The Jon Stewart effect

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 August 2007 at 18:22
Tags: Journalism, Reddit, Slashdot, The Daily Show

Forget the Digg effect. Try the Jon Stewart effect.

Guess what was the most-viewed story on PressGazette.co.uk in July. No, nothing about Alan Johnston or Rupert Murdoch. No, it was this one about the New Zealand Parliament’s new standing orders making it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters to use footage of the chamber for “satire, ridicule or denigration”.

It was a simple PA story which was virtually ignored by the world then we initially posted it on 23 July.

But then Jon Stewart mentioned it on the Daily Show, and it ended up on Slashdot, Reddit and several major political blogs in the US, drastically extending the usual 36-hour window when a news story usually gets all of its traffic.

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MySpace News: What, no personalisation?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 April 2007 at 12:57
Tags: Digg, MySpace, Reddit

As was long expected (by those who read the right blogs), the social networking behemoth MySpace last week launched a news aggregation service, MySpace News. But nobody developing news aggregation or recommendation sites will be quaking in their boots just yet.

As it stands a week after launch, MySpace News is an enormous missed opportunity. The service, which is based on the news aggregator NewRoo, certainly won’t win any awards for navigation in online news design.

With an enormous banner advertisement at the top, even users of large screens will see only a story or two on the front page. Its primary category navigation is hidden away beneath another huge advertisement. There is no obvious way to search for news other than that on the page.

MySpace News also allows users to rank the news stories. But, unlike the binary simplicity of Digg and Reddit, MySpace News uses an awkward scale of 1 to 5. What’s worse, few users seem to have discovered how to use these tools. Judging by the handful of votes on
even the top stories, MySpace’s 100 million users certainly aren’t streaming to their latest news portal.

The whole news site seems like a bit of a ghost town – which is something of a flaw for a site that seeks to harness the “wisdom of crowds”. But that may yet change if and when there is more integration between MySpace News and the rest of the vast site.

The lack of integration seems to be the site’s major flaw and a massive missed opportunity. MySpace is sitting on a huge amount of statistical data about how its 100 million users are connected to one another.

If this social networking data could be brought to bear on story selection, MySpace News could provide an interesting new twist to news personalisation.

In spite of the appearance of democratic story-selection, the great weakness of the existing social news recommendation sites is their voting algorithms, which mean the stories appearing on their front pages are dominated by a tiny elite of unrepresentative alpha users.

Unlike many other so-called participatory media sites, MySpace users generate useful information about themselves merely by forging the links that are a social networking site’s bread and butter.

Armed with its social-networking data, MySpace could, in theory at least, attempt to achieve innovative forms of news personalisation. MySpace’s voting algorithm, could, for example, give greater weight to articles voted on by the reader’s MySpace friends, on the assumption
that acquaintances are likely to share interests.

MySpace News, like any good website these days, is in “beta” testing mode, and has been soliciting feedback for improvement. One hopes someone is paying attention.

Reddit to power Wired’s long tail?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 November 2006 at 15:18
Tags: Digg, Journalism, Reddit, Wired

So Condé Nast’s Wired Digital has purchased the social news recommendation site Reddit.

Reddit is a tool much like Digg, but far smaller. According to GigaOm, the site has 100,000 members more than 1 million unique visitors last month.

The deal certainly makes sense from the point of view of a rapidly-growing four-person startup’s point of view. But some have been puzzled why the Condé Nast would want to bring something like this into the same stable as Vogue and GQ.

Robin Hamman, for example, notes that unlike Digg’s reported suitor News Corp, which might have some use for applying recommendation technology to its existing online publications, Condé Nast has few obvious uses for a social recommendation engine:

… Conde Nast titles don’t deal with the type of content that would find it’s way into Reddit, at least not at with Reddit’s existing userbase and implimentation.” Ok, so Wired might make good use of it, but how many readers of Details, House and Garden, or Bride are really going to want to recommend an article and/or vote it up or down the list of stories? It’s not the type of content that gets the blood stirring.

But Wired may be enough. The acquisition makes perfect sense when seen in the light of the pet theory of editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Recommendation tools like Reddit have an important place in Anderson’s theory of “long tail” digital economics. Merely making more niche products or information online is not suffient for the emergence of a “long tail” economy, according to Anderson. To become economically viable, technological systems need to be in place to connect niche supply and niche emand. ”Filters” are necessary to help people find obsure items of interest and “drive demand down the long tail”.

These online filters generally use some sort of mechanism to harness the wisdom of crowds” effect to help their users find material that is relevant to them. Search engines are the classic example, of course, but so are social recommendation sites like Digg, del.icio.us — and Reddit.

On his blog, Anderson writes of the acquisition: “Reddit is an evolution of the ‘voting’ system pioneered by Digg: it’s fast, clean and very scaleable to niche subject areas (read: Long Tail media).”

Others have already used Reddit’s technology to good effect. It will be very interesting to see what Wired does to put its editor’s theory into practice.
Anthony Mayfield has some thoughts on the acquisition, as well.