michael reuter

News Curation in the Social Media Newsroom on YiGG

Inspired by Robert's blogpost on news curation we've started this experiment. With YiGG we've been providing a Social News Platform since 2006, where news-addicted users have been reading, adding, commenting on and recommending news. 

Some of Robert's ideas we've implemented already, others we haven't yet. As always, the easiest thing for us would be to develop this "curation thing" step-by-step - following the seven 'needs' he described in his post.

For us management of news always has been and most likely will be a smooth combination of algorithms and user behaviour. Today, 5 days after our first discussion, we've launched the first step: the Social Media Newsroom SMN. Being a part of the well known Weltspion, the SMN shows those news stories people care about most - on the Internets outside of YiGG (as you will see, we show stories in English and German language).

With 2 clicks users can tweet these stories or add them to YiGG Neueste Nachrichten and to their accounts, respectively. This part of the SMN is the algorithmic one. 

 

Another part of the SMN is the user generated one: by adding a "tip @yigg" to any tweet, users can send news URLs to YiGG. If those URLs belong to known and trusted sources, stories will be added to Neueste Nachrichten, automatically. If those domains are unkown, they appear as user recommendations in the SMN and can be aded manually. The YiGG team will check those sources and add them to the pool of trusted URLs. By tipping YiGG, users can influence the stream of news shown on YiGG!

Next steps will focus on the story detail page. Now the detail page concentrates on a story - we'll allow more users to edit a story detail page to turn it more into a topic detail page. This means we'll modify our story concept from "user centric" (i.e. the user owns the story) to "story or topic centric" (all users can curate and enrich stories).

As always we love to read your feedback!

 

Finding Relevant News

 

Many of us complain about information overkill these days. Others - one of them is me - reply with: There's no information overload, there's just selection failure.

Anyway - those of us in the news business are trying to find ways to ease the daily consumption of news for the user by ranking, weighing, recommending etc. At YiGG we have launched the project 'worldspy' with that goal exactly: we try to 'detect' relevance of news we find in the world wide web and display those relevant stories to our users who, adding their individual tastes (recommendations, comments, etc.), again curate those stories.

Bottom line: our approach is a combined effort of both, algorithm and user generated relevance. First two day's results are promising - we're really looking forward comparing the results with the user generated only alternative we had before!

Rocking Michaelangelo - Hold Your Horses

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

The Web's Next Big Thing: Reputation

Craig Newmark on "Who to trust online?"
>br> via OM

Would you miss a Champions League Match of your favorite soccer team?

The beer brewer Heineken could make you miss the Champions League match of your favourite soccer team, couldn't they?

Socialnomics - Social Media ROI

Robert Scoble: The Role Of Social Media in Marketing

Robert Scoble, blogger and entrepreneur, discusses his thoughts on how ideas spread. The public session was part of the Stanford GSB marketing course, the Power of Social Technology (Dr. Jennifer Aaker). A panel of experts, including Robert Scoble, MC Hammer, and Loic LeMeur, discussed how social media can build successful brands.

Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize! Congrats to @riccardowired !

Congrats to Riccardo Luna! You've made it! The Internet has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize!

The Internet has made the list of nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, going up against a Chinese dissident and a Russian human rights activist among others.

The nomination was made after a petition by the Italian version of Wired Magazine, which cited the Internet’s contributions to “dialogue, debate and consensus through communication”. Signatories include Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi, and organizers say the nomination will make for a legitimate entry.

Let's push it to make it possible!

YiGG Update: Per Bookmarklet Nachrichten als nicht eingeloggte Nutzer einstellen

Viele Websites bieten Ihren Nutzern sogenannte Bookmarklets an, mit denen sie Inhalte der Seiten in Soziale Netzwerke und Communities wie YiGG übertragen und weiteren interessierten Lesern zu Verfügung stellen können. 

Bisher haben wir nur angemeldeten Benutzern das Einstellen von Nachrichten erlaubt, hauptsächlich um Spam zu vermeiden. Jetzt haben wir jedoch einen Weg gefunden, dies möglich zu machen: Ab sofort können auch Nutzer, die YiGG nicht kennen bzw. uns zufällig gefunden haben, Nachrichten einstellen, wen sie auf ein Bookmarklet klicken. Als Einsteller der Nachricht fungiert unser Hamster mit dem Namen Marvin.

Mit dieser Änderung vermeiden wir, dass neue Nutzer sich zunächst einloggen müssen, um aktiv Nachrichten auf YiGG zustellen. Dennoch würden wir sie natürlich gern als registrierte Nutzer sehen: als Communitymitglied hat man zahlreiche Möglichkeiten, Nachrichten noch besser zu lesen, zu sortieren und zu empfehlen. 

Neu: YiGG Livestream - Personalisierter Nachrichtenkonsum

Heute haben wir den YiGG Livestream freigeschaltet. Während alle YiGG Seiten bisher nachrichtenbasiert waren, ist der Livestream nutzerbasiert; d.h. auf einer Seite sieht man, was einen YiGG Nutzer interessiert und was er macht.

Wir glauben, dass diese nutzerzentrierte Sichtweise ein wichtiger Schritt in Richtung Personalisierung beim Nachrichtenkonsum ist. Über den Livestream kann man YiGG schnell und einfach benutzen: YiGGen, Favoriten anlegen, Kommentieren, auf Kommentare seiner Freunde antworten und Nachrichten oder Kommentare auf Twitter und Facebook mit seinen dortigen Freunden teilen.

Darüberhinaus hat man den Überblick über seine eigenen Aktivitäten, die letzten Tweets und eine Direktzugriff auf sein Profil.

Wir sind sehr gespannt auf das Feedback und natürlich auf die Vorschläge, wie wir den Livestream weiter ausbauen sollen (die nächste Stufe befindet sich bereits in Planung).