Blogging

Social news site Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast’s Wired Digital division two years ago, has announced the start of a new strategy to distribute its technology around the Web. It’s partnered with the U.K.’s Independent newspaper to install Reddit technology on its Web site and encourage readers to vote up and down on the news.

While a prominent button for the Independent’s internal voting system will appear on each of the publication’s online news stories (these will show up in a few weeks), it will also accept links submitted from around the Web.

“It’s this kind of open mentality that really excited us about working with them,” co-founder Alexis Ohanian said in an e-mail.

Reddit opted to make its code open-source in June, an announcement that would presumably lead to the kinds of deals that the company announced on Thursday. It’s far smaller than rival Digg, but seems to have a clear message in place: that Reddit is about distribution, not a standalone site.

More:
Reddit goes ‘Independent,’ says more deals to come

After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That’s the company’s latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

“Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites,” a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

Reddit Bacon.

The site’s humor-inclined team referred to the site update as “somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it.” More likely, it’ll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn’t otherwise have it; Reddit’s team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast’s Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit’s open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best “custom Reddit” from scratch (i.e. fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!

Read more here:
Reddit now lets you create your own social news site

Two weeks ago I shared some online marketing/PR wisdom from GM’s social media guy, Christopher Barger. Here are a few more of his thoughts to wrap things up.

Most important social networking tools:

Chris hates Twitter (another thing we agree on!) but recognizes that it has an impact. Following the influencers in any sphere can be a great way to learn what is important there. It can help monitor what’s being written about your company, product or service, and help you pick up on which bloggers to follow.

He likes Ning, Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Facebook, and Lee LeFever’s In Plain English videos.

What matters in blogging:

• Simplicity
• Two-way dialog
• Access (provide a method for reader contact other than the comment form)
• Transparency
• Unique value
• Listening

Recommended books:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger (published in 2001, but amazingly prescient and still timely)
• Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin (I haven’t had the opportunity to read this one yet, but The Big Red Fez and Unleashing the Ideavirus are both outstanding)
• Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

Final piece of advice: learn from your kids. They’ve grown up with the Internet and developed the ability to rapidly separate what’s hot from what’s not in an environment with an unprecedented rate of technological change.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Excerpt from:
A Few More Thoughts from Christopher Barger

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah…ahem…right.

On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute’s worth of scanning.

View original here:
The Social Media Minute

The top headlines at a given time on Wednesday morning at OurSignal. Yeah, a bit short on relevant news.

(Credit: OurSignal)

On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web’s recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.

Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was “Goatse In Spore,” a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don’t Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.

The concept is kind of cool: “warm” colors mean a story is gaining momentum, and “cool” colors mean it’s fading. Bigger boxes mean more votes on a story across the Web. And it refreshes every 15 minutes, which isn’t that impressive in the real-time culture of Summize, but is still quick enough to provide a fresh take on the news.

That’s the problem: news. Social-news sites, for better or for worse, have become known for being places to find the most popular Top 10 lists and funny videos in addition to the news, and OurSignal is no exception. So if you’re looking to find the goofiest Digg and Reddit headlines in one place, this is a nice resource; but if you’re actually looking for the news, you might be out of luck. Putting a handful of social-news sites together unfortunately doesn’t do much to help the content.

I’ll stick to Google News for now, thanks.

View post:
OurSignal puts the follies of social news all in one place