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Social News Watch
My StumbleUpon PageNews Niblets: Social Media’s Best and Worst Quality
Many people love appetizers. They’re usually overpriced, under-portioned, and loaded with calories, but we love them anyway. Why? Because they’re quick, easy, and too the point.
Social media websites like Digg, Reddit, and Propeller offer the same product in the form of headlines. We get to nibble on the news, taking it in bits and pieces, served to us through headlines that are often sensationalized or pointed. While some people take the nibble and move on the main course by reading the full story, a good portion of us live on the appetizers. We read the headlines, possibly read the descriptions, occasionally scan the story (or even just the first few paragraphs), then it’s back to the social media site for the next bite of news via headlines.
Some never make it past the headlines, establishing a reaction or opinion based on the nibblet. This is good. This is also bad. Read more
Please buy me a cup of coffee.Cleaning the Shoutwaves: Digg makes changes to shout system
Shouts. I noticed a couple of changes in the way that shouts work. I could be wrong, as I wasn’t much of a shouter, so please feel free to flame me if none of this is news to you.
A week and a half ago, we published Lost in a Sea of Shouts: 7 Ways Digg can Fix the System. It made it to the front page of Digg, but as fate would have it, it occurred just after 3am PST on Sunday morning — the worst possible time to go popular.
Whether someone at Digg read the article and started applying the changes (highly unlikely) or if they had already recognized the flaws themselves and changes were in the works for a while (much more likely), it still looks good that 2 of the 7 suggestions seem to have come true: Read more
Please buy me a cup of coffee.Facebook jumps ahead of Myspace in Traffic (depending on who you believe)
This really isn’t a question of Facebook vs. MySpace. It’s a question of Alexa.com vs. Compete.com.
According to Alexa, Facebook jumped ahead of MySpace last week to technically take the #6 spot. While it hasn’t changed on the official Alexa Top 500, a close examination of the line graph comparison shows the too big dogs in social networking neck and neck on Novemeber 20 and 21. Facebook jumped ahead by a small margin after that.
Compete.com paints a completely different picture. Despite the slower updates, MySpace still have a huge lead lead in October, 2007. It shows MySpace at 65 million versus Facebook’s 24 million. Read more
Please buy me a cup of coffee.Propeller: Knock knock knockin’ on Reddit’s Door
Compete.com’s and Alexa.com’s numbers are far from gospel, but they do offer an excellent comparative indicator for traffic. Looking at the traffic estimates and trends for Reddit and Propeller, it’s very conceivable that Propeller will overtake Reddit for the #2/#3 (depending on whether you consider StumbleUpon a social news website) position behind Digg amongst the social news powerhouse websites.
For a long time, Netscape was technically #2 in traffic, but most acknowledge that this was misleading. Many people typed in Netscape, not realizing it had become a social media website. Other sources sent traffic to Netscape, but only a small percentage used it for it’s news-based purpose. When the move to the new Propeller.com URL was announced, many believed that it spelled doom for the once-proud alternative to the Yahoo! and MSN homepages. Read more
Please buy me a cup of coffee.The Godfather and Social Media
In many ways, the top level websites of social media can be compared to the fictional world of The Godfather. Sounds weird? Hear me out.
The Godfather showed us a world of beauty and corruption. Alliances were made and broken. Those who were good to the family were rewarded, while anyone who stepped in the way was hit.
Social media works in much the same way. It can be beautiful, offering the best of the web compiled into loosely organized areas where masses of people can flood a worthy website and enjoy its offerings. It can be corrupt, as spammers use the power of social media to drive traffic to unworthy websites. Read more
Please buy me a cup of coffee.Social Media: Experts Offer Tips for Success
There are always articles about getting started in or getting better at social media, but this week was flooded with some great ones written by talented, respected authors. Here, I have compiled some great resources, some “must reads” for anyone wanting a leg up.
Social media is huge and growing. Those who have had success are often not willing to offer advice. It was a great week — the advice was strong and it seemed to be free flowing. Enjoy
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Ben Cook with bloggingexperiment.com takes a very straight-forward, conversational approach to showing the primary mistakes that submitters of social media make. Faking comments, misleading titles… we’ve all been tempted to try it. Some of us (myself included) have had marginal success doing these things. In the long run, it is futile and hurts your chances of building a strong profile that puts stories on the front pages consistently.
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