Sites we rate

Not just the usual social media suspects. Plus the reasons why!

Q: What makes these sites exemplarary social media phenomena as far as we're concerned?

A: Each one preaches, supports or exemplifies our ur-social media model: news, community, inter-site relationships.

But,there are some surprises in here. If you're expecting a roll-call of the usual suspects;blogs and flickrs, digs, reddits and blowhos, then you'll be disappointed.
Isn't it too early to be getting anal about exclusive taxonomies for social media?

Shouldn't we be painstakingly empirical instead and try to figure out exactly what works what doesn’t work and save the big generalisations till we're clearer about what's really happenning?

All the following sites are important, special and web friendly things, but in each case there's something different and singular going on.

What does this mean?

Well, many of the sites listed here certainly wouldn’t consider themselves blogs.

So, what makes a non-blog a social media phenomenon?

Lets take Digital Photography Review as an example.
Unlike a blog, it's not a diary and it's not presented as the work of an individual, nor is it brnaded in any way as a personal phenomena. Also, unlike a blog, it has full length product reviews.

However, just like a blog, the content appears in chronological order, in a single column.
Much of it is 'linkbloggy' and is drawn from sources driven by press releases and its own community.

On the other hand, church of the customer, which is a blog, treat rest of blogosphere as it's community, whereas youtube is so closely connected to myspace, that to separate the two is to misunderstand what's going on there.

Q. So what makes these sites exemplarary social media phenomena as far as we're concerned?

A: Each one preaches, supports or exemplifies our ur-social media model: news, community, inter-site relationships.

More than that, one cannot say - the time for theory is not yet come.

Digital Photography Review
Probably the best example of a specialist news driven community site in the whole consumer electronics marketplace, in this case, the 'news' is an 'in-house reviews and commented press releases' model, but am I dreaming, or is this seemingly random 'differentiation of approach' yet another example of the proof that neither these guys, nor Engadget, nor Gizmodo, really know how what they are doing actually works?

Drudgereport
Billions of visits, exremely bloggy, and supposedly outside the blogosphere?

TechMeme
Who needs to bother with newsreaders if you have an aggregator as good as this?

(it's so addictive that it has radically changed Scoble's blog reading model) But does it let you miss the small stuff?

RobotWisdom
Jorn Barger, the father of linkblogging, a genius, invents his own abbreviated language, still makes other linkbloggers look like they are trying too hard, but is this a blog?

Technorati
Ok, it isn't a blog, but is the home of blog search, if only they or someone else could make the whole thing feel less like wading through a quagmire.

Church of the customer
Go here to worship word of mouth marketing; we do.

Beet TV
One day everyone will have one of these.

YouTube
So much promise, such a mess, the sheer volume of incoming material makes you imagine that quanity would make up for poor sub-editorial management, but instead it makes it worse, yet another demonstration of a poor balance of human and algorithmic structure.

Motley fool
These people discovered many key features of the 'news and community integration model' but didn't take it to the next level.

TurnHere
Channel9 for places other than Microsoft.

Clearstation
One upon a time, the future was buried inside this site: it's still in there, but it's still buried.

Clickz
Why is the site which teaches you how to not be a best kept secret, still a best kept secret?

Flickr
What will this morph into as server bandwidth becomes cheap enough for people not to need to use it to save money?

Digg
Supposedly all about tagging, but really, from everyone but the taggers point of view, is it really something else altogether?

Popurls
Why bother to go to any other linkblogging/newsfilter site?

MySpace
Turning usability on its head?

No, it's just exploiting tendencies that were there all the time, tendencies which were outside the 'convenience' paradigm which blinkers today's primitive notions of usability.

SecondLife
The introductory process is so poorly structured that only a determined effort, geeky stoicism, or assistance from another user can overcome the inhibitions it produces. The fact that despite this there is already a high sign up rate is proof of the vast potential of this kind of environment, if anyone finds a way to make the thing more newbie-friendly.

The Register
These people take the tabloid headline-writer's craft seriously and apply it to technology news. They are the very epitome of "British" writing: sceptical, ironic, self-deprecating, a powerful contrast to the typically positive, breezy, literal style of most of the US technology press. They are openly dismissive of 'blogosphere' phenomena like Web 2.0, despite being a good example of how online news can punch above its weight.

News.bbc.co.uk
This site can still teach just about every other news site (in fact just about every site) a thing or two about how to lay out content, even a decade after they moved into the lead (they got Jakob Nielsen in to help them set it up). But their prominence management still has a "matrix fetish" which is as obsolete now as it was then (although the blogosphere has taken most of their competiton a few steps backward).

The Guardian (UK newspaper)
This competes with the New York Times as the most 'switched on' newspaper, they love blogs, but have no idea how to makef their content any more web friendly than anyone else (cryptic hint (1): you need to do a certain something that you do in the printed version that don't you do in the online version, even more cryptic hint (2): vice versa).

http://slashdot.org/
This is 'the swarm', the hive mind. Is Myspace the hive mindless?

If you want to see an issue have the most chance of getting a good 'ventilation' amongst a dedicated bunch of online arguers, this is the place to go. Their prominence management has a great mix of people and algorithms defining the priority but a default 'algorithmic' message board layout, which means that although they punch above their weight, they punch far below their potential.

Tailrank
Techmeme-alike augmented with search capabilities but suffering from more rudimentary prominence management.

http://www.metafilter.com/
A linkblogging community that pre-dates the 'tagging linkblogs' like Digg.

Wikipedia
Yes, they have news, community and a superb UGC knowledge acquisition process. No, they know nothing about how to integrate them.

Arts and letters Daily
An archetypal link blog that doesn't look or feel like a link-blog. They have had (for many years) something to teach us about the whole online commentation process.

Science Daily
An unbeatable free resource for science stories.

New Scientist
As the most switched on publication outside the IT press, they seem just as confused about the strategic relationship between the printed mag and the online offering as anyone else in the same business.

E-politix
A pioneer in providing a 'bloggy' news resource for politicians, why does this thing seem to exist in a world of its own?

Huffington Post
A blog?

An online newspaper?

Why did this happen after Salon made it so clear that online newspapers were not a home run?

Salon
A notorious example of perils of attempting to monetise online news after the first online advertising bubble burst. There is a relationship between print media, online news, subscriptions and advertising that seems to eludes these guys as much as it does almost everyone else (see the Huffington Post for comparison).