LSQHA Blog Reviews

Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use. NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews . The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app! Sponsor When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it's easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined. The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust. The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It's one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it's another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality. The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It's a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing. NewsTrust and MyNews aren't for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.) Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content. Discuss

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Want to Read Good Journalism? Try NewsTrust's New Personalized Filtering Tool

We hear a lot about how starting a company takes some serious entrepreneurial DNA with traits like ambition, drive, relentlessness, and above all, passion. But some might argue that these are just the good sounding attributes that can lead to success; what about the other characteristics that may not sound so great? According to WePay co-founder Rich Aberman, starting a company also requires some arrogance and naïveté, so here's his advice on founding a startup straight from the entrepreneurial front-lines. Sponsor Aberman and his partner Bill Clerico started working on WePay, a site that helps groups and organizations collect money electronically, back in August of 2008 and have since raised $2 million in funding after participating in Y Combinator 's incubator last summer. In a recent blog post , he equates starting a company for the first time to jumping in a boxing ring with "the champ" and thinking you can take him, hence the arrogance and naïveté; no matter how much work you've done to get ready for this moment, nothing has prepared you for the force of that first punch.

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Founding a Startup? Credibility is Your Best Friend

Last night, during Digg 's annual SXSW party, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg's traffic a bit nervous. Sponsor It's hard to underestimate the influence these changes will have on the Digg community. Not only did the Digg team create a completely new backend architecture, but Digg is also making a lot of changes to how the site will work from a user's perspective - some of which will surely be controversial among Digg's most active users. Digg will launch the new site in alpha in a few weeks. You can sign up for an account here . It's important to note that Digg plans to work directly with its users and is looking for feedback from its alpha users. The alpha site, for example, will feature a large feedback bar at the bottom of every page. Personalized Homepages as Default On the new Digg, every user will get a personalized homepage which will be populated with stories that are popular among this user's friends and relate to topics this user has expressed interest in. This personalized homepage will become the default Digg frontpage for all users who have signed in to Digg. Users who are not signed in will still see the old Digg homepage. With this, the Digg team is clearly looking to get more users to sign up for the service. Digg will also update its users' profile pages. Submitters Lose Power Another major change to Digg - and one that will surely create some controversy among the most active users of the service - is that the new Digg will de-emphasize the power of submitters and put an even stronger emphasis on who votes for stories, as well as on outside signals from third-party services like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn't forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community. As Adelson told us, on the new Digg, submitting a story will basically mean that you are the first voter. Currently, a relatively small group of submitters has a lot of power over which stories will appear on the Digg frontpage. Signals from Twitter, Facebook and Co. While there will still be a role for those users who regularly discover new and interesting content, the new Digg will put a strong emphasis on votes and signals from your friends on third-party sites like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, Digg will create a social graph for you that will take all of this information into account when it create your personalized homepage. On the homepage, Digg will also expose why a story appeared in your feed. While Adelson couldn't go into details, it seems like Digg has established a very good relationship with Twitter and has had access to Twitter's firehose feed to almost a year. Once the new digg comes out of beta, anonymous users will also be able to vote on stories. While the team is still working out the details, it is clear that Digg is looking to get as many signals as possible to augment the current voting process. It will be interesting to see how Digg will weigh all this information in the creation of personalized pages and the new topic pages. The submission process for stories that haven't been submitted to Digg already will now be a one-click process. Digg will also soon use third-party sign-on systems, including Google, Twitter Connect and Yahoo to allow its users to sign in. Working With Publishers: What Will Happen to the Digg Effect? Obviously, quite a few publishers will worry that the old Digg effect - which would often take sites down because of the huge amount of traffic a story on Digg's frontpage can create - will now disappear. Adelson, however, who also noted that Digg "wants to be a good source for traffic for publishers," thinks that this new system will create a more regular stream of traffic to publishers. In the long run, Adelson noted, Digg also plans to open up its advertising platform to share revenue with publishers. This project is still in its early stages, but according to Adelson, this could involve using a widget on the publisher's site or by using Digg's salesforce to sell ad inventory on these sites directly. To make all of this work, Digg completely stripped out the old infrastructure and started over by building a completely new platform. This, said Adelson, will allow Digg to easily make changes to the frontend and react to user feedback during the alpha and beta phase. At some point in the future, Digg might also open this platform up to third parties. A Completely New Platform Digg is clearly taking this new version extremely serious. The company plans to hire 50 engineers this year to help with scaling the architecture. Adelson was clearly proud of the work his team has done on the backend architecture. The new site will be "wicked fast," thanks to a complete retooling of every aspect of the site, up to the point where the bottlenecks for Digg are now network speed and latency. This is quite a feat, given that Digg now offers an almost unlimited amount of topic pages and a personalized homepage for every user - all of which will have to be recalculated constantly. How Will Users React? It will be very interesting to see how users will react to all of these changes. Adelson and the rest of the Digg team are very aware that this will create some controversy, but Adelson clearly thinks that this is the right way to go for Digg. The topic pages will allow Digg to cater to users who care about every type of news, be it the Boston Red Socks or the latest gadget news. Discuss

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Big Changes Are Coming to Digg: More Power to Publishers, Less Power to Top Diggers

For obvious reasons , we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access. So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff , a haldful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Ozzie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access? Sponsor The difference would be significant, as Stuff's graphic shows: The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealandto the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network. This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013. Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider. "The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets. "Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago." How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss

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Kiwis to Bring $900M in Bandwidth-Building Cables to New Zealand

Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace , we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service. We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho , a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch. Sponsor Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs. Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster. Extending The Relationship For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend. Vegesna: "First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. " Google Dominates The Landscape To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure. Vegesna: "Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here ." A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM? Vegesna: "Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)." For more about the Zoho integration: Discuss

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Insights: Three Reasons Why Zoho Joined the Google Apps Marketplace