20/wanted-taggable-desktop-newsreader/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/20/wanted-taggable-desktop-newsreader/#commentsFiled under: , ,

OK folks, I figure if anyone can tell me if such a thing already exists, it's you. I love NetNewsWire like it wuz my own chillren, but it kills me that I have to categorize all my feeds singly. This is bad. I have to decide whether danah goes into "friends" or "web 2.0" or "women in tech." She needs to be in all of them! Does supr.c.ilio.us belong in "friends," "web 2.0," "tech commentary" or "snark" (which, luckily, now warrants its own category)? You see my conundrum.

Web-based readers are out for me because I track too many feeds and performance quickly becomes an issue. Does anybody know of a desktop newsreader for the Mac that allows me to tag my feeds and see them in multiple places? Thanks in advance!
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]]>feedreadersnewsreadersRSStaggingtagsBarb Dybwad2006-03-20T15:19:00+00:00Roll your own Digg clone, it's a utility nowhttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/20/roll-your-own-digg-clone-its-a-utility-now/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/20/roll-your-own-digg-clone-its-a-utility-now/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/20/roll-your-own-digg-clone-its-a-utility-now/#commentsFiled under: ,

There's quite a number of anemic Digg clones out there, a real testimony to the community building skills of the original.  But an interesting new service I found this morning is CrispyNews, a site that lets you create your own topic specific subdomains for Digg-style newswires voted up and down by users.  Adsense all around and site creators share revenue after a certain point. 

This is probably too much like Newsvine to really take off, but who would have guessed that Digg style services would hit utility status so quickly?  What exactly is the word for them even?  It only makes sense that some day soon we'll all be clicking up and down on FeedFlare type links after each item in many of our RSS feeds and have top 10 or 20 lists reflected accordingly on our dashboards.  Or some combination of RSS and Digg-style up and down for our community of interest or work.  Anybody else read the recent Harper's excerpt (in print) on Chinese media gaining or losing points and thus pay according to who in the government praised their stories?  Hmmm....
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]]>communityCrispyNewsDiggmedianewsWeb2.0Marshall Kirkpatrick2006-03-20T10:30:00+00:00AJAXian Meta-search for tags: Keotaghttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/16/ajaxian-meta-search-for-tags-keotag/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/16/ajaxian-meta-search-for-tags-keotag/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/16/ajaxian-meta-search-for-tags-keotag/#commentsFiled under: , ,

Another gem from eHub today, Keotag is a beautiful, multi-functional search engine that finds items tagged with your search term in 14 different tagging systems (Technorati, del.icio.us, shadows, 43 things, etc.).  Search results are returned quickly and displayed with a very nice AJAX interface.  There isn't support for Flickr or other photosharing apps, nor for video apps that support tagging, but it is so smooth and fast that I'll be probably be using this instead of TagCentral from now on. 

See also the tag creation function for your blog posts.  Now if only they'd turn this into a bookmarklet or blummy plug-in.

Systems like this are notoriously fly-by-night, but this one has AJAX, pastel colors and rounded corners.  So it's gotta be for real, right?
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]]>del.ico.usfurlKeotagmetasearchtagtaggingtagsMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-03-16T13:56:00+00:00Memeorandum expands to celeb gossip, will they stop there?http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/14/memorandum-expands-to-celeb-gossip-will-they-stop-there/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/14/memorandum-expands-to-celeb-gossip-will-they-stop-there/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/14/memorandum-expands-to-celeb-gossip-will-they-stop-there/#commentsFiled under:

Gabe Rivera's robot army (producing Memeorandum and Tech.memeorandum) has expanded to cover celebrity gossip news in the form of a site called WeSmirch.  The Memeorandum formula appears to be a secret-sauce of link tracking blended with "authority" and some editorial "wisdom."  It's an excellent way to find what is the hot in at least some parts of the online world.

Celeb gossip makes sense.  Will Rivera add any more sites on different topics before selling or launching ads?  I don't believe that sports, science, market analysis or food (the most likely topics in my mind) would work well with the Memeorandum formula because I believe those blogospheres don't engage in nearly as much cross linking and the subtopics in many of them are of less universal interest than is the case with tech.  So I'll bet that this is it and now someone will buy all three blogs.  Any guesses who?
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]]>aggregatorsgossipmemeorandumnewsMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-03-14T10:44:00+00:00Digg.com introduces comment rating featurehttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/04/digg-com-introduces-comment-rating-feature/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/04/digg-com-introduces-comment-rating-feature/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/04/digg-com-introduces-comment-rating-feature/#commentsFiled under: , ,

Those wacky folks over at Digg.com have introduced a new Slashdot-style means of rating commenters' comments (though it seems that it may be simpler than Slashdot's?).  Found via.

These sorts of community news sites seem to provide a huge amount of their value in the comments section of each post, so it only makes sense to take the user-centric model a step further and have readers move comments up or down by quality. 

With the rise of automated memetrackers and community edited newswires, those of us seeking to add value to readers' experiences by just plain blogging about the industry have our work cut out for us!  Perhaps our value proposition is in serving as distinctly flavored super-filters for the news that's still overwhelming even when run through the above mentioned systems (even the guys at Digg do this with the DiggNation show), drawing unique connections that aggregators and comment heads are unlikely to draw and...analyzing the impacts of things in the news.

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]]>bloggingcommentsdiggmemetrackersslashdotMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-03-04T14:41:00+00:00Memetracking the Life Science Blogospherehttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/27/memetracking-the-life-science-blogosphere/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/27/memetracking-the-life-science-blogosphere/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/27/memetracking-the-life-science-blogosphere/#commentsFiled under: ,

Postgenomic.com is a new site that aggregates and analyses blogs about the life sciences, largely but not exclusively based on linking behavior.  I can't help but think of it as a topic-specific Tech.Memeorandum with more features but a smaller sphere of blogs being indexed.  It looks to be limited right now to 155 blogs in particular, though the site is asking for more blogs to include.  It's been up for less than two weeks so far.  The site also includes support for microformats for content contribution (eg. rel="review" markup in blog posts).

Memetrackers are hot right now in the Web2.0 space, and it's very interesting to see the genre in action outside the web tech industry itself.  Web tech geeks are probably the most likely people in the world to have blogs, though, so it will be interesting to see how much success can be found in other fields where the medium of blogging is still catching on.  See also ScienceBlogs.com.

Postgenomic was created by an anonymous scientist named "Stew."  Identified as a bioinformatician in his late twenties working at a large UK university, Stew says he remains anonymous so he can blog freely without fear of losing his job.

Hat tip to eHub for discovery of this.
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]]>biotechblogslife sciencesLifeSciencesMemeorandummemetrackersPostgenomicscienceMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-02-27T12:19:00+00:00Diggdot.us mashes social newshttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/22/diggdot-us-mashes-social-news/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/22/diggdot-us-mashes-social-news/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/22/diggdot-us-mashes-social-news/#commentsFiled under: , , , , ,

Want to get the best of digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular all in one place? You're in luck! Check out for this particular blend of social news mashup.

[Thx, Jason!]

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]]>Barb Dybwad2005-11-22T07:32:00+00:00The Carnival of Feministshttp://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/17/the-carnival-of-feminists/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/17/the-carnival-of-feminists/http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/17/the-carnival-of-feminists/#commentsFiled under: ,

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for turning me onto the Carnival of Feminists, which is a bi-weekly showcase of feminist posts throughout the blogosphere, as selected from nominations received. Issue 3 was just published, with posts in two themes: "1970s into 2000" and the "Editor's Feminist Cafeteria." Nominations for Issue 4, to be published at The Happy Feminist on December 7, are now being accepted; they should be posts dated between November 16 and December 7. To submit a post, send an email to veryhappyfeminist AT yahoo DOT com with "Feminist Carnival" in the subject line and the permalink to the blog post in the body. Go thou and submit thy favorite feminist blog post for some linklove, y'hear?

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]]>Barb Dybwad2005-11-17T18:00:00+00:00