Here are some of my take-aways from this graph, and two other comparison graphs you’ll enjoy:

1. Foursquare had way more media buzz over both time periods. Foursquare’s coverage is pretty consistent as well, seeing 47% of their headline mentions from June 1 to July 31 then 53% from Aug 1 to Sept 30.
2. Gowalla had more total headline mentions since June 1st, but SCVNGR had significantly more mentions from Aug 1 to Sept 30. This is most likely directly correlated to SCVNGR’s recent, and seemingly successful, PR push guided focused on increasing the service’s consumer adoption.

Another useful exercise is to compare which publications are covering Foursquare and SCVNGR.*

Not surprisingly, a large proportion of SCVNGR’s media coverage has come from Boston-area publications, like this blog, Mass High Tech and Xconomy. With this information, we think it is safe to assume that the buzz around SCVNGR is still a very local phenomenon, as their push to be a more mainstream consumer service is still in its infancy.

*Gowalla was left out because no one wants to read about the MySpace of location-based services.

Featured Panel Participants

Panel 1: Content-Side

Panel 2: Business-Side



As print media continues to decline and more consumers turn to digital technologies for their daily news, publishers are reinventing the way they create and distribute content. Pinyadda and the leading digital publishers, content creators and strategists above will discuss the evolving news landscape and future of this rapidly changing industry. Factors such as location, search, new media, and a socially enabled world will all be discussed.

Panel Details

The first panel will cover how the editorial process has changed around gathering news, creating community, and user-driven content creation and aggregation. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s product lead, Austin Gardner-Smith, will moderate. Themes include: Changing distribution structures; New consumption platforms; Content and demand.

The second panel will discuss new business models for digital content and opportunities across platforms such as mobile and tablet. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s Co-Founder and CEO, Chase Garbarino, will moderate. Themes include: Revenue glut; Paywalls and subscriptions; A way forward.

NOTE: This event is sold out. If you would like to attend, we have a limited number of reserved spaces. Please contact cheryl at pinyadda dot com.

Here’s why Pinyadda is the best way to share news on Twitter, including examples from our community:

Know the best articles and blog posts to share

Pinyadda is like your personal assistant for news and information. Instead of having to go site-to-site or do searches (and often dig) for the news and blog posts that you want to click on, Pinyadda sifts through the firehose of content for you and collects the articles and posts you’re most likely interested in. Pinyadda serves the good stuff to you in real-time, filing each article as it’s published into clean pages you can browse based on topics, sites and people you follow (click for a quick 30-sec video overview).

With Pinyadda, you know the articles you’ll be into sharing to Twitter without lifting a finger:

• Want to tweet about news on a particular topic? Go to that topic page and see articles being published about it from sites across the web on everything from your city or favorite sports team to things like celebrities, food, social media, autos or green tech.
• Want to tweet articles from your go-to sites? View a feed of what’s been published most recently from all your favorites, and if you have one site in mind go to it’s individual feed page. (Tip: Here you can even tell Pinyadda to show you only articles published from a few sections of that site. It’s great for big sites like Boston.com where you may only be interested in a couple sections, like sports and events.)
• Want to share an article that lots of people are talking about? Go to your Home feed to see what articles people you follow are sharing (we call it pinning). You can also toggle to the “All People” feed to see what’s buzzing in the whole community on Pinyadda — lots of people use Pinyadda like a digital water cooler to share and discuss articles with groups of friends and colleagues, so you can always find great stuff.

Craft engaging news-related tweets

Since people use Twitter for different reasons, we designed Pinyadda’s integration with it with flexibility top of mind. This way you stay in the drivers seat of your voice and can mold your tweets as you like. Here are examples of some of the most effective ways to share all the news goodness on Pinyadda to Twitter:

1. Share a headline. This is the most basic way to share news to your Twitter followers. Just copy and paste the headline from the feed into the comment box. It’s straightforward, easy, and gets the news out quickly to your followers. (Tip: If you you want to legitimize the source of the link, include its Twitter handle, e.g. I know Boston.com is @bostonupdate.)
   
2. Share a quote, main point, question, or data point from the article. These are great ways to shake up how you share news articles to Twitter. These often grab your followers attention better than a straight headline, and shows you’re putting some TLC into your tweets.
   
3. Add value to the article by including your own commentary. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise, opinions, or simply add some humor to the news you share with your followers.
   
4. Direct an article to a Twitter follower. Often when we read an article we think of someone – be it an inside joke, something that will help them in their job, or is relevant to other aspects of their lives. If the person you’re thinking of isn’t as ahead of the curve as you and on Pinyadda too, include their Twitter handle at the beginning. (Better yet, invite them to Pinyadda!)
   
5. Share a discussion to Twitter. If you’re part of or come across a great discussion on an article on Pinyadda that your followers on Twitter would like, simply enter  something like “check out this great discussion about X” when sharing the link to Twitter. (Tip: Combining #4 and #5 is killer if you know someone’s really into a subject,e.g. tweeting “thought you’d want in on this convo.”)
6. Promote a site you think is great. If you come across a site on Pinyadda you want your Twitter followers to know about, simply visit that site’s page and click on the big blue “share this site” button. You can even customize the message you want to tweet out with it.
   
7. Share your profile on Pinyadda to Twitter. Want people to know what topics and sites you follow, how many followers you’ve gained, and what you’ve pinned on Pinyadda? (We like to call this your news graph.) Simply tweet out the URL to your Pinyadda profile or include it in your Twitter bio.
8. Share your Yadda shwag to boost your cred on Twitter. Pinyadda’s points system allows you to compete to earn coveted spots as the “Maven” of topics or “Ambassadors” of your favorite sites. You can also unlock fun badges (some even have coupon codes attached) just for pinning the news you’re into. For example, we teamed up with the marketing gurus over at Hubspot and you can earn their Inbound Marketing Ninja badge set by pinning inbound marketing news. You can share all this cred by clicking on what you’ve earned from your profile. Want to be the Maven of Twitter?  Sounds like it’s time to get your yadda on!
   

Connecting Pinyadda to your Twitter account is easy.

Connecting Pinyadda with your Twitter account is simple. Choose an article you want to tweet, enter text you’d like to tweet in the comment box, select the Twitter checkbox, and hit the “Pin it” button (click here for a 30-second video). If it’s your first time doing this you’ll be prompted with a pop-up to enter your Twitter username and password. Once that’s done, the text in the comment box and a unique short URL will hit your Twitter feed.

When one of your Twitter followers clicks on the link, they’ll be brought to a page with the article. If the text you entered in the comment box exceed Twitter’s 140 character limit, Pinyadda automatically truncates. Rest assured, because when your Twitter followers click the URL they’ll see your full comment.

To manage your Twitter account on Pinyadda, visit the Contacts tab of your settings. There you can even see who out of the people you follow on Twitter are also on Pinyadda.

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Do you have other examples of great ways to share news to Twitter?  How can we make sharing links to Twitter better for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors.  This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example.   Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.

In the past several years, the Internet has turned the news and greater media industry on its head – everything from content creation to distribution has completely changed.  This has created problems for both consumers and publishers.  For consumers, discovering and accessing the news that is most valuable to us has become overwhelming.  For publishers, developing a strong community and converting that community into hard dollars has become incredibly difficult.   At Pinyadda, we have designed our platform specifically focusing on the evolved news and media landscape, hosting what we call the “news graph“.

The individual parts of the news graph have existed for a long time (post about this coming soon).  With Pinyadda, we are focused on connecting these critical parts and providing more value to the different entities within the news ecosystem.  We have studied how our behavior as news consumers has changed and have provided simple tools for enabling each individual user to get the information they need from the sites they like, the topics they follow and from interesting people.  For publishers, we have focused on providing an open distribution platform aimed at extending publisher’s reach and exposure through automated distribution and organization.  This framework will provide the foundation to enable publishers to capture more critical data and eventually monetize the distribution of their content.

While we have experienced tremendous growth in the short time our platform has been open, we are still young and focused on making improvement to best serve our community of users and publishers.  Our intention for this post is to start of on-going discourse regarding the evolution of the news graph, which we invite you all to contribute to.  We believe the news graph is a critical component to ensuring that consumers have an effective way to access the best information available for their unique interests and needs, as well as enabling publishers to capitalize on providing quality content.

Coming soon: The Working Parts of the News Graph

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, once stated that, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments about the death of privacy, one has to wonder whether Barlow’s statement may be more relevant to the times if phrased: “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking Facebook to respect the private information of its users.”

While there are plenty of smart people arguing the pros and cons of the effects of Facebook’s new privacy changes and Google Buzz’s auto-following model on users’ private information online, I am more interested in the business implications of these developments.  The industry powers like Facebook and Google seem to be in a mad dash to make more information public; however, I wonder if this push for extended network connectivity is smart for all networks.

A recent study conducted by Nielsen found that Twitter’s “heavy users” in the UK consist of 7% of the user population and make up 79% of the total amount of time spent on the site.  Facebook on the other hand sees in the UK 52% of its population as “heavy users” making up 98% of the time spent on site.  While this distinction between the distributions of user activity on the two sites could be attributed to a number of things (e.g. type of content hosted, product differences, etc.), I personally believe that the network designs with regards to privacy and the nature of users information have the largest effect on the user activity distributions.

When analyzing the value of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, much of the excitement comes from data that shows digital word-of-mouth as the most trusted marketing form.  Taking this into consideration, you would think that Facebook and Twitter would want to be very deliberate in making adjustments to privacy settings and product design that effects how information is shared throughout their networks, with a focus on optimizing the distribution of user activity in a way that would best support their business models.

The two networks are typically used for very different things – I think of Facebook as my “social life identity” and Twitter as my “broadcast identity“.  Inevitably, Twitter is a much more public platform than Facebook which would suggest the distribution of user activity will always be a bit more skewed. However, I think it is safe to assume those over at Twitter are probably thinking of ways to engage a larger portion of their user base.  From Facebook’s standpoint, I find the sneaky move to make user’s information more public by default is certainly questionable in terms of user trust, but also strange from a business standpoint.  Facebook’s biggest strength is how deeply people engage with on another on the site, by making such a change I feel they could be jeopardizing this.

I am interested to hear what others thing about this – do you think it is smart for Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz all to be pushing consumers to share more information publicly?  Do you think it is smart for one and not the others?  Let me know in the comments.

I am also interested in hearing from any of you statistical nerds about what you think ideal user activity distributions would look like for the different networks.  I’ll write a follow up post with my opinions on this if there is any activity around the idea.

Misiek spoke at a “fireside chat” at Vilna Shul (a true hidden gem in Beacon Hill with a phenomenal history of Jewish culture in Boston). An HBS strategy professor who teaches “Competing with Social Networks”), Misiek has done extensive research and written numerous case studies on these networks. If you haven’t read his work or seen his data analyses in the news, you’re really missing out. Schooled in sociology, he offers a unique, non-marketer perspective of social networking—way deeper than it as a channel—that strikes the core of why we as humans are engaging so fervently on these platforms. This includes, among others, needs to stay connected with the people we care about and needs to look for new job opportunities.

After he opened the floor for questions, someone asked if he thought there were still needs (opportunities) for new social networks. He offered two examples: one for “girls only” and one for enterprise/corporate environments. The latter struck the biggest chord with me. Having previously worked in consulting I have heard first-hand HR heads express that they realize the power of social media and want to use it internally to cultivate corporate culture and community. However, they know employees aren’t going to discuss at work how hard they’re going to party on Friday night.

As a result, companies have created Twitter handles, perhaps allow their employees to blog, add knowledge to wikis, create a fan page on Facebook, etc. Misiek remarked that what’s missing, and why these don’t actually drive engagement and community within companies, is that the initiatives aren’t adding direct, true value to the employee’s day-to-day responsibilities. More important, they’re not addressing a need in these employees’ life. On the flip side, they are also not effectively adding measurable value to the larger company’s mission or competitiveness. They’re basically just allowing the company to say, “See, we’re totally on the social band wagon.”

Enter the discussions around content we’ve seen really take off this week on Pinyadda after opening up in public beta. We’re truly seeing community amass around content: ideas being exchanged and built upon and experiences and perspective being shared. It’s reinforced my hypothesis about the value Pinyadda could offer in the workplace. Pinyadda might not only be a place to have your industry news served to you. Nor might it only be a place to discover and discuss breaking news or useful blog posts that can help your business learn to be better. Pinyadda can enable employees to see, for example, what their boss or CEO is reading and allows them to add their own thoughts, experiences, and ideas about the item in real-time.

From the employee’s perspective, imagine, now you’re no longer employee #2384 in the cube by the bathroom in the Minneapolis office. You have an identity and are sharing your ideas and knowledge cross-departmentally and with other employees and senior managers, perhaps who don’t know you. That’s fulfilling a direct need for both the individual (hey, I’m really valuable and have lots to offer to this firm) AND the company (what are our competitors doing, how can we do things differently, here’s a new idea and fresh perspective, employee #2384 is an up-and-coming leader).

At a more basic level, how many links do you receive a day to “check this out” from your boss or buddy in the cube over? Maybe it’s something about work. Maybe a YouTube clip from last night’s Tonight Show. Mostly useless threads of emails follow, cluttering what used to be a communication medium to talk about projects with co-workers and do business with partners and prospective clients. As our product lead Austin often says, I think we’ve advanced enough to separate these link chains from work inboxes with all the different media platforms now available to us. Assuming the link is work-related, the fact remains that these discussions aren’t opened up to the larger company to discuss–the collective intelligence opportunity. Perhaps a different business unit in an office in another country would have an interesting perspective on the item and offer insights that can help the other unit operate more efficiently or consider a new idea.

Bottom line: I think Misiek is absolutely right. There is a gaping opportunity for social products in the workplace. His sociological need perspective explains why most current internal corporate social initiatives aren’t doing so hot. As he noted, successful ones down the road will add value to and address a social need for both employees AND the company’s competitiveness at large. A platform like Pinyadda that can enable companies and employees to reap the benefits of collective intelligence could be an effective solution.

Pinyadda is too early stage at this point to address these needs with a custom product. However, if you are a small working group or business and think you could benefit from using the platform today, please do reach out to us. We’d love to work with you (cheryl[at]pinyadda.com or @cheryllmorris).

Regardless, we’re incredibly jazzed to be seeing some smart, valuable dialogues take place on Pinyadda this week and hope to see more as our early adopter base grows.

I think the API model is a great example for the newspaper industry. It allows them to stop worrying so much about their distribution problem and get back to doing what they do best – producing content. Let the rest of the developer community worry about finding ways to get the news to readers. But I’m not so sure the Times thinks about their API this way, and the announcement that they’ll be erecting a pay wall in the coming year seems to reinforce that doubt.

It seems like the Times sees this API as a way to establish itself as the definitive archive of all events past – the lens through which history is viewed and dissected. As such, it will be incredibly valuable, allowing historians and documentarians to uncover meta-trends and write fascinating feature pieces about them (who they’ll get to publish those pieces, well…). But when I think API, thanks to Twitter, I think “now.” I think about developers building great experiences around the wealth of content that belongs to the Times, about innovative new ways to organize and discover its content, about new solutions to the old media problem. The Times’ management, I fear, does not share my sentiments.

If the pay wall goes up – and I’m not entirely convinced it actually will – the API either becomes far less useful or far more useful, depending on the restrictions applied. I find it hard to believe that it will exist in its current form, with open access to all articles one hour after publication. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

The point of all this rambling, you ask? The point is that the Times seems like a two-headed monster to me. Half the time, they do everything right – the first to truly incorporate lots of multimedia, the first to successfully incorporate the blog form, the first to understand the web as an opportunity and not a threat. The the other half of the time, they seem trapped in the same delusional nostalgia that’s handicapping the rest of the industry – the display ad run-around, the formatting stalemate, and now the paywall. I suspect that there’s considerable internal tension between these two forces as well. And I’m not sure who will win.

Maybe the pay wall will work for the Times. But its life span, as far as I see, is inherently limited. No matter what we believe in, no matter how long it takes, the price of content will eventually reach zero. There’s just no way the generation that’s coming up behind us will swallow a monthly fee for access to a publication that holds no emotional or collective social value for them.

I give the Times credit for trying something – anything – to stop the revenue drain that’s been their standard operating procedure for the last few years. But they should keep looking for a long-term solution – one that’s closer to the API than the pay wall.

So why, after nearly a year of asymmetric loyalty (web voyeurism, almost) did I reach out today? The answer is relatively simple, but it tells a complex story about how media trends are changing. I wanted to know where this person found the inspiration for their posts, many of which contain fantastic photos seemingly culled from a vast repository of design-oriented source material that I can’t find, despite what I consider relatively exhaustive searches.

What’s more, I’m convinced that any sources this person returns to me will be of a higher quality and have a higher degree of relevance than the results of a continued search on my own (I’ll follow up and let you know if that’s true). While I often preach the benefits of social curation, and Pinyadda’s design places this act at the very center of our user experience, this struck me as a particularly tangible example of how and why this type of connection is important.

I’ll be adding all the sources I receive to our index (and tagging them under the ‘Design’ topic) so that all of our users can enjoy them. I’m willing to bet that most of these sites will have content whose quality far outpaces the quantity of their audience. And hereinlies the beauty of content-specific aggregation: other users will be able to find them and follow them, without having to beg and plead with their followers in a creepy, email-based way. Good content finding its audience is what we’re all about, and I’m proud to be part of a company that’s trying every day to make that vision a reality.

The story, then, has two morals:

1) Social curation is incredibly valuable. By following this un-named design maven (who may not even know I consider them as such) I was privy to hundreds, nay thousands, of awesome articles, posts, photos and music that more accurately matched my tastes and preferences than any publication or blog, no matter how niche-focused, might have. This isn’t to say I don’t like niche blogs (I do, a lot), but instead that humans like me will almost always do better at finding the stuff I like.

2) Good content will find a way to find its audience. I truly believe that the end result of the disruption we’re seeing in the media industry will be a complete eradication of barriers to distribution and the ultimate triumph of content. I think that Pinyadda and others like us can play a huge role in helping consumers and producers of content find each other. If we provide readers with the tools to find the content they want and then make it easy for them to share it with each other, we can create viral marketing and distribution loops that move faster and wider than all the trucks in the history of newspapers ever could.

This is what big media doesn’t seem to understand, and it’s the beauty of the web we’re helping to build: when people find great content, they want to support it, evangelize it, and help it be found by others. It’s not a chore or a burden but a real feeling of goodness that comes with adding value to other people’s daily lives, if only in small, small ways. Instead of trying to find ways to trick me into paying for their content, big media should be trying to find ways for me to pay it forward.

Do you have any blogs or publications you find yourself evangelizing, even by accident? I bet you do, and I’d love to hear about every one of them in the comments.

Why is Bruce so blatantly overrepresented in this countdown? The only answer is that Bruce Springsteen is important to the Rolling Stone business. When Bruce does well, Rolling Stone sells more magazines/ad space. This got me thinking about social media…

What about Twitter? Which of the four major tech blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat) publishes the most content about Twitter? For this, I took a quick look at our Pinyadda index from November and formulated the following chart (click image to enlarge):

As you can see, TechCrunch is far and wide the most prolific of the publications, producing approximately 2 times the amount of content as Mashable, 4.5 times the amount as ReadWriteWeb and 3.3 times the amount as VentureBeat.

Scanning titles and various meta-data for ‘twitter’, it appears that only 7.8% of TechCrunch’s articles are about Twitter. Compare that the the 8.6% for VentureBeat, 15.1% for ReadWriteWeb and a whopping 20.7% for Mashable.

Yes, one-fifth of Mashable’s content for the month of November was Twitter-centric. Imagine, if you will, that Twitter’s popularity wanes (gasp!). What is Mashable to do? Produce less content? Unlikely. Fill the gaping content hole with other content? Likely.