Bad news: This blog has pretty much run its course. Nothing very interesting (to me) has happened in this space for a long time. I won’t be updating twopointouch anytime soon.

Good news: I’ve started a new blog, called gamethinks.com, which is about computer games. I know this won’t interest a lot of my regular readers, but it does interest me, a lot. Give it a go. Maybe I can convince you.

image credit: C J Isherwood

I’ve produced an experimental social media news page using Feedly Mixes. You can embed this sort of thing into any site you like.

As you can see, it grabs and mixes up the content from selected RSS feeds – a list of sites covering the subject, as chosen by me. It then ranks the articles according to whether I deem a particular site important. Articles that I tweet or share in Feedly will also be included and take precedence on the page. Then it uses Google Reader’s statistics on how many people read, saved and shared articles to bubble up leading stories. Finally, it uses the age of the article as a fourth filter. The content is refreshed every 3–4 hours.

I’m not sure that my particular implementation is especially useful. The sort of person likely to visit this site almost certainly already reads the sites I have selected.

However, I think it could be a really useful tool in other circumstances. If you work in a particular domain – let’s say it’s construction – then it really is child’s play to create a page that gives a digest of the day’s news from the publications that deal with that area. That page could be set as everyone’s home page in your firm, or a link on the browser’s favourites bar, making sure the whole business is up-to-date with the latest news.

It’s better than the sort of pages you get at Alltop because you decide and curate the content sources – the construction page on that site is a good example of why you want this – a lot of the sources are US-based, which won’t be very relevant if, like me, you’re based in South London. There’s also no way I can see to flag particular stories as important.

A slightly more poetic use for Feedly Mixes might be the Interesting Pictures feed from flickr or ffffound. Maybe a personalised web comics page or a selection of new short stories.

NB: WordPress doesn’t deal well with the iFrames used to display the Feedly Widget on pages – you’ll need to install the Embed iFrame plug-in to get it to work.

The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blogosphere is the spectre of ‘fast-food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly generated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings.

…what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

This ‘fast-food’ content is actually regurgitated. It’s the copies of original material being re-written hundreds of times again within a matter of hours of its original publication. This may already seem familiar to users of Techmeme. Apparently. if you create lots of content quickly enough about the topic du jour, you can generate lots of traffic. Whether it’s new, well-written or popular won’t really matter, Arrington claims. It only has to be ‘popular enough’ to tip the scales of Google recognition and AdSense style advertising revenues.

E-consultancy today attempted to pour oil on the waters, claiming:

There is a market for content of all types, just as there’s a market for restaurants of all types. You might scarf down an occasional Big Mac at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never make reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town. And so it goes with content. If you’re looking for information on how to change the oil in your car, you could probably do far worse than the eHow article on the matter.

I think I may be a bit thick, but I don’t really understand the problem:

• There has always been a wealth of cheap/free content on the Web. That’s part of what makes it good.
• Some of that is good quality e.g. much of Wikipedia and some of it is….mmm not so much e.g. Linkfarm material, Answers.com.
• Google – the search engine used by almost everyone – has worked out how to circumvent much of the bad material by depending on the volume of inbound links, whose weighting is in turn determined by the credibility of those link-makers, among other criteria.
• Google also regularly updates the ways in which it finds people trying to cheat their way to the top of search rankings by, for example, rewriting content from other sites and then inter-linking.

More importantly, I think we’ve already established at this point that lots of search engine traffic is not a very effective way to try to make money for a news publisher. The UK newspapers’ relentless war to become the sites with the largest number of monthly uniques over the last 5–10 years has left them all almost penniless. Randoms don’t click on the ads, you see.

What they really want is useful content and useful readers:

Relevant and responsive readerships for advertisers = revenue.

Brands readers trust for quality and such = revenue.

Readers who want value-adds = revenue.

Useful and valuable branded content for relevant readerships = revenue.

A bunch of randoms who found you on Google = MASSIVE SERVER FEES AND NO RETURN (see FAST FOOD).

Arrington shouldn’t fear the fast-food merchants, he should fear the mainstream media catching up on his turf. They may often be a little hapless, not terribly online savvy, but there are an awful lot of them and they’ve still got lots of money to invest in digital publishing to find models that work. And they will keep coming, wave after wave.

I am reminded of this by the reports today of the protests around the G20 summit. Bring on the excellent reportage from today’s activities by Steve Lawson. Here’s a segment that really hit my philosophical bones. Skip to around 5.00 minutes to see some police march across the screen for no apparent reason. Lots of shouting. “Police Oppression” someone shouts. “Shame on you” the crowd chants. Yet it’s clear that no-one really knows what’s happening.

And zillions and zillions of people with cameras, cameraphones and videocameras.

There are more reporters and police, by possibly ten times, than there are ‘real’ protestors, it seems from this footage.

What the hell is that? In a very postmodern way, it seems that the reality of the event will be defined by what appears in the media.

Stuff like this:

Great photo but what we don’t see in this picture is the vast army of photographers, paparazzi, bloggers, v-bloggers, and (yes) journalists following this tiny minority around that Steve’s footage shows. The clear joy that a couple of windows have been broken at a branch of RBS in current news report seem to suggest a great deal of disappointment that there wasn’t more to record but ourselves.

Was there a riot in the City today? I will have to wait for the evening news report to find out.

The ‘G20 riot’ is in some ways more like an audition for Big Brother than political protest. I think it will be voted out on Friday.

This brief sample shows that we’re a bit more shallow and materialistic than the beeb would hope we were. We’re also not nearly as interested in cricket as they think (though the recent news from Australia would suggest we’re right to pretend it doesn’t exist ;)) The left column shows the priority the BBC gave the story and the right column shows the most popular stories.

Obviously, the BBC shouldn’t therefore send half of its Middle-East staff to Hollywood as a result. We employ the BBC to educate us, broaden our horizons and inform us about important events.

There are interesting and perhaps disconcerting implications for social media projects here, though. If the news agenda was left to us, would there be any stories about people dying in far-off countries? It’s hard to say, though these sorts of studies make the prospects look bleak.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

.…Findings show that [in the US]:

Half of those surveyed said that they would turn to network television for immediate news information (NB: 66% in the UK)
The next most popular source was the radio (42%)
37% of consumers would use daily local newspapers
33% cable news or business networks
25% of those interviewed would rely on Internet sites of print and broadcast media
6% would turn to Internet user groups, blogs and chat rooms (24% in the UK)
On average, says the report, consumers are four to six times more likely to feel that traditional media is more trustworthy than emerging news sources for news they feel is most interesting.

.…For entertainment, consumers most often picked traditional lifestyle media as the most trusted source. However, Internet blogs, user groups and chat rooms were selected next most often, followed by weekly or monthly general interest and news magazines.

.…52% of the consumers surveyed anticipate they will continue to mostly trust and rely on traditional news sources. However, 35% expect they will trust and rely on both emerging news and traditional news in the future, and 13% anticipate they will trust and rely mostly on emerging media.

Update: Even cooler – it will even work through an RSS feed, launching a new window from the button that is presented.

Just a thought. Does any aggregator generate a live OPML file that I could use to feed Grazr?

This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

The digg thread reporting the post has already — after 11 hours — garnered 211 comments. The current top user P9 — submitter of 1344 stories and 1113 comments — has apparently decided to resign:

As a direct result of your blog this evening. I will no longer no supporting Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever wants to reign.

I’ve written before about digg friendship groups, as have a large number of other people. After a certain point, it seems they did more harm than good. After becoming enormously popular very quickly, growth of the site had petered out. These changes seem designed to bring more people into digg and restore the perception that stories are promoted on their merits, rather than because of who submitted them.

Well, anyway. Here’s what I managed to get.

Can you give me some facts and figures about digg? Number of users, number of registered users, average visits per user, postings per day, comments per day? Number of staff? Startup costs?

Digg has approximately 475,000 registered users (you need to register to participate in the voting process). There are 4100 stories submitted every day as of 8/11/06, of which perhaps 40–50 make the front page. Right now, the digg workforce is 15 people strong. As for startup costs, digg was very lucky to receive interest from many venture capitalists, and so we were in a position to choose who we took money from. One note about starting up is that having a presence on the Internet costs less today than it did two years ago. Bandwidth, servers and the other necessities for a Web presence are a fraction of the cost than a few years back. I doubt this could have been done several years ago without going to a VC first and getting that start up capital and building it from that point.

What was your revenue for the last year? Projected revenue for this year?

We cannot comment on digg’s revenue at this time.

Any other sources of revenue aside from advertising? Any planned?

Right now we’re driven by Google AdSense ads, and we also have a partnership with Federated Media. We feel pretty strongly about not bombarding users with ads, so we’re trying to be as non-invasive as possible

To what do you attribute the success of the site?

Digg’s success lies in the democratic collaboration of its users, also known as web democracy. It wasn’t any type of business when it was first conceived. It was just an experiment that took off. There were others out there that were attempting similar things, but others didn’t come together like digg did. I’ve seen over 200 digg clones since we launched, some backed by billion dollar corporations –but they don’t get it. To succeed you need to innovate, not just duplicate someone else.

In what respects is digg a Web 2.0 site/service?

One part of Web 2.0 the really fascinates me is social open sharing of information. For the first time, masses of users are getting together to perform useful tasks online. And digg is a huge part of that. Not only can you read the stories your friends are interested in and talk about them, but digg itself really came into prominence because networks of friends spread, through word of mouth, that digg was the place to go.

I’m a fan of both digg and reddit, and it’s interesting to see the differences between what both crowds consider to be the day’s top stories. Such differences speak volumes about the wisdom of crowds, which both sites tout as their driving force. The answers found to problems (i.e. “what are the most interesting news stories today?”) depend considerably on who is in the crowd and the norms set for what makes an something interesting. Perhaps such a subjective issue is not really amenable to the approach except with groups that already have a general consensus about such matters. If that is the case, then perhaps the approach of Crispy News, which allows users to form their own news-voting communities, might offer an interesting alternative.

University of Virginia graduates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian started the website in June 2005 with the help of the Y Combinator venture firm in Cambridge, followed by an unnamed angel investor who funded the site through August.

Ohanian said the [PC World] magazine’s approval will give his team added motivation. “It’s mind-blowing for us,” he said.

Reddit, which attracts 50,000 visitors a day, reached profitability in April, Ohanian said. The company doesn’t disclose revenue figures.

Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said Reddit’s users circumvent the traditional news model, choosing the most interesting news stories of the day. “It lets the wisdom of crowds do what editors used to do,” he said.

Reddit hits profit as its technology nets praise in market.