It’s coming up to Thanksgiving here in the US, and a thin layer of snow still sparkles on the ground in the winter sun. On Friday, (that’s the day after Thanksgiving for any of you not steeped in American tradition) we shall drive to Milwaukee for a spot of Christmas shopping and, in the case of the young ‘uns, some serious scoping out of items to be put on a list for Santa.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that it is again that time of year when lists are made, checked twice and, in the case of Now Public’s MostPublic Index, found to be rather wanting in the sense department. Yes, we have another meaningless ranking of the internet’s glitterati into top 20s for New York, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Vancouver and London. And yes, I’m listed on the London list, at number 11.

There was a time when I would have cared about this, especially coming from Now Public. I was one of the first people to write about Now Public, back in March 2005, and I’ve had a soft spot for them ever since, even if I never did get as involved in the community there as perhaps I would have liked. But that, I’m afraid, is not enough to make the list they’ve drawn up relevant in any way.

The list has been derived thusly:

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

* Online Visibility
* Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
* Interactivity and Accessibility
* The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

But what does that actually say about someone? Nothing more than that they will readily adopt and use social tools. In some ways, it’s just the top 20 Chatty Cathys in London (guilty as charged), but in other ways it’s not even that.

What amuses me, though, is the reaction to the list. As usual, many are doing the whole “Who they hell are these people?” thing, particularly in the comments on Iain Dale’s blog. Now I wouldn’t begin to claim to know all the UK’s political bloggers, because that’s not really my bag. But Iain’s commenters are only too happy to dismiss any names they don’t recognise on the basis that they don’t recognise them, as if somehow it’s possible to know everyone on the internet including those outside of your sphere of interest and expertise.

Many people have commented on preponderance of journalists in the list - six from the BBC, four from The Guardian, and a few independents. (Two more listees are genuinely famous outside of the internets, and two of us are social media consultants.) Given this list is more about verbosity or GoogleJuice than influence or contribution to the tech community, it should be no surprise to see a lot of (tech) journalists there. For one, it’s their job to be on top of new tools so they sign up to everything going, and secondly, loquaciousness is a prerequisite for being a journalist. If you’re not good with words and happy to talk, then you’re not likely to take a job that relies on just that.

Jess McCabe notes that there’s only one woman on the list (me). Is this a function of the manner in which the list was compiled, or a reflection of the underlying dominance of men in social media? Well, it’s impossible to tell for sure from this distance, but if you look at the Los Angeles list there are nine women in the top 20, so there doesn’t seem to be an inherent bias in the list-making process.

It is, of course, disappointing to see such a male-dominated list. And many have made suggestions as to who else “should” have been on it, but unless there was bias in the list compilation process, then “should” has no part to play in the discussion. Maybe women in the UK aren’t as digitally noisy as men. Certainly there aren’t as many of them in leading positions. But that’s a discussion separate from this one - unless there’s proof that the list compilation process is inherently biased, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they’re just reflecting an existing trend.

Some people are dissociating themselves from the list, with weary sighs and more than a little perplexity. Those of us who’ve been kicking around the blogosphere since well before the invention of the podcast have seen lists like these come and go, and every single one of them was pointless.

Yet we’re all human, and there’s no shame in feeling a little fillip to see your own name listed, even if the manner by which your name was chosen seems rather arbitrary. Despite my intellectual self understanding that the list is a waste of time, my emotional self can’t help but be at least a little happy to have been named.

But ultimately, the list has done exactly what it set out to do. It’s caused a few big name bloggers (predominantly the ones listed…) to write about NowPublic, link to them, and regardless of what is said pass some traffic their way. That is all that this list - and every other that has come before - set out to do. It’s PR. Bizarre and shallow PR perhaps, but nevertheless, the aim of the list is not to teach us something about ourselves, nor to reveal something interesting about the communities of which we are a part, but to provoke us into making some sort of comment, good or bad.

Still, to save you a click, here’s the list, republished in all its daftness:

1. Rory Cellan-Jones
2. Darren Waters
3. Iain Dale
4. Paul Bradshaw
5. Erik Huggers
6. Tom Coates
7. Ewan McIntosh
8. Stephen Fry
9. Nick Robinson
10. Neil McIntosh
11. Suw Charman-Anderson
12. Alan Connor
13. Kevin Anderson
14. Andy Murray
15. Ian Betteridge
16. Robert Peston
17. Jon Kossman
18. Euan Semple
19. Jack Schofield
20. Charles Arthur

Suw and I are huge fans of This American Life, a show on NPR in the US. We often listen to the podcast over breakfast on the weekends. My friend Mohamed Nanabhy says that the US government should spend its public diplomacy budget on This American Life because it’s such a good representative for the US.

One of the great things being back in the US during the elections was to catch up with Andy Carvin, head of the social media desk at NPR. Andy is live blogging a session with the host of This American Life, Ira Glass, on story telling and interviewing.

There is s view that an aggressive, in your face style of interviewing is the mark of a great journalist, but Ira and his team actually tell wonderful stories about everyday life full of humanity. It’s an amazing form of journalism, just different from aggressive public accountability journalism. Here are a couple of choice quotes from Ira:

Ira Glass: If you do interviews like a stiff, that’s what comes out of the interview subject. One of your greatest tools is to be a human being.

or this nugget:

Ira Glass: Pure imagination. Part of what makes a story work is the reporter imagining what it really means to be this person.

For any budding journalist who wants to know about interview techniques, Ira is one to listen to or watch.

After seven weeks in the US for the elections, I’m behind in everything: Eating, sleeping and blogging. I’m going to be writing a lot about the experience and lessons learned in terms of the technology and in terms of the journalism. But, before I get into deep thoughts about the trip, I saw something that really resonated with me as I watched how social media covered these elections and where traditional media was sometimes successful in adapting to the world of social media and also how much further traditional media still has to go.

Tim Eby of WOSU, who I reconnected with at the Columbus Social Media Cafe, just tweeted:

Retweeting @amber_rae amazing social media presentation @andyangelos http://tinyurl.com/5eqmxg

The presentation by Andy Angelos, quotes the Cluetrain Manifesto:

Get out of the way so internetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets. The result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Just so a leap of logic isn’t necessary because I’ve found sometimes I make connections that others in my industry don’t:

Get out of the way so internetworked journalists can converse directly with internetworked people formerly known as the audience. The result will be a new kind of journalism. And it will be the most exciting journalism that we have ever engaged in.

That’s the lesson that I’ve learned from my trip. Discuss.

Sorry for the blogging silence here on Strange Attractor, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m currently driving across the US covering the elections. One of the things that Emily Bell at the Guardian wanted me to do was to meet up with bloggers and other social media folks on the trip, and I’ve managed to meet up with bloggers in LA, Denver and tonight a great meet-up with the Social Media Cafe crowd in Columbus Ohio. Thanks to Tim Eby of WOSU for the invitation. I met Tim and Robert Patterson in London a couple of years.

I came in a little late, but there was already a discussion about local community blogging project Ganther’s Place. People who live in the neighbourhood were using the blog to name and shame absentee landlords. They also mentioned how the blog was helping to gain the attention of traditional media to cover their concerns.

After that, Robert, Andy Carvin, who heads up the social media desk at NPR, and Anna Shoup also of NPR joined the meet-up through the magic of Skype. Andy talked about a project to monitor voting during the elections. They will use Twitter and SMS with the hashtag votereport to collect reports on voting, now during early voting and all the way through election day next week. You can already follow some early Twitter reports via Summize of Dwigger.

Robert has an absolutely fascinating project with the public broadcaster in St Louis. They are using social media to help people either facing foreclosure or falling behind in their housing payments to keep their homes. The entire focus of the project is to help people help themselves but giving them information about resources in the city. It’s about fostering community even as the fabric of the community is under strain from the housing crisis, and it’s about people finding ways to help themselves. Robert’s overall message was the potential of social media to renew community bonds and give people the tools for self-reliance.

I gave a quick overview of my social media efforts during the road trip. Twitter helped me arrange the blogger meet-up in LA. Twitter also helped me to cover the rise of homelessness during this housing crisis. I talked about how Ralph Torres in California contacted me because of the blog and gave me a foreclosure tour of Riverside California.

I also gave a quick overview of some of the technology that I’m using on this trip. I showed off Twibble, the Twitter client that I’m using on my Nokia N82. I also showed the Twitpic and geo-tagging features of Twibble. I’ll be writing more about all of this once the trip is over.

Thanks again to the folks at Social Media Cafe Columbus for the warm welcome. I’ll see you on Twitter.

Social media: use/challenge
Works for an accountancy company, which always sounds really boring. There’s a process mentality, things have to work with the way someone does stuff. Met Euan Semple a few years ago and he was talking about social media, but Andrew didn’t really quite see it. Put it to the side and about six months later, and it dawned on him was that they could do more. Was like the people who was trying to convince others to try new things. Euan set him on this road.

People at company are all worker bees, they want to do things, they don’t want to think about things and work out how things might be done. So have to get their teams working with whatever’s been put in place. So regardless of the fact that blogs and wikis are strange words and odd to say, eventually find out that the word ‘blog’ has become acceptable, ‘wiki’ maybe not so much.

How do we start working with them. Have to capture the imagination within the partnership and to use people who have a perspective. It’s not always the man at the top, could be anyone. Capture their interest and sponsorship and help their people do things. Point is that you can’t do everything for everyone. To do everything you have to go into mainstream IT, and IT is all about security and authentication. To do anything you have to be thoughtful about where you’re doing to do it. Look at points that are flowering.

Tax is one area - it depends upon information being passed quickly around the business, so that they can get an advantage from that knowledge. Soon as it’s public domain then it loses value. Big debate about competition and change, and where the Big Four are going to be, and where the second tier companies are going to be. BDO wants to be able to be apart fro the Big Four, and figuring this out is something social media can do.

In tax area, Daniel Dover, had written series of books to bring tax to life. Had an idea he wanted to do a series of movies. Marketing team were not keen on it. But he carried on and they took his idea, managed to find the money to do a YouTube channel, not a full one because that’s expensive. So started to do video and put that up.

Convinced CEO that blogs are a good way to converse with journalists, audience, all sorts of people. Had something to say and had a good style to say it with. Because of external blog, now have internal blogs too.

How to respond to generational studies, looking at the graduates coming in. Even if you’re 21, though, many of them still have the minds of a 40 year old, they don’t automatically use all the tools. But Facebook is cross-generational. Students coming in had misrepresented the acronym BDO (humorously).

HR Director things that Facebook is about dating; IT thinks that if someone wants to block it, they’ll block it; business leaders don’t know what to do - but normal business rules apply, if someone’s not working they’re not working.

Got to point with Facebook where it becomes intrinsic. Stop Facebook, then you also have to stop phone, email, text…. There is no work/life balance, there’s just life. It’s not fun is fun, work is work, there are elements of fun in work. And CEO said, “Myself, I prefer to trust people”. Write a policy about fair, sensible use. If they want to abuse that, then you have the management ability to do something so why do you need to put an electronic filter in there saying “Don’t do this”. You don’t recruit lazy, stupid people; you recruit smart people who are the leaders of the future, you don’t stop them networking.

Values of the business underpin all that. Have a Facebook group now.

People want to do stuff. Bought an island in Second Life. Wasn’t about the PR side of things, early adopters were all already there, so their entering Second Life wasn’t a story. They wanted to do something, wanted to tie that in to everything else. Have to take a view that thinks about how we look at 3D worlds and virtual solutions, and SL seemed ready made to do that.

Took the tax movie from YouTube and then carried out a session, invited tax clients to SL and premier the movie in SL. Bring a little imagination and play into what BDO is about. If we say we are entrepreneurial, different, then that’s an easy way to show it.

The idea is to take that island and rent it out to member firms. They wouldn’t have thought of that and you can give value back to them by doing it.

How do we do this? Imagination. It’s important to be yourself and to be imaginative. Support form the top. Recruit creatively.

Online brand reputation management
Why should businesses monitor the web? People say happy and sad things. Consumers are out there talking, blogging, it’s not just word of mouth, it’s much more pervasive - blogs go much further out. Need to commit time and resources to doing this because search results are your company brochure. People see negative messages via Google, don’t even need to go to the website.

Search results for Starbucks, Dell and Land Rover Discovery - lots of negative sites. People search, and often confronted with negative messages and it’s important that businesses know what’s going on.

Was searching for a Starbucks logo, found one in Google Images but it was linked to from a page called “witchcraft and abortion” - not a great association!

Consumerist, shows a lot of negative news or issues. Important to know what’s going on, either to manage expectations and explain what’s going on, or to learn what you need to change.

What should you be monitoring? Lots of stuff going on - websites like Consumerist, ComplaintsBoard, PissedConsumer - which is a lot of competitor-bashing, rather than real consumer issues. Also blogs, Digg, Reddit, etc.

Need to look not just at your companies, but at your key people. Set up alerts.

Example, headline about a guy called Paul Polman from Nestle was poached by Unilever. So did a search on him, found a lot of negative stuff about Nestle, as opposed to Paul, which comes up very highly in search. Digg also has every negative links on it, as does Reddit. Reddit is used, in the US at least, by very politically active people they tend to be more willing to act.

Have to be aware of what’s out there and make a decision on whether to engage. On Reddit, would never engage them because they are crazy and the negativity would mushroom. But need to know where stuff comes from.

This isn’t about panicking and being worried, but be aware.

Use something like Bloglines, or can create Google and Yahoo email alerts. Use shortcuts to quickly monitor, so bookmark a search. Use RSS to manage into. Maybe hire a professional firm if you’re a large corp with a big problem, and make sure that they can show you what they’ve done before. Don’t just use a PR company who think they can do this.

Use misspellings, associated phrases.

Do your PR in a way that it can be instantly repackaged without having to reword it, so put in your links, make sure that the link phrases are relevant, don’t make it look too corporate. Use that to get linked into your sites and push bad stuff down. Make sure that when you need to you can squish that negative message below the fold or onto the second page.

Link press releases with website pages dedicated to the news but use different copy. If you want news to get out, use different copy on your website to the news sites so that it will show up.

Don’t undervalue your company’s achievements. Talk about what you’re doing, press release it. Someone will pick it up - don’t be shy about talking about your achievements. Newswire helps you get stuff out. But do not use more than one service - journalists see that as spamming. Do not spam journalists. Use one service, target your press release carefully.

Corporate blogging, if you’re going to blog as a business, make sure that the voice is still authentic. People won’t read your press releases on a blog. Don’t turn off comments. Make sure you’re talking to people, be involved. Don’t engage trolls, if negative feedback appears, don’t delete it, check and see if you need to respond, don’t get into an argument in a public forum, unless you need to counteract negative information but avoid emotive language.

It is possible for a CEO to blog, but their time is usually limited to consider making it part of a larger project where more than one person is blogging - share the load amongst many people to get a better readership - different voices will attract different people and the people who are blogging will enjoy it more. Example, McAfee CEO uses a personal voice and only blogs when there is something to say - sometimes months between posts. Uses first person, his own personal story.

Moo is a great example - follow overheard@Moo on twitter and it’s hilarious and gives you a feeling of being closer to the people in the office, e.g. when they had too many pies (they were pied out!). It was lovely to be engaged at that level even though I don’t work there.

Feature your bloggers (like IBM) - don’t be afraid of exposing your bloggers to external people.

Are laws now that say it is illegal for businesses pretend to be someone you aren’t.

Suw and I talk about the US elections over breakfast all of the time, and I realised since I came back to Washington last week that despite having very little interest in politics when I first came to Washington DC ten years ago, my geekiness has now spilled over into politics. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had about politics and the economy with a range of people since I came back. Suw was asking questions that I’m sure on the on the mind of many Guardian readers, and instead of letting these conversations disappear, I realised that I wanted to capture and share those conversations.

We recorded this conversation this morning over Skype. She was sitting in our flat in London, and I was sitting in my hotel here in Washington. We used the Skype Call Recorder from Ecamm (a bank breaker at US$14.95), but if you use a PC, Pamela will do the same things plus can automatically handle uploads to FTP servers and auto posting to several blog services. I used Pamela to record broadcast quality interviews when I was at the BBC. If you use a nice broadcast quality mic such as the Snowball from Blue (a lovely wedding present that Suw and I received from our friend Vince), the sound quality is stunning. We simply used the mics on our MacBooks. The Call Recorder software has a side-by-side split screen option so we didn’t have to do anything to edit the video apart from top and tail it (edit out our pre-call and post-call chatter). In the end, it took very little production time apart from the time for the call. Viddler, the site we used to host this doesn’t like stereo audio so I had to merge the channels, but QuickTime Pro handled that with ease.

That’s the technical side of things. Technology is simply a means to a journalistic end for me, and the real aim is to expand my little experiment to anyone with a Skype connection, a webcam and a question about the US elections. Sure, I love talking to Suw about anything and everything, and she wants to talk after the vice presidential debate next week between Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Republican nominee Sarah Palin. I want to use this to open up a discussion with as many people as possible about the US election, around the US and around the world. I’d also like to see how feasible this is on the road. After next Thursday, I’ll be traveling across the US. The technical challenges are pretty minor, especially compared to previous election trips that I’ve taken. The real measure of success for this and many other journalistic experiments I have planned for the next month is the depth and breadth of the conversation. If you’d like to take part, drop me an email or leave a comment. Let’s talk. There are lots of important issues on the table, and I’m so excited about how technology opens up new possibilities for civic dialogue.

Last month, Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera asked what would be the most important things to include if one was building a news website from scratch. It kicked off a great conversation, largely via Twitter. I think it’s a question that more people are asking as we are open to more radical ideas to support journalism as the print business model comes under increasing pressure.

I collected some of the responses and added some of my own, but I wanted to flag up this response from Mads Kristensen in Denmark. He recast the question in terms not of building a news site but rather a media site “since the news business is so over-commoditized by now that it’s arguable if there’s any strategic advantage in looking just at news”. Some journalists might wince at that statement, but there is a lot of truth in it. We really need to ask some hard questions about what is our unique selling point. What information, analysis or entertainment are we providing that one else does?

Mads asks a question that is increasingly on my mind:

So to my mind this is more an idea of how to redefine media as such without the legacy of the old media companies. So what would I do?

I really am beginning to think that the ideas that will redefine media, news and information in a digital age will not come from legacy companies. They are in the awkward position of trying to build a new business to support the old, and I increasingly think that two motivations are mutually exclusive.

Mars’ vision is very customer oriented, which is not a view that one would hear in most news rooms. The question is what do our readers want to read or viewers want to see but rather what do we think they need to read an see. Mars believes:

Yes, I would act a lot more according to the stated needs of the community rather to what I myself would find important. I realize that’s against pretty much every journalistic principle in the book, but ultimately I think that’s one of the reasons why media companies struggle to stay relevant. And at the end of the day I would rather stay relevant and in business.

It’s sad to think that it would be considered against ‘every journalistic principle in the book’ to think this way. Every time I express that view, I’m accused of wanting to pander to the audience. I beg to differ. Journalists who don’t know want their communities want are both out of touch and these days soon to find themselves out of a job, and only a journalist in touch with their community knows what they really need to know.

Steve Yelvington is one of my heroes. Last summer, we swapped stories over beer in Kuala Lumpur with Peter Ong after talking citizen media at an IFRA Asia workshop. Steve told me how he wrote a newsreader for the Atari ST in 1985 and how he got the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newsroom on the internet in 1993.

Now, Steve should be everyone’s hero. He’s working on a next-generation news site management system, and he and the folks at Morris Digital Works have pledged to release the code under the open-source GPL licence. Steve describes the design ethos of the system:

When we’re done, this will be an innovation platform, not just a content publishing and community platform. …

Open tools and open platforms are great for developers, but what we really want to do is place this kind of power directly in the hands of content producers. They won’t have to know a programming language, or how databases work, or even HTML to create special presentations based on database queries. Need a new XML feed? Point and click.

It’s based on the open-source Drupal platform, and he talks what is possible with the system.

We’re integrating a lot more social-networking functionality, which we think is an important tool for addressing the “low frequency” problem that most news sites face.

We’re going to be aggressive aggregators, pulling in RSS feeds from every community resource we can find, and giving our users the ability to vote the results up/down. We’ll link heavily to all the sources, including “competitors.”

Ranking/rating, commenting, and RSS feeds will be ubiquitous. Users of Twitter, Pownce and Friendfeed will be able to follow topics of interest.

I couldn’t agree with Steve more when he says that internet start-ups have been smart in adopting open-source tools while newspapers have failed to embrace them. That thinking has to change. Steve is looking for collaborators on the project, and I think this is a golden opportunity for news sites to work together to build a platform for their future.

I didn’t ask this question, although I think about it quite frequently. Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media with Al Jazeera, posed the question on Twitter:

Twitterverse : If you were building a news website from ground up what would be the most important things to include?

It’s a good question, a pressing question. I think that there will be a site with related services that radically disrupts the news industry. Last month, I wrote a post that asked the question of what had prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age. Steve Yelvington, who has great depth of experience in journalism, digital or otherwise, left a left a great comment and concluded:

This ain’t just another channel. The new players, coming into the game without any frame of reference other than what’s right in front of them, are much more able to recognize that than those of us from legacy media.

What would you do with a blank tablet? What would you do without the legacy business? What do you think would be most important in launching not just a news website but a digital news service with no baggage?

Mohamed started thinking about three guiding principles for visitors: Relevance, discoveribility and depth, and Robin Hamman, of Headshift, suggested wrapping all of this in a social media layer. Lars Plougmann, also with Headshift, suggested “syndication, participation, embeddable content, bridges to the flow on the web, mobile access”.

Mandy De Waal, editor of MoneyWebLife, had several interesting ideas.

1. Story tracking tool - which stories most popular, searched for etc ala Google, live chat with newsroom at certain times.
2. Satire… satire… satire! A section showing people how to easily become vloggers, Thought Leader type guest columns, polls.
3. Live feed of the newsroom in action - (but not close enough to see what they are writing about
4. Ticker tape of hyper links showing breaking story - this could be a new form or type of content aggregations.

I re-tweeted Mohamed’s question and got some great responses. John Thompson, of journalism.co.uk says: “Automatic semantic tagging, related links, user-customisable RSS, SEO friendly URLs, Apture-style auto linking, good comments system”.

Paul Bradshaw, Senior Lecturer in Online Journalism and Magazines at Birmingham City University and the man behind the Online Journalism Blog, also had a number of good ideas:

1. RSS at every juncture - automating all activity so it’s publishable: bookmarking, twittering, blogging, email, browsing.
2. pingback in all external linking. I’d also move away from one big powerhouse towards a network of little niches.
3. and I’d set it up so journalists got alerts or digests when people comment on their stories, with time set aside for response

On the last point, I think that commenting systems should have RSS. With Movable Type, I occasionally use CoComment to follow the conversations that I participate in.

Revenue

And I think Craig McGinty has an excellent bit of advice: “Be as creative in making it pay as editorially.”

We all realise that the business model for newspapers is broken - especially in the United States - and it’s time to consider revenue models and multiple revenue streams. This would be especially critical for an all digital news service. The cost basis of a digital news service could be much lower than a newspaper or broadcast outlet, but the reality is that the revenue is also lower for digital right now.

Businesses need to look at new revenue streams. PaidContent (recently acquired by the folks who pay my wage) has built a successful business not simply by focusing on the digital content vertical but also by building a successful events business. I don’t think the business conferences are the only events-based businesses that content companies could sponsor. And events aren’t the only new revenue stream that a digital business should develop.

Cost basis

Legacy media companies haven’t taken advantage of the disruptive economics of digital technologies. I see a lot of newspaper companies getting into video, but instead of using low-cost digital technologies, they are chasing television and buying high-cost broadcast technology.

Smart companies are leveraging open-source technologies, but many companies suffer from ‘not made here’ syndrome, delivering projects over-budget and behind schedule.

The digital project would also start with a much leaner staff. Jeff Jarvis had this suggestion on the Guardian’s media blog:

But on my blog, I took a hypothetical newsroom staff of 100 as a round number, then cut by 30% - not draconian by today’s precedents - and asked what the priorities should be when the cutbacks come. In my hypothetical newsroom, reporting is the highest priority. The more original journalism that is done, the higher the value of the paper and its web service, the better the opportunity to stand out in links and search. Breaking news is worthwhile, but I come down heavily on the side of beat reporting: journalists who are devoted to watchdogging an area.

The Social Layer

I agree with Robin. The successful site would have a social media layer. The site has to have attention data (most viewed, commented, linked, Dugg, etc), recommendation, rating and several levels of participation.

However, I think the social-ness of the strategy can’t stop with the technology. I think the news site of the future will also have a staff focused on building community around the content. People make technology social. Journalists connected to their communities provide more relevant content to those communities and build deeper relationships with them. Social journalists, comfortable creating social media and facilitating social interaction around that content, will be the core of disruptive digital business coming to a community near you.