Secondly, I’m surprised at the accusation that it’s another site making money of someone else’s efforts. There is, of course, a whole load of new news and information out there every minute of the day, and it’s good to have somewhere that aggregates it together, AND allows comment too. Google Reader is a good service, but of course, you have to subscribe to each sites feed; you can’t communally comment, and you will miss news reports that haven’t been posted on the sites you subscribe to, as there is no way to link to subjects or keywords in GR, only to feeds.

I look in Social|Median itself at least once a day, and often find articles of interest that I wish to read more about, and I click through to the site that’s posted it.

When I find articles of news that I think may be of interest to other Social|Median users I add it to the site, using the Social|Median bookmarklet in my browser. I usually copy one or two lines of text from the article, and add as a teaser so users get an idea what it is about. They would then have to click thru to the site, that I found it on to read the whole article.

I’m perhaps an atypical user in that I rarely watch TV, and get the vast majority of my daily news from online sources, so I value a site like Social|Median greatly, as it’s collecting links to what I want to read in one place. It’s also interesting, and part of one’s own lifelong continuing learning process to be able to comment on articles and get comments and replies to comments back from other users that may or may not agree with your views.

Therefore Social|Median not only gives me links to news in one place, but promotes debate about it too, and that can only be a good thing for people in general, and a good thing for the sites that get extra visitors to articles they might otherwise have never seen.

Ham: Allen: In a word, wow. There are so many inaccuracies in your article I don’t know where to start. You are certainly entitled to your opinion if you don’t like socialmedian as a service but at least get your facts right. Grand theft content while a nice sensationalist headline is just plain wrong and a silly accusation. It might get people to read your blog post but it’s just not true. Next you’ll probably accuse us of being linked to a hothead pastor, of not really being born in the U.S., and of associating with Bill Ayers. First off, socialmedian is publisher friendly. We enable users to discover content on the web that they in many cases would never have seen/discovered.

– discovering content is awesome… if you read CN, you’d see I am all about discovery. Same reason I fought against Friendfeed and Twitter offering defaults. I totally love content discovery and those parts of Socialmedian are great!

We promote popular sources and help users find new sources of content for the topics they care abotu. Like other social news sites, socialmedian enables people to aggregate and discover content from multiple sources and then link off to the original source. socialmedian does not scrape content from any source. We only grab RSS summaries from sources that our users have personally selected to use our tools to get feeds from (like Google Reader).

– but did I give you the right to take my content, place it on your site and use it in the manner to which you’ve done. I’ve given my readers the right to read the content, that’s all. It’s like this… I give Mary permission to drive my car. Mary takes my car and lets Diana drive it. Diana didn’t have my permission to drive my car. Neither did you.

socialmedian abides by a fair-use policy for content on our site. We only grab summaries of content and then link off to the original content. Every article on socialmedian includes a read more link which clicks out to the external source. When viewing a list of stories, the title of the story links directly to the original story on the external site. When viewing a list of socialmedian user activities that the title of the story directs to a socialmedian internal page.

– right and as I noted, since most blog posts appear to be shorter than whatever your cut off is (which certainly seems WAY long) so you are displaying the full content of a post. I see the read more links and the title links which might be a good baby step, but as for embracing the content authors, it’s nowhere near where it needs to be. I think it will be interesting to see what happens over the next year with regards to feed usage – look at the big terms of service that engadget sends along with every story now.

Yes, socialmedian encourages our users to carry on the discussion on socialmedian. We do this as a service to our users, similar to Digg, Facebook, and other social sites. When a user shares a story from socialmedian onto twitter, they have the choice of either sharing a link to discuss that story on socialmedian or to direct their twitter followers to the original story. Above all, the benefit of socialmedian to the end user is being able to get the news they need filtered by people who share their interests. This works rather well and has been greeted with great response by our users who use socialmedian to find and discuss content of interest through their social networking contacts. Whether socialmedian is labeled "beta" or not, it continues to be a work in progress.

– See this post about the "<a href="http://www.centernetworks.com/the-conversation-monetization"&gt;stolen discussion</a>". It’s clear that services like yours have realized that the discussion/conversation are where the money are and so everyone wants to take it. Without offering anything back to the source content publisher. If you are going to tell me it’s traffic back to the source, it’s going to take way more than that as I’ve seen maybe 1 person a week coming from your service. I’d still like to see the same thing…. conversation centralized at the source, whatever that source is (photo, video, text, whatever).

– While we’re at it, what’s your business model?

Our model from day 1 has been to listen carefully to user feedback and to adjust very quickly and provide enhancements. We likewise work closely with publishers to learn how best to enable socialmedian promote their content. This is all an ongoing evolving process. We only removed the "beta" tag because we heard feedback that even in this day and age of every Google product being labeled "beta" there are still many non-techy/mainstream users who are skeptical of trying a news service that is still in beta. So, we decided to continue our public evolution of socialmedian without the beta tag. The philosophy of listen, learn, adjust, repeat still follows. Thanks for stopping by to check us out.

– i like that… never cared much for alpha, beta, gamma – everyone provides support at all stages so why not just "go live". I believe your service has some promise – I actually think we’ve chatted about it earlier this year. As long as you add value without lifting content and stealing the discussion, ya have a chance!

– don’t worry my man, I don’t want to see you in social media jail – I am willing to be bail you out too. Happy to continue the discussion anytime!

Posted for Jason Goldberg as it somehow got caught in spam:

Allen: In a word, wow. There are so many inaccuracies in your article I don’t know where to start. You are certainly entitled to your opinion if you don’t like socialmedian as a service but at least get your facts right. Grand theft content while a nice sensationalist headline is just plain wrong and a silly accusation. It might get people to read your blog post but it’s just not true. Next you’ll probably accuse us of being linked to a hothead pastor, of not really being born in the U.S., and of associating with Bill Ayers. First off, socialmedian is publisher friendly. We enable users to discover content on the web that they in many cases would never have seen/discovered.

We promote popular sources and help users find new sources of content for the topics they care abotu. Like other social news sites, socialmedian enables people to aggregate and discover content from multiple sources and then link off to the original source. socialmedian does not scrape content from any source. We only grab RSS summaries from sources that our users have personally selected to use our tools to get feeds from (like Google Reader).

socialmedian abides by a fair-use policy for content on our site. We only grab summaries of content and then link off to the original content. Every article on socialmedian includes a read more link which clicks out to the external source. When viewing a list of stories, the title of the story links directly to the original story on the external site. When viewing a list of socialmedian user activities that the title of the story directs to a socialmedian internal page.

Yes, socialmedian encourages our users to carry on the discussion on socialmedian. We do this as a service to our users, similar to Digg, Facebook, and other social sites. When a user shares a story from socialmedian onto twitter, they have the choice of either sharing a link to discuss that story on socialmedian or to direct their twitter followers to the original story. Above all, the benefit of socialmedian to the end user is being able to get the news they need filtered by people who share their interests. This works rather well and has been greeted with great response by our users who use socialmedian to find and discuss content of interest through their social networking contacts. Whether socialmedian is labeled "beta" or not, it continues to be a work in progress.

Our model from day 1 has been to listen carefully to user feedback and to adjust very quickly and provide enhancements. We likewise work closely with publishers to learn how best to enable socialmedian promote their content. This is all an ongoing evolving process. We only removed the "beta" tag because we heard feedback that even in this day and age of every Google product being labeled "beta" there are still many non-techy/mainstream users who are skeptical of trying a news service that is still in beta. So, we decided to continue our public evolution of socialmedian without the beta tag. The philosophy of listen, learn, adjust, repeat still follows. Thanks for stopping by to check us out.

Best, -jason

While I appreciate giving props where props are due and being appropriately respectful to content creators, it seems to me you are missing a key value of community: communication.

Aren’t we missing the point if we become so obsessed with driving traffic that we forget to slow down and appreciate the conversation?

I found this blog (your blog) on SocialMedian. I wouldn’t have found it if Jason Goldberg hadn’t submitted it. People I respect are discussing this and that is why I am here.

You don’t need to feel threatened. We’re the ones paying attention. We’re driving the traffic.

Also, you are flagrantly inaccurate, but I’ll leave that bone for someone else to pick.

Regards,

Sarah

Yes, the conversation has shifted.

I love the site and think it should continue to function pretty much as it does. By allowing the ease of submitting news from other services I already use, it has become far superior to Digg in actual utility for me. It is not gamed, there are no established “power users” per se, and it regularly serves me up news I am interested in. However, the fact is that Allen has a point: people post the full content and others then have no reason to visit the link. This disassociates the creators of content from their content, in various ways, and can interfere with the livelihood of others and may also have copyright issues.

I see a couple solutions…I have run a few online communities in my time, and on forums we had a rule that people could post no more than 25% of any copyrighted content; anything violating that rule was removed.

Another solution would be making republishing granular: items under CC or a GNU license can be reposting in full and those under normal copyright can only be reposted in part.

It just seems to me that you are unduly concerned about where your readers find you. You really can’t control that. How many people engaged with you today because of SocialMedian? You’ve got quite a conversation going here (and on FriendFeed and S|M). It all got pointed back to you and ignited a rather stimulating conversation spanning the globe.

Who cares how we got here? We’re here.

And I’m absolutely going to keep reading CN (and I may clip it and talk about it on occasion) because I want to see this conversation continue.

Best,

Sarah

Many of the articles are from well-known sites like NYT, CNN, Huffpost, etc, but quite a few gems are from sites that I never would have heard about in a million years.

I can’t speak for others, but for me, finding a thread of news or information and following the thread until my curiosity is satisfied is how I use the Web. Social Median isn’t quite there yet, but its a good start. One thing is for certain, we’ll see dozens more cohorts of Goldberg’s platform in the months to come. I will not be surprised if we don’t start seeing them integrated with Calais or other semantic Web technologies that will allow for greater, serendipitous discovery of content from completely unrelated Web brands.

Here’s the thing. Even if you are right… which is debatable, this is a trajectory that will not be undone. It is over. FriendFeed is not going away. socialmedian is not going away. Both are growing. So either embrace it or keep being unhappy (or both).

Things have changed. You can choose to ride their momentum, or you can fight it. But you can’t make it stop.

I tried to break it all down in my blog post (http://rwv.blogspot.com/2008/12/old-vs-new-media-creative-commons.html) but it ran a little long. It’s a big issue and there is a lot invested in keeping conversations on the site that originated them, not just to generate traffic but to prove the viability of a news source. However, if you can start looking at things at a different angle, I think you may find that these changes are for the better.