Digg launched a new social news discovery function called Newswire on Monday.
Newswire “gives you the tools to shape the breaking stories on Digg,” according to the social news site’s blog. Unlike other areas on Digg, the Newswire updates news in real-time — as stories are submitted, they appear in the “Recent” section within Newswire. As they are Dugg, stories move up in the “Trending” section within Newswire.
As the company notes on its blog, the key to picking the top stories on Digg is finding them. This tool was created to help alleviate the pain of sifting through a ton of subpar content to find the diamonds. Instead, users will find the most recent submissions in “Recent” and the most popular stories in “Trending.”
Popularity is calculated “by looking at how many Diggs, Likes and Tweets [a story] has, who has Dugg it, when it was submitted, the past quality of similar stories, and a handful of other signals,” according to Digg’s blog.
The Newswire feed can be customized by focusing search results with the following pieces of information:
By “Recent” or “Trending” stories
By type of media, including images, videos or text (or all stories)
By number of Diggs (“more than” or “less than” a certain number of Diggs)
By topic, such as business, entertainment, technology, etc.
To further the transparency of how news is developing, the Newswire also features an activity feed in the right column, as well as on its own page.
This new feature could be a positive blip in Digg’s history, or it could just be another update gone unseen. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
Tumblr is out with a new way to curate its burgeoning content: a directory featuring highlighted blogs that it’s calling “Spotlight.”
The Spotlight directory comes just a few months after the introduction of Tumblr’s new “Explore” page, which replaced the old Directory with a page that organizes content by tags (you can still reach the old-school Directory at www.tumblr.com/directory).
Tumblr has been reaching out to blogs for inclusion in Spotlight over the last few weeks, and plans to add more — as well as new categories and languages — in the coming months. The site also made it easier to find the “People You Know” tool by placing it right up there next to the Spotlight tab.
This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.
Steven Rosenbaum is a curator, author, filmmaker and entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Magnify.net, a real-time video curation engine for publishers, brands, and websites. His book Curation Nation from McGrawHill Business was published this week.
The personal web publishing boom has led to an information explosion. It’s a data free-for-all, and it’s just beginning. Andrew Blau is a researcher and the co-president of Global Business Network in San Fransisco. Blau has foretold the changes in media distribution and content creation. Now he’s watching this new, historic emergence of first-person publishing.
Today, publishing tools have been set free, Blau says. Cost, ownership, and barriers to entry are all gone, almost overnight. “The ability to amplify one’s voice, to amplify that beyond the reach of what we have had, reflects a change of course in human history.” He pointed to the difficultly of sorting through the riot of voices online. What that chaos needed was curation — a way to get value out of the information flood. But the role of the curator has been a contentious one, and not everyone has been on board with the concept.
Who Gets Heard?
All big changes have unintended consequences. Blau says that the old problem — limited access to the tools to amplify speech — has been fixed by the Internet. It used to be that making and moving information was so expensive that the question of who was going to get permission to speak was a central social and political issue. But now speech is more democratic.
That development, not surprisingly, creates a new problem. “The problem is who gets heard,” Blau says. “The real issue that remains is access to an audience. Because that’s hard. Access to technology has become trivially easy for most people in the industrialized world, and increasingly easy for people in the emerging economies around the world.”
Blau is right: Speech is easy. Being heard is hard and getting even harder. Computers can’t distinguish between data and ideas or between human intellect and aggregated text and links. This lack of aesthetic intelligence in a storm of data changes the game.
Are Content Aggregators Vampires?
Okay, let’s get this part out in the open: Creators don’t like coloring inside the lines. They’re fueled by a passion to make original work. But there’s a reason why painters don’t rent a storefront, hire a staff clad in black clothing, and throw endless cocktail parties with white wine and fancy hors d’oeuvres. That’s called a gallery, and a gallery owner is a curator. These are the people who enjoy the process of choosing what to hang, how to price it, and how to make sure painters have enough income to pay the rent and buy more paint and canvas. Hopefully.
The web doesn’t work that way. At least not yet. The folks who run the online galleries — the curators — aren’t asking permission or giving a revenue share, which means that content creators need to get comfortable with the idea that in the new world of the link economy, curating and creating aren’t mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: Seth Godin. He is one of the web’s best-known marketing wizards. He’s a speaker, author, website owner and entrepreneur. And he says that content creators can’t ignore curation any longer.
“We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage,” Godin said. “There’s always someone who’s going to supply you with information that you’re going to curate. The Guggenheim doesn’t have a shortage of art. They don’t pay you to hang paintings for a show — in fact you have to pay for the insurance. Why? Because the Guggenheim is doing a service to the person who’s in the museum and the artist who’s being displayed.”
As Godin sees it, power is shifting from content makers to content curators: “If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.”
This change is leaving folks who used to control distribution with less power to dictate terms. One of those folks is Mark Cuban. Cuban is a content creator. Or, more accurately, he owns assets that create branded content. He owns the Dallas Mavericks. He owns Magnolia Pictures. He owns HDNet. And he’s got a stake in a whole bunch of other stuff.
“The content aggregators are vampires!” said the always colorful Cuban. “Don’t let them suck your blood.” Cuban points to sites like Google News and The Huffington Post as the most aggressive content criminals. He tends to see no value in folks who gather, organize, summarize, or republish. He only finds value in content creation: “Vampires take but don’t give anything back.”
Not surprisingly, Godin wrinkles his nose at Cuban’s vampire metaphor. Simply put, he says it’s all wrong. “When a vampire sucks your blood, you make new blood,” Godin says. “The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There’s an exception for business information and super-timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win. I’m not talking about plagiarism; I’m talking about the difference between obscurity and piracy. If the taking is so whole that the original is worth nothing … that’s a problem.”
Robert Scoble also disagreed with Cuban’s horror-movie metaphor. “That’s ridiculous. Cuban is fun to argue with, but it’s ridiculous. I mean come on, The New York Times is an aggregator of a thousand people’s work. More than that if you include letters to the editor, opinions, and guest posts and contracted posts and contracted articles. The New York Times has been doing aggregation for a hundred years. To say that’s a vampire is just totally ridiculous.”
The Billion Dollar Opportunity
Scoble has declared curation as the next “billion dollar” opportunity and wonders aloud as to whether he should “create or curate” as tech news breaks in Silicon Valley. Scoble says a curator is “an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.”
“I used to drink from the real-time fire hose, because on the social web, everything was about real time,” says Brian Solis, author of Engage. “Then I realized over the years that it’s actually more about right time than real time. In fact, when information comes through, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the right time to engage, capture it, and share it. I’m more successful now creating a list of information, relevant information, and then repackaging, repurposing, and broadcasting that information at the right time.”
Getting people to pay attention to you — by following, friending, linking, or otherwise engaging — will have real economic value, says communications consultant and author Chris Brogan. “Attention is a currency, just like many others. We understand time and money as two interchangeable things. But attention is just as much something that needs to be arbitraged and disconnected from a 1:1 value. Said another way, ‘Attention costs me time and time is worth money, so attention by extension is worth money.’ ”
Conclusion
Data will be created with staggering speed, and systems will need to evolve to find, gather, and package data so that you can get what you need, when you need it, in coherent and useful bundles.
Curation taps the vast, agile, engaged human power of the web. It finds signal in the noise. And it’s most certainly going to unleash a new army of web editors armed with emerging curation tools.
Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
Thanks to the very generous folks at Sling Media I have another Slingbox PRO-HD unit to give away to a lucky reader of my blog. To be entered into the drawing, just leave one comment on this post with your full name and a valid email address and I’ll pick one lucky winner at random on June 30th. You must…
Steve Jobs: You Need To Allow The QuickTime Plugin To Support Fullscreen Video
For as far back as I can remember, nearly every video clip on the web has given the viewer the option of deciding if they want to do fullscreen and have the video fill their monitor. This option has been considered the norm in the industry for many, many years, yet for some reason, Apple does not allow videos played… Read more…
Internet Video Distribution Will Not Displace Cable TV: “Cord Cutting” Is Hype
I know I am not the only one who thinks there is way too much hype within some segments of the online video industry and none more than the subject of “cord cutting”. Far too many writers, bloggers and analysts are preaching about consumers dropping their cable service in favor of getting video content from the Internet when in reality,…
Which World Cup Fans Are the Most Passionate? Facebook Knows
On June 11 the world will be united by football — or as we Americans call it, soccer — when the 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in South Africa. The once-in-every-four-years competition has the the tendency to elicit extreme emotions from players and fans alike. This year Facebook will track the latter with its Goal! Leaderboard application.
The application — which was commissioned by FacebookFacebook and built by tech platform Involver — is a ranking of World Cup competitors based on fan passion.
Football fans can show their team/country love with a “Like” and use the sharing power of the 400 million-member social network to spread the word.
The leaderboard is available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese, and countries listed link to their respective Facebook page. Facebook is using each country’s total number of “Likes” and dividing it by its InternetInternet population to calculate a “Passion Index.” Teams are then ranked by their index score, though application users can also filter by other factors like popularity or region.
Goal! Leaderboard is simple, but it has already created a frenzy among football fans across the world, and the most popular countries are getting hundreds of thousands of “Likes.”
As it stands, Italy is the most popular country with 368,760 “Likes,” but the Chilean team has the highest Passion Index when compared with each of other 31 competing countries.
Who are your kids friending on Facebook? What are they really texting to their classmates? How much online time is too much?
Too often, parents who are misinformed about the social web (willfully or otherwise) will shut their kids out of it completely, only to find they are logging in anyway. If you’re not taking an active role in your child’s online life, you may be missing important opportunities to ensure they are on the path toward “digital citizenship,” and protected from inappropriate content and people.
To help shrink the tech-culture divide between parents and their kids, we sought advice from the experts, who draw not only from their own research, but their family experiences as well. Keep reading for some valuable wisdom on raising the first fully digital generation.
Take an Active Role, and Do Your Homework
For kids, social media can no longer be dismissed as a time-waster or distraction. The networks your kids use to rate their friends and comment on photos will eventually become their core business tools and career prerequisites. Those who don’t learn to use them responsibly will face a severe disadvantage.
So how do you grant kids the freedom to explore while still keeping an eye on their safety? Start by educating yourself.
“Parents can’t just decide to keep their kids at a distance from all of this. There’s no way to opt out,” said Melissa Rayworth, a freelance writer who tackles parenting and digital issues for the Associated Press, Babble.com and other media outlets. “Parents need to learn about the sites and devices their kids want to use, and then set strong boundaries. If you don’t know what something is or what it’s about, dive in and start using it.”
“If [parents] engage and have their own experiences on FacebookFacebook, LinkedInLinkedIn, [etc.], they will better understand the attraction, the possibilities, and the issues that their teenagers face,” said Sue Blaney, author, speaker, and teen parenting blogger at PleaseStopTheRollercoaster.com.
One important step, especially when it comes to younger children, is to set up their social media accounts with them.
“Parents should guide their teens through the privacy settings on Facebook and all other social networks on which they participate,” said Blaney. “Make no assumptions here. Instead, invest the time so you can make informed and considered choices about privacy.”
Being a part of the sign-up process from day one will establish you as the gatekeeper of social media, and not a barrier for your kids to inevitably circumvent. You can become part of their online life while learning the ropes yourself.
“Have your teenager show you around the web. Be a ‘curious tourist’ in your teen’s digital world,” Blaney continued. “Ask your son to show you his favorite games, or ask your daughter to share her favorite sites, videos or activities. This can be a pleasant way to engage with your teenager and to learn from her.”
Safety and Privacy
Safety and privacy are probably the two biggest concerns of parents when it comes to social media. While there are some software and profile setting solutions, your greatest asset here is likely education.
“[Kids] need to understand the differences between private sites and those that are completely open to the public and leave them vulnerable,” said Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, who authors the Momania parenting blog for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And if they can’t tell the difference, then they need to be taught to stay off of questionable services.”
Because social media has become such an integral part of our daily lives, the time has come to merge “online” and “real-world” pursuits of common sense into one educational package for kids.
“We need to teach them as they grow up that ’stranger danger’ exists in the virtual world, as well as the real one — whether it’s the weirdo in our local park or a weirdo following you on FoursquareFoursquare,” said Giarrusso. “We also need to constantly be hitting home, ‘think before you act online.’ The repercussions can stay with you and be devastating.”
Kids may not always be up for a boring web safety lecture from mom and dad, but there are some more “edutaining” resources out there, like this PSA clip from the popular Disney Channel cartoon Phineas and Ferb. One overarching tenet kids should take away here is, if you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it online.
Fortunately for parents of younger children, many of the brands that seek to engage them online, do so via kid-only games and networks that are a far cry from the content free-for-alls that abound on sites like TwitterTwitter. Rather, these networks have built-in safeguards that will put most parents at ease. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should set kids adrift and walk away from the screen.
“Many social media sites for young kids only let them post pre-approved phrases, so they can’t divulge personal info, and no one posing as a kid can say anything inappropriate,” said Rayworth. “But at some sites you need to turn those controls on, so definitely explore any site your child wants to use.”
When Giarrusso discovered her five-year-old son had signed up for the Cartoon Network’s online multiplayer game FusionFall, she not only sat down with him to explore the site, but reached out to the game’s administrators to get the scoop on the safety features. She turned her conversation with the game’s executive producer into a blog post so other parents could benefit from her investigation.
While most parents won’t need to go quite so in-depth, making contact with a real person at the other end of a kids-only social network is never a bad idea.
Rayworth also notes that online safety concerns don’t stop at inappropriate content or strangers. There’s also the potential for invasive marketing.
“So many kids’ products now have a social networking component to their site. A few months back my son went to the Hot Wheels site and he had the option of spending time on the site logging which cars he has, and talking to other kids about them,” she explained. “Things like this are potentially a lot of fun, but you have to keep in mind that your child is being advertised at the whole time … I think it’s really vital to limit that.”
Teens can face a whole new set of safety and privacy challenges on the larger networks, most of which are open to everyone, and are far more public.
“In terms of safety for older kids, every expert I’ve spoken with says, ‘don’t let them have a computer in their room,’” Rayworth noted. “Keeping it in a common space gives you more access to what they’re doing, and a clearer idea how much time they’re spending online. Kids may also make better decisions if they know mom and dad are nearby and can see the screen.
“The complicated thing is figuring out how far you want to go in the name of safety,” Rayworth added. “Some parents aren’t comfortable reading their teenager’s texts or accessing their Facebook messages. Others think it’s important. One option with Facebook is telling your kids that they must friend you … but agreeing that you won’t be posting on their wall or commenting on their posts. Agree to just stay in the background.”
The Fine Line Between Participating and Spying
While it’s important to take an active role in your child’s online life, there are personal boundaries that should be respected and adjusted based on the child’s age, maturity, and earned trust. While public posts on a social network may be fair game, things like e-mail messages and passwords could be considered an important threshold of maturity.
“Parents have a right to have their kids’ passwords, particularly younger teens,” said Blaney. “When teens get into the upper levels of high school, different rules may make sense for teens who prove themselves to be trustworthy.”
Remember, social networks are just that — social. They tend to be an extension of what kids do and say in their “physical” social circles — much of which is not intended for parental consumption.
“During the teen years, they often experiment with various personas. Am I like Britney? Am I like my older cousin Jamie? A teen may change her look, her friends, [and] her activities during this natural and important exploration process,” said Blaney. “It makes sense that some of this experimentation will take place over and through the communication channels that they utilize, including texting and social networks.”
If you’re intruding on your teen’s personal online space, she’s likely to take it underground. Remember, she’ll always be one step ahead of you technologically, so it’s unlikely you’ll win that race. If you’re willing to give up having passwords, you should trust that simply being a part of her online community (from day one, if possible) will be enough to ensure good behavior.
“Be a presence on your teen’s online profile, but in the background,” said Blaney. “Some parents like to post on their kids’ Facebook pages, but that isn’t necessary to do an effective job of monitoring (and may be a real turn-off to your teenager). Often, just letting your teen know that you look regularly is enough.”
Setting Limits Without Being a Luddite
As with any digital pastime, too much social media use can become a distraction, especially for kids. Yet locking them out of the social web (either partially or entirely) would be doing them an educational and cultural disservice. The key is to find balance.
“It’s stunning how many hours per day kids spend with some kind of screen,” said Rayworth. “I think if most families step back and really do the math, they’ll find a lot of consumption even among little kids. One option is requiring that for every hour your kid spends online … they then spend an hour doing non-screen things and hanging out with live people in person. That can be eye-opening.”
“Technology is changing the landscape, the demands, and the context for [children’s] educational experiences,” said Blaney. “Again, without a real understanding and appreciation for how technology is being used and the fundamental impact that it has on their child’s future, parents run the risk of being a hindrance in their teen’s education.”
Be fair but firm, and have a good understanding of the technologies to know when it’s becoming too much.
Good Parenting? There’s No App for That
When we originally set out to explore the issues surrounding kids and social media safety, we were in search of software or network settings that could automatically filter inappropriate content. What we quickly learned from these interviews was that the challenges for parents are far more nuanced, and solving them takes work.
“Much like driving a car or going off to college, parents have to hope that they have instilled good values and have taught their kids enough to handle situations they will encounter on social media,” said Giarrusso.
There will always be a technology and culture divide between parents and children. But with a little extra effort, perhaps it doesn’t always have to be so big.
Location-sharing service Gowalla has just revamped its website and expanded its Trips feature. The Foursquare competitor is launching the new feature set with two big business partners — National Geographic and The Washington Post — who have produced their own collection of Trips with hand-picked destinations.
The National Geographic-branded GowallaGowalla Trips include 15 walking tours to explore destinations like the Seine in Paris, the Avenue of the Arts in Philadelphia and San Diego’s Balboa Park.
The Washington Post has curated its own adventures. Its trips are designed to help travelers discover attractions and explore Washington, D.C.
These trips are in-depth exploratory missions that include destination descriptions, maps, editorial commentary and photographs. They also parallel what FoursquareFoursquare is trying with its branded city adventure quests for badges.
Gowalla’s Trips feature gives any user or business the ability to create their own expeditions and emulate the trip style of National Geographic or The Washington Post. Plus, users who complete trips earn a digital pin (similar to badges) as a keepsake for their Gowalla Passports.
Gowalla users can also now add descriptions to Spots (places) in Trips. These descriptions are permanently associated with the location and remind us of venue tips on Foursquare.
The souped-up Trips functionality make Gowalla exponentially more interesting as an adventure guide. We can immediately see the potential of this new addition with the experience and information-rich trips created by National Geographic and The Washington Post.
Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out 
Thanks to the very generous folks at Sling Media I have another Slingbox PRO-HD unit to give away to a lucky reader of my blog. To be entered into the drawing, just leave one comment on this post with your full name and a valid email address and I’ll pick one lucky winner at random on June 30th. You must…
On June 11 the world will be united by football — or as we Americans call it, soccer — when the 2010 FIFA 
Who are your kids friending on 
Location-sharing service 