Great story in the WSJ about the buzz being generated by the top users at digg, Reddit, Newsvine, delicious, stumbleupon, and of course Netscape. The article really shows how the top users in these systems have become more than just "users," and the WSJ seems to really get that folks can be paid to do a job and not be corrupted.

Of course, when you pay people to do an editorial job you have setup a system for them to do so without compromising their ethics. We did this at Netscape by letting the Navigators blog/bookmark things they selected (i.e. unlike PayPerPost we didn't tell people what to blog about--let alone tell them it had to a be a positive result).

AOL is really doing a great job of supporting Netscape from what I can see. They haven't cut the budget, and it seems that the tech roadmap that we setup when I was there is being executed on brilliantly (it really is an amazing tech team over there!). The Netscape 9 browsers is ground breaking no many levels, and the stats from Netscape six months in are *exactly* like digg's after six months (250,000 stories and 150,000 members @ Netscape--not to shabby!).

AOL is sitting on a powerhouse with Netscape and I hope the give it a full two year runway because that's what it takes to build a community system like this. Netscape is the #1 or #2 social news system in the world and AOL owns 100% of it--that's big. CondeNast owns the #3 system with Reddit, and digg is probably gonna get snapped up by Yahoo, Google, or Newscorp I'm sure. So, AOL got essentially a free foothold in this emerging space because Jon Miller, Ted Leonsis, and Jim Bankoff made a long-term bet that is *just* starting to pay off.

I really hope Randy Falco, Ron Grant, and the new team over there let Netscape continue to grow because these systems could wind up being the core of the next generation portals.

My plan was to go to 50 Navigators with six months, and I think Netscape is at around 25. I highly encourage the team over there to get right to 50 Navigators @ $1,000 a month and then start a second program with 200 Navigators at $500 a month. This second group of Navigators who have a lower hurdle of work (say 100 stories per month baseline), but would be focused on the 30 channels. So, you would have 250 Navigators total with 6-10 on each channel. This would make the channels full and give Netscape a chance--for only $250,000 a month--to really own the broad social news space.

As the story showed digg, reddit, delicious, and Newsvine are the perfect place to look for emerging talent and pay them.

If I was CEO of StumbleUpon I would raise $10M and pay the top 250 folks $500 a month for contributing to the system. It would make the system go off the charts.

Anyway, I'm out of the social news business... although I wish I wasn't I really love what Netscape's doing and I talk to members of the team and community over there on a daily basis.

PS - The 9.0 browser is amazing!!! Great job... don't forget my News drop down menu!

Wow.

Like wow, wow.

Today's Kevin Rose announced that he is taking down the top users list at digg because of the top diggers are getting blamed by "some outlets" (I guess that would be news outlets) as the cause of manipulation on digg.

Well, truth be told if you take the negative baggage out of the world manipulate and just look at it as "to change something" it is very true that the top users change (aka manipulate) digg. The whole concept of social news/bookmarking is that users can have an impact. So, those outlets are 100% correct that the top users control much of what you see on digg, and the users are not at fault for trying to have an impact.

The problem really is that there is a perception that those users rule digg--and in fact they rule somewhere between 1/3rd and 1/2 of digg from what I can see.

Most of the top users I've talked to over the years are very, very driven by that top list. They want to climb higher, they talk about strategies to climb the rankings, they build tools to get to stories first, and they lament their inability to sustain their position when they fall.

digg motivated the top users in the system with recognition and now that digg is "at scale" they really don't need this rabid group any more. In fact, the value of a motivated top 100 and their never-ending quest to climb the rankings is not worth the negative impact and press it has on digg is what I'm hearing from Kevin. digg wants to shake the fact that the top stories are controlled by a select group of individuals and this is not the first step in that direction. Remember digg already dinged people for going direct to the permalink to vote (as opposed from the on deck circle).

This is the gift and curse of social news... your existence is based on user participation, and your existence can be destroyed by certain types of user participation (i.e. spam, payola, gaming).

Of course, since digg has an API isn't this all moot?! Won't someone create a top-user list in 10 minutes after digg shuts their list down?


I applaud Kevin for making the bold move, but I don't think this one has legs. I think the top users deserve their recognition and if Kevin is not paying them for their thousands of hours a work and year AND not paying them with recognition what's left?!

The driving forces in these system are (in order:

1. recognition
2. affiliation
3. compensation

All that digg really has left now is affiliation, and the question is will that be enough. I wish him luck.

I don't know Randy Falco or Ron Grant, but I wish them luck. The NYT says they have a long view of AOL, everything I read says AOL's is going to be cleaned up and sold.

My advice to both men: start blogging today. AOL was a very closed culture when we got there a year ago, and blogging is what really pulled the company into the Web world. There are dozens of important folks in the company having honest discussions on blogs and the best way for you two to build AOL is to embrace the culture of honesty, transparency, and debate. Blogging is the best medium for this. Take a page from Microsoft and let all your team members blog, and even pay some folks to be company bloggers. Let it all hang out, let the marketplace tell you where to go, and be open about everything--the good and the bad.

Even though I was at AOL for only a year it felt like home. ~50 members of "my team" are still rocking it out at Netscape, WeblogsInc, and Blogsmith, and I really hope the new guys recognize the amazing potential those groups have and continue to invest in them.

Weblogs, Inc. has grown into an eight figure business at AOL over the past year and I think it could be a nine figure business if they keep investing in it. Easily.

Netscape has continued to advance and grow since the bottom out in October. It takes 2-3 years to build an online community like Netscape, not three to six months. Social news is the future and Netscape is in first or second position on every important factor in that race (along with digg). To give up now would be such a wasted opportunity (especially since there are 500 folks trying to get into the top five slots right now!). I mean, Conde Nast just bought reddit--a distant 3rd or 4th to Netscape and digg.

Blogsmith is a fantastic platform that could rival TypePad and WordPress in the market place if AOL put some muscle behind it. Brian is a genius and AOL should really pull him in to the senior management team--guys like him don't wind up in big companies often.

Anyway, I've got to get back to my day job... I don't work for AOL anymore but I still spend 2-3 hours a day thinking about and talking to the folks who run those businesses. Giving them advice (solicited and unsolicited), and participating in and using those fine services and products.

Randy & Ron: If you every need any free advice on them or want to grab lunch you know how to reach me. Good luck and please take care of my babies. :-)

As we all know I'm no longer working on Netscape. So, these are my observations as someone who is no longer affiliated with the service. I've figured out exactly how you can get almost any quality story on the home page instantly.

For Netscape

1. Step One: Add the top 20-30 users on the service as friends. (Approximate time: 10 minutes). The top users are located on the home page on the bottom right.
2. Step Two: Add the Netscape sidebar on Firefox so you can follow your new friends (Approximate Time: 2 minutes)
3. Step Three: Vote for the stories of the top 30 users and place intelligent/fun comments on their stories (Approximate time: 30 minutes).
   
4. Step Four: Find a good story and submit it. Tip, try to avoid politics and news channels since they are the most crowded. (Approximate time: 5 minutes).
   
5. Step Five: Sitemail your friends the url of the story and say "check this one out!" (Approximate time: 1 minute). NOTE: Do not spam your "friends" list with sitemail or they will block you. I think maybe once or twice a month is fine. Once or twice a week might get annoying. Really depends on how your friends view you and what they think of the stories you submit. If they are good users they probably have the sidebar and are watching your activity already.
   

Total time: About an hour.


For digg:

[ I'll write this one up next. It's harder for digg obviously... but the key is of course to become friends with at least 30 people on the service by voting for and commenting on their stories. Yes, it is a popularity contest on a certain level. ]

I just added another page to the Wikipedia: social news.

Social news is obviously very different than social bookmarking, which is already in the wikipedia.

It would be great if folks could help me expand the topic.

One of the interesting things about a running a social news site is that you get an early warning system about not only breaking news, but also what people care about. Yesterday a story about Splenda from a questionable source made it to the home page. People are alarmed and the story has 36 votes and 42 comments already... our Anchors and Navigators are investigating the story.

http://health.netscape.com/story/2006/09/26/the-lethal-science-of-splenda-a-poisonous-chlorocarbon

It seems a lot of folks are really concerned about Splenda and we've mobilized dozens of folks at Netscape (users and staff) to investigate the issue.

Please go break it try it!

details here: http://tech.netscape.com/story/2006/09/26/submit-your-videos-to-netscapecom/

It's like digg + YouTube = Netscape. Very cool.

Did you notice we put the number of votes and comments on the top right of the video? :)

Solving the "giving credit" problem in social bookmarking.

One of the things that really frustrated bloggers when digg became popular was the fact that digg insisted that users link directly to stories--not the bloggers who found the stories. So, if Boingboing or Engadget found something interesting digg instructed the community to bypass those blogs and link directly to the source information.

The result? It looked like digg found the story and the people doing the hard work--the bloggers--got no credit.

The result? digg gets credit for being the place where cool things break, when in fact many of the stories are--for lack of a better term--stolen.

Now, I understand why digg came up with the rule. There were folks acting as "middle men" between good content and digg users. They would post a good story and link to their blog which provided no value. We have the same problem at Netscape today and we tell folks to not break the "middle man" rule which states that if you link to yourself you have to provide some significant value that the original source does not.

However, this doesn't solve the giving credit for finding something cool problem.

To solve this I've asked the Netscape team to add a [via WEBSITE ] link at the end of story capsules to give credit to the bloggers who work so hard to find these stories (see image above in yellow). I understand the issue because I'm on both sides of it running a blog network and a social news site.

Bloggers should be very wary of social news sites that don't respect them with the via link. If you find the story you should get some credit for it--credit where credit is due.

This feels like the best way to solve the problem. Thoughts?

Site-based mail is really taking off on Netscape.

Andy created a slick new feature that puts a temporary alert on the top page of you site (a la Flickr alerts, which I've always loved) when you get a new message. The note closes after you check the message or click the close link.

Update: My pal Sean Bonner rips on MySpace for page goosing nonsense.
Update2: Make sure you go vote this story on digg! http://digg.com/tech_news/Netscape_Adds_in_Site_Mail

A very large percentage of MySpace traffic comes from the fact that they have site mail. Many young people I talk to don't use IM any more, they use the slow and ugly version: MySpace site mail. It's crazy because doing IM on a web page is slow, requiring multiple page loads. However, there is an advantage to it: you don't need to add anyone to your IM client and you don't need to download a client.

Anyway, the people have spoken and a large percentage of them love site-based mail/IM.

We've added it to the top-level of Netscape today (we've been testing it a couple of layers down since the start).

If you go to a story page (permalink page) you will see "Send Message" next to people's names now (see images below). We have this for both the person who submitted the story and for the people who are commenting.

Also, instead of taking you to another page it pops open a nice little AJAX box so we don't waste your time. We could have made this take 3-4 pages like MySpace does, but we decided to give up the page views in exchange for the user experience. I hate the fact that MySpace makes you load 3-4 pages to get to your mail--it's so obvious that they are goosing the page views. This is always a bad idea, because those folks click through the pages super fact and never look--let alone click--on the advertisements. This makes your advertisers upset because they think your site doesn't perform. It's a horrible design philosophy.

What do you guys think? Kind of slick huh?

The WashPost did an interesting story on our Netscape Navigators who are getting paid to cool hunt for news stories.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082501308.html

The word is getting out about the first 10 Netscape Navigators (people who took "the offer" to become paid bookmarkers). You can see their photos on the right hand column at www.netscape.com.

Here are the basic details, we hired:

1. Three of the top 12 DIGG users
2. The #1 user on Newsvine
3. The #1 user on Reddit
4. We hired a bunch of folks from Weblogs, Inc. (since we know and love them :-)

It is important to note that this is all an experiment. No one knows for sure if this model of "paying people for work" us gonna work. I mean, it's crazy to think that people could be paid to do a job and do it with integrity--that's just crazy talk. :-)

Seriously, the fact is that the top 10 users on DIGG are responsible for 30% of the front page stories on DIGG. That's 3% of total front page stories each!!! Think about that for a second... the top 10 users of DIGG do 3% of the work each--that is stunning. They get paid nothing but they are responsible for 3% of the total content on the home page. Wow. Like WOW, WOW, WOW!

My hope is that the first 10 Navigators do such an amazing job that we can extend our offer out to other members of the DIGG, NEWSVINE, and REDDIT top 10.

HOW CAN YOU BECOME THE NEXT NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR?
Folks have been asking me the best way to get a paid bookmarking job with us. The best thing you can do to get on our radar and have a chance of getting a gig is to participate in the new Netscape. Of course, being in the top ten on DIGG/Delicious/Reddit/Newsvine is also great. However, I'd also like to see more of these folks participating on Netscape as well.

... and you thought it would be a slow summer. :-)

UPDATE1: There is a story on DIGG about the new Navigators here. The DIGG community is supporting the three users who have left DIGG for Netscape!
UPDATE2: There is a Netscape story about the new Navigators here.

When Brian and I started Weblogs, Inc. the idea of paying bloggers--heck, even making money from blogging--was considered offensive to many. Blogging was, as the case was stated, a highly personal activity that should not be trivialized by the forces of commerce and greed. I don't have a complicated relationship with money or capitalism: I love them both and see them as simply as fuel and the process by which fuel is produced. Money to me means time, time means quality, and quality means success.

Quality. That single factor is what determines the winners in our business. Google's search is of higher quality than Yahoo, MSN, and even AOL's. Because of that Google wins. Engadget is of higher quality than Gizmodo and they are ranked first and second place in their space. Similarly, LifeHacker is of better quality than DownSquad today and as a result they are ranked one and two in their space. For background, my friend Nick Denton of Gawker fame owns Gizmodo and LifeHacker, and we (AOL) own Engadget and DownloadSquad. My point here is that in order for us to beat LifeHacker we need to increase our quality, and in order for Gizmodo to ever beat Engadget they need to increase their quality. The only way to do that is an investment of time. Time equals money, so they both need an investment on a cash basis.

Today we have around 200 bloggers on the Weblogs, Inc. payroll. Two years later John Battelle took the idea and extended it in a blog repping business. Om Malik has raised funding and stolen a Red Herring reporter, and even the nascent vlogging space is in full-blown talent war mode. What was foreboden three years ago is commonplace today.

Talented people's time in our society is primarily engaged with money. As a result we are doubling the staff of DownloadSquad and we've increased the rate we are paying our bloggers to $10 a post on that blog (much more for features). As a result I'm sure our traffic will double over the next three months--in fact I will guarantee that it will happen. Money does change everything.

Talent wins, and talent needs to get paid. I love paying talented people so they can sleep well at night doing what they love. That's my biggest joy in business: gettin' people paid.

Before launching the new Netscape I realized that Reddit, NewsVine, Delicious, and DIGG were all driven by a small number of highly-active users. I wrote a blog post about what drives these folks to do an hour to three hours a day of work for these sites which are not paying them for their time. In other words, they are volunteering their services. The response most of these folks gave back to me were that they enjoyed sharing the links they found and that they got satisfaction out of being an "expert" or "leader" in their communities.

Excellent... excellent (say that in a Darth Vadar/Darth Calacanis voice for extra impact).

That is exactly what bloggers told Brian and I three years ago when we started. Given that, I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:

We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline).

Now, this offer is going to get a big response I know, so we're going to have to limit to a dozen or so folks. However, I'm absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month and if we're the first folks to pay them that is fine with me--we will take the risk and the arrows from the folks who think we're corrupting the community process (is there anyone out there who thinks this any more?!).

We're gonna identify this people in our system as "Netscape Navigators," and they will work with our full-time "Netscape Anchors" to build a community. I see a day when we have the eight full-time Anchors working with two dozen Navigators to keep the site fresh and clean (hmm... I think I need a better choice of words here).

The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time.

If we're (DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, Reddit, MySpace, Netscape, etc) are going to make businesses out of this space we should share the wealth.

As we say in Brooklyn: everyone's gotta eat.*

* Note: Everything I know about business I learned in Brooklyn. I learned this one from my father while at his restaurant when I asked him why we didn't just buy our own jukebox and instead split the money with the "goodfella" who brought the machine in, changed the records every month, and split the quarters with us. "Everyone's gotta eat" he told me. It wasn't the last time I would hear that expression, and there are many variations of it that the 'fellas in the neighborhood would use. "Can I get a taste?" or "I need a taste" were two of many variations on the theme. This expression was a the humble--or demanding--way of saying you wanted a cut of the action (money).

Note 2: One of my favorite Knicks of all time, Latrell Sprewell, famously used a variation of this saying by stating that he had a family to feed when turning down a $10M+ deal from the Timberwolves. They wouldn't give him a better deal and he sat out last year--perhaps his final quality year as a basketball player. This is an important lesson for the talent out there: your first offer is usually your best offer. I'm just saying... :-)

There is a short story in the NYT today about a small, but vocal, group of Netscape users who don't like the new, more interactive, Netscape. The story explains that a petition has been started to change the new Netscape back to the old Netscape where we (AOL) programmed the experience.

There is one piece of misinformation in the story: that we tried to silence the folks doing the petition by not letting them vote up negative Netscape stories on the new Netscape--that's simply not true. We've had a dozen negative stories about Netscape on the home page--just like DIGG has--and we understand that part of running a social news site is that your user base will use the site itself to talk to you. In fact, any negative story on AOL, Netscape, or myself immediatly goes to the number one position.

That's the price you pay for letting folks take control--they actually do it!

I think some folks don't understand that there is a window in which a story can remain on the homepage (just over a day). We do this so the news stays fresh (i.e. when you come back 24 hours later it's not the same self-propogating list stuck at the top level).

I respect the fact that a group of folks liked the original home page better, and they don't want to participate in the new social news site--it's not for everyone. However, this is a very small percentage of the over millions of unique users who come to Netscape, and for AOL there is a very strategic reason for evolving Netscape.com. That reason is we already have a professionally programmed portal in AOL.COM! Also, we told the users about the change for a month, but some folks I think ignored or missed the messaging. That's a big take away here: over communicate with your members (oh wait, I put this in a recent post--I guess I need to take more of my own advice). If I were to do this again I would put a message that blocked users from visiting the site until they had read a note about the upcoming changes. Live and learn.

Additionally, the fact was that the majority of users were not sticking with the old Netscape. A quick look at the stats (not Alexia please--it doesn't count the Netscape browser--where a large percentage of our traffic comes from) shows that Netscape lost 1/3rd of its audience over the past year.

So, we lost a third of the audience by not changing the site, and now by changing we're going to lose a very small percentage, but be back on a growth path.

Look at it this way: if Geocities could change itself to MySpace before losing it's marketshare to MySpace you would do that right?

Same thing here, we're in the middle of paradigm shift from top-down control to bottom-up participation, and when you make a radical change like that you're gonna get pushback. In fact, I'm really excited to see the pushback because it let's me know we are on the right track.

Any new service is gonna get folks who don't like it. The more radical or forward looking an idea is the more folks are gonna be shocked by it--and this is a radical (but soon-to-be established) concept.

We anticipated in our projections that a large percentage of the audience might not like the new portal (double digits) and we're well below that (single digits)--so, I think we did a good job. When you change the menu at your restaurant some folks are gonna like the old menu better... we understand that and we're sorry we can't maintain two versions of the site forever--but this is a business and we have to grow it. For those folks the AOL.COM portal is still providing the classic portal experience with a massive amount of new stuff including a ton of video and programmed news.

It is ironic, of course, that some folks are voting for *less* interactivity and control, but I understand it. I don't want the New York Times to be a social news site... I think.

The "war" between DIGG and Netscape rages on...although not between Kevin Rose and I! The users on DIGG and Netscape are fighting it out... it's kind of funny in fact. The 94% male, techie audience on DIGG vs. the mass audience on Netscape.

Anway, as everyone knows Kevin and I are, in fact, friends. We IM and email often, and we actually like and respect each other. I'm also good friends with Marc Andreessen who founded Netscape and who is an investor in DIGG (small world huh?).

Anyway, here are a couple of threads where you can see the debate:

http://digg.com/tech_news/New_DIGG_Three_ads_above_the_fold!

http://news.beta.netscape.com/story/2006/06/26/digg-30-disappoints/

It's kind of funny.... all this press and attention. You would almost think we planned it. ;-)