Curation

Today Bit.ly, a popular URL shortener for Twitter and the web, has released a lively makeover for users of the site. Bit.ly has quickly gained popularity since its debut and is a project of Betaworks, which also owns Tweetdeck. Will the new changes to Bit.ly have a positive impact on users? What’s really new with Bit.ly outside of a fresh look?

     

Bit.ly Features To Watch

• Auto-shorten
  The keyboard is becoming irrelevant. At least that’s how your keyboard might feel with bit.ly’s new auto-shorten feature for links. Simply copy, paste, and Bit.ly will do the rest. You can also turn this feature off in your options.  
• Manage and Search
  Bit.ly is stepping their game up and elevating the playfield with their new url manager and search dashboard. Now you can easily access your history, backed with a fast and powerful search to find links quickly. A recipe for success for your business? It sure is when you add in link recovery options.
• Bit.ly Sidebar Integrations
  When you log into Bit.ly and look at your recent shortened links, you’ll see an option setting to share or copy recent shortened links. The share option is integrated very nicely with the refreshed Bit.ly sidebar for quick sharing.

      

Use and Value Over Time

All of the latest changes to Bit.ly should prove to make the service more useful and valuable when it comes to gathering data, ease of use, and content curation. There’s nothing too drastic, but users of Bit.ly will definitely notice a positive change in use over time with the latest update.

I have written a lot about digital curation because I believe, in a world of infinite noise, it's the next big thing. Twitter in particular needs a lot of curating since it's hard to find the art in the junk. Sites like Listorious help when it comes to finding Twitter lists. Now there's another just for tools. It comes from Oneforty.com. Here's a list I curated of my favorite Twitter tools for PR professionals.

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BREAKING: Kevin Rose to Replace Jay Adelson as Digg CEO —

There’s a major shakeup to report at Digg today: Jay Adelson is stepping down as CEO, effective immediately. Adelson will be replaced by Kevin Rose, who founded the site back in 2004 and has to much extent remained the face of the company through his role as co-host of online video show Diggnation.

In a statement to be released shortly, Adelson says that “the entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some new business ideas over the next twelve months. As the economy exits a very deep recession, I believe that it is an excellent time for new companies to develop.”

While we don’t yet know what those ideas might be, the news comes in the midst of a major overhaul at Digg. I talked to Adelson in-depth about the new Digg last month, who described his company’s plans to reinvent itself as an aggregator of what people are sharing around the web. Since then, the company has moved swiftly into mobile, unveiling both iPhone and Android apps in recent weeks.

Now, execution of the company’s ambitious game plan falls squarely on Rose, who says of the shakeup that he is “excited to be taking on the role of Chairman and acting CEO, driving Digg forward on our promise to enable social curation of the world’s content and the conversation around it.” Nonetheless, this news comes as a huge surprise given the timing.

We’re hearing that the company held an all-hands morning moments ago to share the news with employees. More to come …

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Jay Adelson Statement

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Got some news. After five years, forty million users, and an amazing ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Digg. With the new Digg getting ready to launch, Digg Ads doing well, our sales force growing, our hiring ramping, and the company maturing well beyond its startup phase, I feel that now is the right time.

The entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some new business ideas over the next twelve months. As the economy exits a very deep recession, I believe that it is an excellent time for new companies to develop. Of course, I will continue to serve as an adviser to Digg. In the interim, Kevin has agreed to step in as Chairman and CEO.

I’d like to thank Kevin, the Digg staff and the Digg community for their support, insight and, most of all, their loyalty in turning Digg
into the force that it is today.

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Kevin Rose Statement

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I want to be the first to thank Jay for the last five years of amazing work. You’ve been a great friend and mentor, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for you.

While I’ll miss working w/Jay day-to-day I am excited to be taking on the role of Chairman and acting CEO, driving Digg forward on our
promise to enable social curation of the world’s content and the conversation around it. We’ve been super busy on the product side
getting ready for the upcoming Digg redesign and delivering our mobile apps for the iPhone and Android.

Thank you very much for your on-going support of Digg, I’m truly excited about the next five years, big things coming!

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Tags: digg, jay adelson, kevin rose

The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators —

I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.

So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. Or I can add my thoughts to those links, just like Techcrunch or VentureBeat do. That’s curation. Or I can do a video like Leo Laporte does and talk about those links. That’s curation. Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation. The editor who sits in a big building at New York Times or your local newspaper that chooses what content you’ll see in your newspaper is a curator. So is the page designer who decides what story is at the top of the page.

But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. That’s why I’m writing this post, to try to get the industry to see that there’s an unmet need that — if they were met — would mean all sorts of things from better scrapbooks for family photos and events to better news systems like what CNN or Huffington Post are trying to build on the Web. More on that after I get through the seven things.

As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. If you give me #7 without giving me #1 first your tool will suck and you won’t be used by curators. If you give me #1 without #7, you’ll be way ahead of some tool that gives me #7 only.

This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. First, what are info atoms? A tweet is an atom. A photo on Flickr is an atom. A conversation item on Google Buzz is an atom. A Facebook status message is an atom. A YouTube video is an atom.

Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc.

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.

So, what are the seven needs of real time curators?

1. Real-time curators need to bundle. We need to be able to bundle certain tweets together. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say a news event, like an earthquake, happens right now while I’m writing this post. Which are the best 10 tweets that describe that event? Can we bundle those together easily? Bloggers can bundle, but making Tweets look like Tweets is actually pretty difficult for normal people and even for geeks like me. Gotta take a screen shot of the tweet, upload that, then build an image tag in Wordpress, then link that image up to the original tweet’s permalink. Whew. What a lot of work for something that should be simple. This could look like tagging, but calling it tagging is pretty limiting because tags won’t get you to full curation. One question: why can we bundle Flickr photos together by applying a tag to them, but we can’t bundle Tweets together by tagging Tweets? For instance, here’s two photos I shot at Techcrunch’s offices showing their new TV team. How did I bundle those together? Simply by tagging them with “Techcrunch TV” tag. Now, what if I could bundle in Tweets about Techcrunch TV? How about a YouTube video? How about other people’s Flickr photos? How about photos on other services like Smugmug or Picasa? How about Google Buzz items? Now you’re starting to understand why we need bundling cross-platform so we can start pulling valuable atoms out of the real-time streams.

2. Real-time curators need to reorder things. Look at just those two photos. One is more important than the other. Now, imagine a bundle with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of items. Why can’t curators put the most important ones at the top of the bundle, just like the New York Times front page editor puts the most important news at the top of the page? Or, even better, why can’t we organize them into sub bundles? During an earthquake, like the one in Haiti, some things happened on first day, other things happened on second day, etc. Why are they all in one flat stream? Or, look at Apple’s iPad launch. Some things are about the specs. Some things are about the people involved. Some things are about apps. Some things are about accessories. Why can’t we organize them all into sub bundles? All curated in order of importance?

3. Real-time curators need to distribute bundles. Let’s say I put together a report for my bosses at Rackspace about what is happening at YCombinator (they just had a launch this week of a new crop of companies). Let’s say I built a bundle of not just the Techcrunch article I just linked to, but the Tweets from the event as well as the reports from other tech journalists like those who work at GigaOm, who also had a report on that event. Now we need to distribute that bundle. Of course we’ll Tweet it. But that means a headline of less than 140 characters that must include a link to the permalink of the bundle. But what about Facebook? That can include a thumbnail. Google Buzz? That lets you upload items with longer headlines and multiple pictures. What about emailing this bundle around the way Chris Brogan emails his blog posts. Why can’t a curation tool be smart about distributing bundles and let you see and manipulate previews of how that bundle will distribute itself to the various places you need your bundles to go to get the right audience.

4. Real-time curators need to editorialize. So, now we have a bundle of Tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Google Buzz items, Facebook status messages, et al. We’ve seen a new pattern in the world and now we want to explain our view of that pattern. For instance, I was at the YCombinator event this week. What if I wanted to add my two cents into the patterns other people saw? I might want to blog like here. Or add a video of my own. Or a Cinchcast (audio recordings done on my iPhone). Or add a bunch of photos I shot, like this one of Paul Graham mentoring his startups at that event with what they did wrong and right. But why did I just need to click “img” and copy and paste a URL to do that? A curation tool would let me drag and drop on my new iPad that I’ll have next weekend.

5. Real-time curators need to update their bundles. When the Haiti earthquake happened, the news story changed over time. We had more information and many many more Tweets to bundle in, not to mention that the mainstream press started flowing stories into RSS and Twitter. If you can’t update a bundle then it will greatly limit the ability for us to communicate. Blogs are pretty bad at this. If I come back in two hours and update this post you probably won’t see the update. In fact, not only can I update this post, but everyone who leaves a comment underneath is really updating it too. Yet early readers won’t see the later comments. They are missing part of the story. Of course, once you update you need to redistribute. IE, let your Twitter and Facebook and Google Reader friends know that the story has changed and there is important new information on the bundle that you need to see.

6. Real-time curators need to add participation widgets. On some bundles you might want to ask your audience to take a poll. Some might want to add comments. Not everyone will. Seth Godin doesn’t have comments on his blog. Other bloggers might want to leave comments open for a few hours or a few days. Even here I’ve made it so you can only comment for 30 days on my blog posts. Why? Because of spammers and other bad actors. I can see a TON of widgets that would be available to get participation on widgets. These would be a great way for these systems to monetize, too. Would you pay $1 to add a poll to your bundle? I would.

7. Real-time curators need to track their audience. Look at this blog post. It has a TweetMeme button on it. That shows you how often this item has been retweeted. I would add such a button to every bundle I do. I’d also add Google Analytics and a few other things that would track where you’re coming from, what kind of engagement my items are getting, and even, how relevant you are based on your own participation in the system. Don’t think that’s already happening? Look at the curation system Spigit built for large enterprises. I met with them yesterday and their system does just that and is getting used by many of the world’s biggest companies like Wallmart and Starbucks.

Does such a curation system exist today? Yes, blogs, but blogs are HORRID for tracking this real time world. Just this post took me 30 minutes to bang out and that was after I had it in my head and I wrote it very quickly. Imagine I was talking about a real time event. The news is already 30 minutes old. We need a new system for real-time curation of what’s happening on my Twitter stream.

It’s interesting that no one has gotten close to even giving us the most basic curation tools. Why is that?

Why are companies ignoring our needs? In talking with CEOs at companies in the real-time space I’ve identified a few reasons:

1. Building-cross-platform tools is difficult. Each real-time feed has different APIs and isn’t set up to interoperate with other real-time systems. Twitter has no API to share its feeds with Flickr. Flickr’s tags don’t have any idea what YouTube’s tags are. Wordpress is blind to all of it. Etc Etc.
2. Fear of platform vendors. No one builds these kinds of features because they are scared that Facebook or Google will build these kinds of APIs and kill their businesses. Not unfounded, either. Tweetdeck built lists into its product and then Twitter came along and added lists in a way that was far more useful than the ones Tweetdeck built. So, companies like Tweetdeck and Seesmic choose to work on things that Twitter will be unlikely to do.
3. Assumption that these features are only going to be used by “weirdos or professionals or both.” I hear this all the time “oh, Scoble, you need these features, but what about normal people.”

The first two I can’t do much about. I agree that these are features that would be best built in at a platform level and have told many of the players to do that. But the third is provably false if entrepreneurs would do some customer research (shocking, but many San Francisco area social networking companies do very little real customer research, which explains why they so often screw up around privacy and fail to find new features that dramatically improve our lives).

Let’s consider the mother who has a 1-year-old son. She invites 30 of her friends to a birthday party for her son. They take videos, do Foursquare checkins, one or two might blog about the party for their mommy blogs. Many take photos, but some of those photos end up on Facebook. Some on Flickr. Some on SmugMug. Some on Picasa. Lots of them Tweet about the event, or Facebook status messages, or put some Google Buzz items up, not to mention FriendFeed, Whrrl, Pip.io, or other systems where you can capture your life’s most interesting events.

Now, how does that mother build an online scrapbook of all the items that were poured into the system? Sure you can use a tool like Scrapblog but how do you get Tweets into that? It’s not a curation tool for the real-time web.

Let’s also take on what would happen once we move into such a molecular world:

1. Search would INSTANTLY improve. (I need a whole blog post on why this is so).
2. Trends would INSTANTLY improve. (You’d have real meta data about important events, look at just the ordering data that would be available to study).
3. Brands would be able to advertise on bundles. (CocaCola would love to advertise on bundles of movie feedback, for instance, especially on bundles curated by the best movie curators — they will never advertise on raw tweets because the risk is too high that their brand would be next to something nasty).
4. A new monetization strategy would INSTANTLY become available for platform vendors like Twitter and Google Buzz.
5. Location services like Gowalla and Foursquare would be able to add real value onto bundles (showing location trends would be a key part of bundles, where they have no real play in augmenting “atoms” like Tweets or Flickr photos).
6. A new form of relevancy, credibility, and authority data would be available for systems to automatically present the best news. Look at how Techmeme appeared after blogging did. Imagine all sorts of new displays of best bundles that would now be possible. Even Techmeme would be able to recommend the best curators on topics, which would greatly improve the real-time news available there.

Anyone feel the need for this kind of new curation tool? Join in, please curate this post and push it around your networks. Let’s see if we can find some companies who are working on providing this new kind of real-time curation system. I’d love to work with startups who are working on just this. +1-425-205-1921 or scobleizer@gmail.com or leave a comment here and let’s work together in public.

The Virtual Public Art Project marries public sculpture and mobile technology to experiment with location-based art works.

At last night’s “Bigg Digg Shindigg” in Austin, TX, Digg CEO Jay Adelson briefly revealed plans for a massive overhaul of the social news site. This morning, I had an opportunity to chat with Adelson in-depth about the new Digg and what users, publishers, and the web as a whole should expect.

To sum it up, Adelson calls the new strategy to “enable social curation of all the world’s content and the conversation around it.” To get there though, Digg has re-built its entire site from the ground up, with dramatic changes that will be rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

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New User Experience

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The days of the Digg homepage as we know it – the most recently popular stories on the service as a whole – are numbered. The site is shifting towards a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter and Facebook, and other “signals” from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares, and more.

But Adelson notes that not all of these signals are created equal – for example, a retweet from a Twitter user with millions of followers will weigh much more heavily in the site’s ranking algorithms than one from a user with a few dozen. The concept of a Digg account is also changing. While you can already use Digg via Facebook Connect, the site plans to support logging in with Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and OpenID, among other identity providers.

It goes even further than that though – users will be able to Digg and submit stories anonymously. Adelson says that this fundamental change will move the site from 20,000 submissions today to millions. Those submissions will be sorted into an infinite number of categories, with Digg auto-suggesting them with users able to make additions and help rearrange miscategorized posts.

Digg also hasn’t been sittingly idly by watching what companies like Twitter and Facebook are doing for brands. The new Digg will eventually support publisher and brand profiles. Further, we might see something akin to Twitter’s suggested user list, where publishers and brands that accrue a large following and continually have popular content get recommended to Digg users.

Along those lines, Leaderboards will also be making a return to Digg, but not in the old form of showing just the most successful submitters site-wide. Instead, Adelson envisions leaderboards for the infinite topic and vertical pages that will emerge, letting Digg users become trusted sources in a given niche. Expect some sort of achievement system that will reward Digg users for “good behavior” as Adelson put it.

Because of all these changes, Digg’s suite of mobile apps is also going to be completely revamped, with changes closely mirroring those on the site.

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A New Paradigm for Publishers

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Adelson says the Digg we know today is “a bit like gambling” for publishers, where a story either hits the homepage and sees an enormous one-time spike in traffic or sits in relative obscurity. With the new Digg, Adelson says publishers should expect a “more predictable” stream of traffic, as many more stories receive placement on an infinite number of personalized user homepages.

Digg has a lot of new features in store for publishers too. The new Digg button – which we’re testing here on Mashable – lets users Digg a story without leaving the site. Duplicate submissions will also no longer be an issue on Digg, because all submissions will be URL-based.

But Digg has much larger ambitions for publishers as well. Websites like Mashable will be able to include Digg comments (which are being re-done again) right underneath stories. But it goes further than that – third-party comment services like Disqus will be able to integrate the comments right into their platforms, making Digg a much more relevant part of the distributed conversation game.

Beyond that, Adelson wants to provide publishers with analytics, and even share revenue with them down the line in an effort to better monetize traffic that comes in via Digg.

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Digg the Business

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Beyond the publisher revenue share opportunity – which is likely well down the road – Adelson sees significant page view growth coming from the thousands of new categories we’ll see in the new Digg. However, he’s not in a hurry to monetize them with ads, saying the company is in good financial shape.

In the long-term, he sees Digg ads – which the company says are seeing some success – as the primary driver of revenue. Digg’s also in serious hiring mode, with plans to add 50 engineers this year to help them deal with the inevitable question of …

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How Will Users Respond?

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Digg’s notoriously vocal community is in for some major changes, but the company is taking a very measured approach in rolling them out. Users will start receiving invites for the alpha site, which you can sign-up for at new.digg.com, within the next few weeks. From there, Digg plans “continuous iteration,” to address user feedback, a process Adelson says is made possible by the site’s recently announced architecture changes that he believes will let them scale indefinitely.

Nonetheless, Digg is committed to its new vision. Within the next few months, the Digg we know today will be shutoff, and the company will embark full speed ahead on its plan to be the most relevant aggregator and curator of the world’s news. How Digg’s rabid base of current users respond and if the new strategy is able to bring new people under the Digg tent will ultimately dictate the success of the ambitious new direction.

Tags: digg, facebook, jad adelson, social media, twitter

Gabe Rivera has launched a new property, Mediagazer, as another column in his network of vertical content websites.

Mr. Rivera is of course the man behind Techmeme, a website that everyone in the world of technology is familiar with. An aggregation service, it uses a powerful algorithm to harvest news, and then employs a team of human  editors stitch together the pieces to create the most dynamic collection of news stories, headlines, and discussion in the technology space around current topics.

Less known in tech journalism are Techmeme’s sister sites. The company also operates BallBug (Baseball), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip), memeorandum (politics), and now Mediagazer covering the most important news in the media industry.

Talking to Paid Content’s Staci Kramer, Techmeme editor McCarthy said that the four-year time difference between the last vertical launch and Mediagazer was due to work perfecting their model: “We spent the last four years evolving and perfecting our aggregation model and finally did the next vertical when we thought it was mature enough.”

The company sells sponsor slots on its verticals, meaning that each site brings in sufficient revenue to handles its curation and maintenance. In that vein, Mediagazer is launching with four sponsors. All but one are new; Seesmic sponsors Mediagazer and Techmeme. The website is very similar to the look and feel of the other verticals in the network.

And of course, Mediagazer does have those new share buttons that were unveiled last week. Techmeme et al know how important they have become, and the new sharing links at the top of each headline story section give readers the ability to link back to that section on the websites simply. Mediagazer will benefit from this functionality from launch.

Will the website succeed? I can safely say that while researching this story, half my time was spent reading content I that came across on Mediagazer. If that is any indication, we have another Techmeme on our hands.

To many in the industry, Techmeme is hands down the best aggregator of technology news. So it makes sense that they’d try to take their combination of algorithms and editors to other verticals. But they’ve tried in the past, and it hasn’t worked. But that doesn’t mean they’re giving up.

Today, the people behind Techmeme are rolling out Mediagazer, a new site focused on aggregating and serving up all the best media news from around the web. The timing seems perfect given the level of interest surrounding the slow but interesting death of print media. And the interest around exciting new devices like the iPad, which may or may not reinvigorate the industry.

But why chose to focus on media?

“Media news has several things going for it: lots of new coverage every day, lots of interlinking, a variety of subtopics (video, blogs, journalism, newspapers, etc.) and (we hope) a potential audience with interest in several of those subtopics,” Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera tells us.

Rivera has tried in the past to roll the Techmeme idea to other verticals such as celebrity news (WeSmirch), political news (Memeorandum), and even baseball news (Ballbug). All those sites still exist, but none have gotten the level of interest that Techmeme has.

So why will this be different? Aside from the interest in media, this is the first site Rivera has rolled out since switching over to using human editor curation. And actually, Mediagazer will be launched under the control of Megan McCarthy, the first human editor Rivera hired in late 2008. Rivera has since made other hires to round out a full staff that can work around the clock for Techmeme.

Says McCarthy, “Media is tumultuous. Some areas are growing, some shrinking, and there’s no clear path of where things are going. There’s talk about the future of journalism, consolidation of media ownership, bloggers, Twitter, etc. It affects daily life (look at how the Oscars were blacked out in New York City and how many people were touched by that). This is an industry that is filled with such disruption — you need to have a way to clearly view the big picture. Mediagazer does that.“

And a bit more about how it actually works from Mediagazer’s about area:

We gather all the important stories about media and present them to you in a timely, thorough, and organized manner. Our story selection method uses the power of our freakishly smart algorithm combined with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors.

We collect every relevant take on an issue and package them together in a comprehensive group of links. That way, you not only get the lead opinion on an issue, but you can easily see all the supporting, opposing, smart, controversial, notable, and previously unseen viewpoints. You get the big picture.

Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like. The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom:

1. Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy.
2. Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective."
3. Curators -- who "'cover' the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."

Now, this is interesting in a few respects. First, many "reporters" today don't really do what is described as reporting above. That is, they often do try to take wire copy or stories that were written elsewhere, and go through the wasted process of "re-reporting" them just to pretend it's a new and unique story for that publication. In many ways, this is a waste of resources. What would be better is if they actually encouraged #3 above -- let a "curator" handle that sort of news.

Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on "curating" as if it's some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they're going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today. These days, everyone is a curator of the news in some fashion: they share news, comment on it, post about it, etc. But they also look to the "pros" to add more value to it as well. But if the traditional press looks down on this function, they won't do a particularly good job of it. It's sometimes tough for a press who used to want itself to be "the final word" on every story to admit that others may have reported it better/faster, as well as the fact that sometimes it's better to involve the community, rather than treating the community as riffraff waiting for the word from the god-like journalists.

If a newsroom were set up with a focus on those three roles (I would add editors as well...), with the understanding that they work together as a team to both bring the most information and community to a particular story, I doubt we'd see newspapers struggling as much as they are today.

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