Mantic Media

The breakthrough of Web 2.0 was the first filter. Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. was where you went to find interesting links, filtered by (mostly) anonymous users. This was amazingly useful, but not quite as good as getting recommendations from people you know and trust.

Recently, I’ve found myself visiting these sites less and less. Not because they aren’t interesting anymore, but because a 2nd filter has popped up that’s even more useful.

Services like FriendFeed (and Twitter within that) add another layer of distillation by allowing you to track the activity of people you trust and respect.

Finding quality, relevant links just got even easier for people curious enough to take advantage of it.

Murdoch: Technology driving vast changes in media:

Unlike traditional media, choices in the future will be generated from the bottom up, not top-down,” Murdoch explained. “A 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not going to want the same news and entertainment as a 50-year-old executive in Chicago … Our challenge is to personalize the experience for these people so we can reach them both.

Well, if Digg isn’t going to implement my feature idea, it’s good to see that Mixx is going ahead with it.

Convenient that I wrote a bit about conversational marketing the other day, as Starbucks just launched a major interactive marketing campaign.

They’ve created a site where users can contribute ideas for improving Starbucks and vote on the ideas of others. It’s very well executed and seems to be getting good participation.

This isn’t a place for Starbucks to push their message. It’s a way for them to listen and draw customers into a community centered around the Starbucks experience. There is a lot of dialogue going on and a feeling of inclusion.

This is a site users could browse for an extended period, just because they’re interested in the content. It feels more like a conversation than an ad.

I’d say that’s a bit more effective than a banner or a 30 second TV spot.

So the story that has dominated Techmeme for the past 2 days is Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote from SXSW, or rather, how interviewer Sarah Lacy spectacularly ruined it.

I’ve read the bulk of the coverage and watched the video. Lacy clearly saw this as a career making event and intended to grab as much of the spotlight as possible.

She got a lot more of it than she bargained for. The real story here is the geek storm that erupted, in the audience, on blogs, Twitter, and now Digg. I’d feel bad for Lacy if this wasn’t good for her career. In two weeks few will care about the over blown debacle, but many will remember the attractive dark haired reporter who was all over the web.

Is this the future of media? Displease the audience and get booed off the stage in a Digg-style riot?

I hope not, or at least that these occurrences are rare. Because in the hurricane of Sarah Lacy bashing only a few have bothered to analyze the words of Zuck.

As GigaOm shrewdly points out, Zuck’s isn’t concerned with money or Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. They’re all about the vision at FB. This leads others to suggest that FB needs a pro CEO.

Wrong, but nice try. When considering what Zuck says it’s just as important to consider who he’s saying it to. SXSW is an audience of users and developers. These people are interested in the ideal of Facebook and most of all in development of the user experience.

They are not investors, concerned with monetization and valuation (see what Zuck says to those here), and he was right to feed them the dreamy user-topia shtick. Better to fib than risk becoming a sell out.

While FB does need an experienced exec, who’s to say that Sheryl Sandburg isn’t now pulling the strings. Zuck is crucial to the company as a media darling a la young Steve Jobs and a pre-IPO Apple. Facebook needs all the coverage it can get to maximize the eventual IPO.

Check out the lovely Lacy’s flailing post-interview interview below. She just got knocked down a peg or two.

One of the biggest weaknesses of Digg is the slowness of the promotion process. Huge news often takes many hours to reach the homepage, at which point it’s already old news. For a supposed news site this is pretty lame, but I have an idea for how it can be fixed.

Create a category called “Breaking” focused only on recent news and tweak the algo to make it much more time sensitive than the other cats. Maybe restrict submissions to only allow trusted MSM outlets and blogs be submitted. Heavily moderate it so that deserving, authentic stories are promoted to the homepage instantly.

Would this really be that hard to do? I don’t think so, and it could save Digg’s legitimacy as a place to go for timely news.