Medium As A Bellwether

The boys at Obvious have launched a peek at a new experiment of theirs, called Medium.

Medium — to the degree that we can fool with it so far, or so far as they have fooled with it — is more of an indication of a new aesthetic that Obvious is pursuing than anything else. It has a iPad-like clean design — shared by all the curations that have been pulled together.

Reading between the lines, the Obvious Ones believe that the dynamic of old-school blogging — typified by Wordpress — is too restrictive, the shouting at Tumblr is too garish and loud, and the self-centeredness of Pinterest too Ayn Randian.

Something other is called for. But it’s not just a slightly different screwdriver, turning slightly more futuristic screws. This is a change where we give up on screws, we give up on hand-tooled websites, we give up on owning what we build.

I haven’t test been invited to post anything: at least for the present, you must be invited, another example of the dream that elitism and/or editors will lead to high quality, without the need for filters.

Certainly, in time, others will be allowed to play fully, but we don’t know what mechanisms will be used to limit or constrain people. Will every collection, like ‘Look What I Made’ in the image above, have gatekeepers who get to decide who gets to contribute? That’s how Tumblr topics work today, at least the popular, profitable ones.

Medium is a speculative design intended to challenge us to consider implications of the deep philosophy lurking within.

Will people be allowed to fool with the templates for collections, or are those fixed by the Editors-In-The-Sky?

Medium has an inbuilt voting scheme where viewers can ‘like’ something — although there is no like or upthrust thumb, only a numeric value showing how ‘interesting’ a post is, on a scale (I presume) of 1 to 10. 

Breaking with the blog norm of reverse chronological, Medium defaults to seeing what is more interesting. Which seems like a nod to Reddit and Digg.

I submit that this early version of Medium is a speculative design intended to challenge us to consider implications of the deep philosophy lurking within, rather than the test of a fully fleshed minimally-viable-product. The Obvious Ones have time and to spare. They are not threatened by a short runway of a few hundred G’s before having to show huge stickiness, or conversion to a Pro plan. They can rethink and reimagine a post-normal social media system, one that they believe will obsolete what we have come to think of as givens, like Pinterest, Wordpress, and Tumblr. 

Whether their twiddling will lead to a colossus, a killer app, remains to be seen. But we can be sure that something new and radically bold is coming, even if it’s not Medium.

Related articles

• 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious (Nieman Journalism Lab) One of the most insightful analyses of Medium, by Joshua Bentam, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab
• Read-only Launch For Medium & Branch, But Twitter Founders Promise More (readwriteweb.com)
• Twitter Co-Founders Preview Medium, Their Publishing Platform That Gives Anyone An Audience (techcrunch.com)
• Twitter Cofounders Unveil Medium, A Publishing Platform That Feels Like Tumblr And Looks Like Pinterest (fastcompany.com)
• Twitter founders launch a blogging platform, Kevin Rose blogs about peeing (venturebeat.com)
• Twitter founders launch Medium: a cross between Pinterest and Reddit (wired.co.uk)

15 August 2012 28 Permalink

Betaworks Acquires The Assets Of Digg

betaworks:

betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg. Digg is one of the great internet brands, and it has meant a great deal to millions of users over the years. It was a pioneer in community-driven news.

We are turning Digg back into a startup. Low budget, small team, fast cycles.

How?  We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience. The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.

We are going to build Digg for 2012.  More to come…

I will have to get the down-low on this.

12 July 2012 101 betaworks Permalink

The Corporatization of Memetrackers: Netscape, Digg, Rojo, and our Engines of Meaning

Rafat Ali reports on the Netscape memetracker relaunch, which is just the first of a spate of news in the memetracker space:

[from Netscape.com To Be Relaunched As a Digg-Like Site; Calacanis Heading It]

The storied Netscape.com will be revived again by AOL, and will relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site with Jason Calacanis at the helm, sources have told paidContent.org. Some Netscape-Calacanis rumors first surfaced on SV gossip site Valleywag.

The original Netscape division has been more than decimated over the last few years and layoffs have been almost routine these last few months. The new Netscape.com will be headed by Calacanis, who came in through AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs Inc. Not clear what role Weblogs, Inc.’s blogs would play but both divisions would report in Calacanis, according to the sources. He already reports to Jim Bankoff, executive VP of Programming & Products, who would also oversee the Netscape.com changes.

Calacanis has been a big Digg fan and has written about it on his blog a few times. He has yet to respond to our query about these details, but said on his own blog in response to rumours: “There are no details to share right now, but if that changes I’ll certainly let you know.”

What is not clear is whether the new Netscape will stick to just technology news aggregation like Digg, or go the general consumer route. The latter seems the most likely.

Don’t get me wrong: positive feedback, unchecked, can be a not nice thing. It just sounds good. The known problems of memetrackers — the “heaping on” behavior of authors or participants can polarize the system, biases in the majority can lead to dissenting perspectives being squelched, new voices are shut out — are likely to be an ongoing issue for anyone moving in the space.

The dynamics of memetrackers — which stories that are breaking, what announcements are racing through the blogosphere, whose new insights are being discussed — represnts a critical turning point in media, demonstrated by the growing importance of the Diggs, memeorandums, and Tailranks out there.

It’s the algorithm, the machine, harnessed to the collective insights of a body of people, that is replacing the editorial management of media. Instead of the CNN newsteam deciding what’s hot, tech.memeorandum’s machinery moves certain hot stories to the top of the page, or the activities of a handful of folks at Digg leads to a cascade on interest in a new product announcement.

That’s all well and good, and probably better — and obviously cheaper — than conventional editorial controls. But the control of the algorithm, the inner workings of the magic box that determines what’s hot and what’s not, is in the hands of the wizards that work for these new media gatekeepers. Yes, the myriad decisions of tens of millions of individuals still factor in heavily — like the ranking of blogs at tech.memeorandum being based on popularity, which is based on links and traffic — and the more explicit voting stuff at services like Rojo’s new Mojo, a personalized memetracking tool (see the TechCrunch and Read/Write Web for solid, in-depth reviews).

The answer to feed glut might be memetrackers, where we rely on the machinery and the harnessed collective grey matter of many, many others, to guide us to the right stuff to read, the right viewpoints to test, the right insights to be exposed to. But the corporatization of memetrackers is my biggest concern. Will there be a consistent weighting of more established, more conservative voices? Will the hippies, dreamers, and iconoclasts be weeded out? Will thoughtful and critical analysis be avalanched by hot meme-chasing newshounds who loudly proclaim love for everything hot? I wonder.

But there is no doubt that my primitive hunter/gatherer model of roaming around looking for good stuff will be augmented with something more overarching. Bruce Sterling once wrote about this:

[from Order Out Of Chaos]

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.

And the abiding question for me is “who is writing those algorithms?” If we can get to the point where we — the eventual users of these engines — have some say, or at least an insight, into the inner workings of the engines, I would more happily embrace them.

17 March 2006 Permalink

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of Memeorandum

Don Dodge takes on a thankless task, interviewing Gabe Rivera, of memeorandum. Thankless because he gets basically zero out of Gabe, who doesn’t (sensibly) tell any of the algorithmic secrets under the hood, or any of the cool things he is thinking about for the future. We hear him tell us why he thinks the memeorandum approach is better than others, but not much else revelatory. A nice try, though, Don.

[Disclosure: Of course, I had the benefit of spending a few hours with Gabe last week (I made him some eggs, while hanging around at Michael Arrington’s), and so I know there are neat things in the offing.]

3 February 2006 Permalink

Good Works, Bad Works, but Karma doesn’t work

Richard McManus at ZDNet’s Web 2.0 Explorer and Read/Write Web investigates the karma system at Reddit, and wonders if it’s better than Digg’s:

[from » Collaborative filtering: comparing Reddit’s karma system to Digg]

Indeed Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian says that “with reddit, we’re hoping that by focusing on filtering, users will be inclined to vote up links that genuinely interest them”. The Reddit method then is trying to capture that elusive social software principle of getting the user to reward him or herself first and foremost, but actually the system is enhanced at the same time. As Alexis said, “The nice thing about this is that although users are serving themselves by voting to train a personal filter, the by-product of their honesty is that the community gets a more accurate idea of what’s really popular.”

What do you think. Is Reddit’s karma system a better - more honest - way to rank stories and users than Digg’s? Or do you think Digg has the right approach, but just needs to address the groupthink and spam issues that come with scaling to thousands of users?

My strong belief is that these rating/ranking filters are failing at a fundamental level: not because they don’t work, or because they can be gamed, but because they are

1. closed, and
   
   
2. tightly integrated to a specific solution.

Each application could influence this foundational karma in dissimilar ways. On one application, say Oyogi, your karma would increase by correcting answering questions directed to you, while Technorati might increase your karma based on the number of inbound links to your blog, and Typepad might increase your karma based on the number of positive comments you receive on your blog.

Since we are in the Web 2.0 era of mash-ups, won’t someone break their karma system out, and set it up in this way, so that we can avoid a fragmented collection of non-interoperable solutions? People who would like to have various, separate identities could still do so, and the solution could support anonymity, but the benefits of a open karma solution, that all could draw upon, is so obvious that I am actually surprised it hasn’t been done already.

19 January 2006 Permalink