Better insights and Football/Soccer

Recap of the features in this week’s release:

• We have access to a bigger slice of Twitter, so the “Hot Topics’ module on the home page is now even more accurate (though Liverpool fans still talk about their team quite a bit)
• We have decided to suppress tweets in our mobile applications after you folks asked us to do so
• Minor bug fixes

As always, thanks, FanFeedr

Real-time curation vs editorial judgment, or, the redundancy of humans

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch famously suggested that if one were to build a news organization from scratch, one path would be to hire away the top 50 writers at the New York Times without all of the attendant cost (pensions, printing plants, editors, etc) and put out lean/mean journalism.

A smart tactic, but one that still would rely on editorial judgment about what news should be presented. Smells like latency to me.

Yet most organizations that focus on news, and its associated verticals (financial news, entertainment news, sports news, and so) pursue a model that relies upon editorial judgment to determine what gets published. This has remained more than unchanged, calcified, perhaps, since 1994. It is the most linear adaptation of an old-school publishing metaphor that one could concoct.

The other technique that news sites can pursue is social media sensing about what people deem important. This doesn’t suggest that humans can be done away with in the story selection process, but determining weight and heft, and what is important, should be driven by what people are paying attention to right now, not editoral-historical perspective about importance.

This can be done by sampling Twitter, Collecta, OneRiot and other real-time engines for the topics, stories and subject matters at hand, and determining the relative weight of story importance based on mentions, velocity of the mentions, the authority of the person and/or the site making the mention, and other algorithmically-driven analysis.

The Huffington Post has managed its way to 24MM monthly uniques using a small group of freelancers, some staff, and better judgment about the zeitgeist by leveraging social trend data to determine subject matter. This is higher order prioritization than human judgment, but still trails real-time by a lengthy period. They also have a right-column that shows their most popular stories, and this serves to drive a great deal of traffic on the site.

Even faster in terms of approaching real time is the approach taken by Jonah Perreti’s smart BuzzFeed. Compete places them at 2.2MM monthly uniques with a network reach just south of 80MM monthly uniques. They know, more than most other sites, when a piece of content is going viral, which is different than news judgement, but my point is that it is complementary, and worth as much (and requires fewer people to inject themselves into the process.

Most news outlets are using humans for editorial judgment. The next level in the just-memed “Pyramid of Publishing” is the HuffPo, a little bit of the Daily Beast, and some elements of BuzzFeed that are news-related. There are others in that next tier, to be clear.

The top of the pyramid is rarified land, with a few enterprising souls and some big companies dabbling in real-time + news categories +/- media assets.

Some examples include Brizzly, Bitly TV, the aforementioned Collecta and SkyGrid (iPad only.) (FanFeedr, does this on a personalized basis, for sports.)

There is going to be ongoing friction between these five categories of news prioritization:

• Editorial: fleshy people making decisions about what is important
• Real-time: streams of relevant news around a topic
• Wisdom of the crowds: leveraging implicit and explicit interactions, sharing, commenting, and views, to determine popularity.
• SEO-driven: Demand Media, Aol and others are pursuing this approach
• Local: This is actually an orthogonal dimension that can frame any of the above items on a geo-located basis.

For organizations that want to carve cost out of the equation and still drive customer value, the prioritization should be Real-Time, with a “What’s Hot” component. For extra credit, provide a local window into the above items.

The new Newsweek, despite its shortcomings (and lack of time-stamp on its articles), is broadly tackling this head-on, which is a good thing, and others who pursue this strategy will find greater dividends on their news-gathering investment.

For another point of view on this subject, Robert Scoble has posted a smart take on the seven needs of real-time curators here.

R53: Laying the table for March Tournament Pick’Em

Straight to the goodies.

More real-time goodness

• We are publishing in real time to Facebook through the API, so no more of that RSS lateness
• Facebook team pages also get scores, photos, and videos, so that you don’t have to go elsewhere to get everything about your favorite teams
• We are now publishing our RSS feeds via Pubsubhubbub, which means you can get them completely in real-time, with no latency
• Scores and photos are have also been included in the RSS feeds on FanFeedr.com.

Pick’Em enhancements

• We are now publishing the opportunity to pick your favorite NBA and NHL games directly to our Twitter and Facebook feeds so that you don’t have to come searching to bet.
• We reduced the number of times that Pick’Em picks publish to your Facebook feed. You will only see them once a day at the very most so that we don’t overwhelm your posts.
• We also reduced the publishing of picks on FanFeedr to just the first pick you make each day so that you can see everyone in the Public Timeline, and, more importantly, so that your own feed isn’t overwhelmed.
• On Monday, you can pick the NCAA tournament, and we have special badges for each bracket
  

Racing improvements

NASCAR

• We now have individual pages for each of the NASCAR teams, like Penske
• We also have Twitter accounts for Penske and others

Formula 1

• We now have individual pages for each of the Formula 1 teams, like Ferrari and BMW Sauber
• We also have Twitter accounts for Ferrari and Mercedes

Technical stuff

• Fixed a bug whereby posts to Facebook didn’t work properly

We hope that you enjoy the tournaments this weekend, and look forward to checking out your Picks in a couple of days, FanFeedr

Release 41: Blog Spectacular

We had a smallish release this week in advance of some awesome goodness next week.

Specifically, we launched a new feature on the home page that allows you to see the top publishing blogs over the last 24hrs. Heading up the most recent list are the Sports Blogs from Yahoo, and a surprise presence on the leaderboard is the Arrowhead Pride site (all about the KC Chiefs, natch) from SB Nation. Please check out the list, when you visit, to find new sources of smart content.

We also added a bunch of new NBA content sources, so you can get your jazz-on-the-hardwood fill without having withdrawal symptoms in the lean hours of the AM.

As always, thanks, FanFeedr