The FanFeedr Product Blog

I spoke at the BigThink Search event, where the Google-Bing controversy came to fruition. This was an aside with O’Reilly media about how search can influence news presentation, and how FanFeedr uses social signals, and the people who generate the signals to refine the prominence of a particular story, team or player.

Feedback welcome and appreciated, as always.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Much has been written about News Corps’ the Daily as a news product, both pro and con, and how it compares to another forward-thinking, magazine-like sibling, FlipBoard.

What is of greater interest is how the product chooses what to cover, and how that delivers value to users.

There are four ways to assign the news, and five ways to present it. We are going to focus on the former, saving the latter for another post.

How to assign the news, or how to decide what to cover . . .

• Editorial
• Curatorial
• Algorithmic
• Algorithmic plus on site interactions

Editorial

Human beings (I am one of them!) provide great news judgement, but can often lag behind the information zeitgeist or misjudge it. There is no reason, in 2011, to make editorial and assignment decisions in a vacuum.

A purely editorial lens uses an editor, obviously, to make decisions about what to cover. They may not care what is trending on twitter, or the page views that they received on the stories from yesterday, or what their competition is covering, and the attention that various subject areas received.

I am not accusing the Daily of being purely editorial. However, in the absence of an editorial mechanism that is actively mining the data of who is looking at what, when, in what volumes, and with what authority, one is left thinking that just using Bob or Sue Editor is not enough.

Curatorial

Using a curatorial lens instead of making purely editorial decisions about what news to cover is not just a sidelight, or auxiliary plan for coverage. It is the most fruitful means to cover the largest number of events in the absence of infinite staff.

While the 100 journalists at the Daily is 100 more journalists than we have at FanFeedr, the application isn’t going to be able to deliver articles that hit the sweet spot of trending topics, garnered through social media, which is something that Business Insider, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, SB Nation and Bleacher Report seem to have pinned down quite nicely.

UPDATE at 1.54p ET: These sites use analysis of trending topics via Twitter and/or Google Trends to drive news coverage. Vin Diesel in a car crash? Let’s write an article about Vin Diesel, and a piece on celebrities who get into car crashes. Tiger Woods exposed? Let’s get salacious pictures of his special friends through their social media profiles. The technique looks at hot topics and then uses those topics to drive coverage. A curator also looks in a slightly longer timeframe, like the last 24 hours or week, to tease out the topics that are driving continued interest. You don’t need to do this for a subject like politics, but covering specific political figures will have greater resonance based on their frequency of mention, or prominence.

The curatorial lens has a downside: it can devolve into subject areas that some may find less tasteful. It does allow any publication, including the Daily, to both react well to areas of potential user interest as well as determine areas of coverage for future focus.

You can get a sense of how the Huffington Post does this here.

Algorithmic

The third way of making editorial decisions about coverage is using a purely algorithmic framework to suss out what people are talking about, and then present the “hot” news to users based on real-time interactions across a large body of content.

One might suspect that Google News is crafted this way, but, in fact, they have humans sitting on top of the algorithms.

Many of the SEO content farms, as they are somewhat disparagingly labelled, pursue this avenue for assignment purposes. Simply put: they exploit opportunities to attract search traffic. These opportunities are gleaned through data analysis and then assigned to writers at low cost.

They use a single signal: search queries.

Algorithmic plus on site interactions

The fourth way for editorial presentation is using trending topics through social channels, and then refining those topics based on attention signals off of one’s own site. Put simply, this is a more refined version of the purely algorithmic take, and it requires data mining user interactions at scale, but in a way that competitors cannot.

Two concrete examples:

• Bleacher Report has an email newsletter that has over 1MM subscribers (they have stated this publicly.) They use the interactions of their users through those newsletters to determine areas of interest for coverage, in addition to their other data mining techniques. No one else has access to this data.
• Gawker Media promotes a single story on front of its new websites, based, again, on a set of interactions that only Gawker can measure, in addition to their normal story coverage techniques, and they also have the scale that makes their private user feedback a valuable tool for refining their coverage.

Human beings don’t play a role here, but this process is highly dependent on having enough signal to understand both what is happening on social channels and the interrelationship of internal (site and application) data with the “signals” at large.

The joint venture between bitly and the New York Times, News.me, pursues this logic. The JV can use Twitter + Bitly to do this type of news presentation at scale, and accurately.

They have access to bitly’s click-stream data for discrete URLs in addition to perhaps the most robust analysis of social media information pursuits through the use of shortened bitly URLs across social media.

FanFeedr, our company, does something similar, but just for sports.

Conclusions

• Of the four, the purely editorial lens will show greater distribution in page views and time spent across all of its individual news products, as it will tend to be hit or miss.
• The curatorial product will show a more tightly clustered set of viewers, but greater volatility over time, depending on whether scandal is in the air or not.
• Curatorial products love controversy because they add kerosene to the fire, in a good way. Purely curatorial products also introduce latency into news coverage, in that they can’t cover the news as it is happening, because they require signals (both social and sharing based) that necessarily trail the actual event. With this technique, you can’t assign a story about a high-ranking Senator caught in flagrante at the local Applebees until there is a social media reaction to that event.
• The purely algorithmic product can be victimized by being banned, as the search engine Blekko has done (and Google may do),  gaming (companies or individuals affecting topic popularity through unethical/non-natural means) or an insanely devout fan base (tip of the hat to Justin Bieber).
• The blend of algorithmic plus internal signals can also get gamed, but the gaming is less likely because of the diversity of signals used in the analysis, assignment and feature presentation. Is it also less latent that a purely curatorial model, because humans aren’t involved.

We aren’t advocating one technique at the expense of the other, but suggesting that two or three of the techniques, used in a complementary fashion, will yield the highest user value. HuffPo uses a blend, as does Gawker, SB Nation and Bleacher Report.

Right now, there aren’t enough “hit” stories on the Daily that personally appeal to me or that I couldn’t get elsewhere.  The Daily can solve this by adopting a larger umbrella for linking to third-party stories, and choosing those stories based on user interest on their site and elsewhere.

Essentially, they need a more diverse story selection model to deliver greater individual value to individual users.

Last but not least, to really refine their news presentation model, they should actively promote sharing for every content item, including excerpts from articles and videos, so that they have a proper internal feedback loop for what is working and what is not. They currently enable posting to Twitter and Facebook, but it isn’t granular (that is, at the sub-story level), and leaves little UX affordances for color commentary.

The last feature that they can add to deliver greater user value, and something that we do at FanFeedr (self-promotion alert), is provide users the ability to personalize based on topics of interest, and if they used Facebook authentication (which they do not), they would be able to pull in user interests directly from their profile, and then customize the news delivery based on those explicit preferences.