social news network Socialmedian is now open and available in a public beta

The foundation of Socialmedian is its user created ‘news networks

Users can add links to these networks, but Socialmedian also automatically suggests stories based on keywords users can add when creating a new network

This is a very smart idea, as it allows even small networks to have a constant stream of updated news

To share items on the site, users can either use a bookmarklet or ‘clip’ any story already on Socialmedian and share it on another network

Users can, for example, vote on the ranking of the keywords and sources that are used to seed the networks

its personalized networks and extensive social networking features set it apart from most of its competitors

Socialmedian is a very nicely designed social news network with a feature set far too extensive to cover in this short post

almost everything on the site feels very well thought out

Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com

The price is wrong.

Digg is truly the most useless of the big Web 2.0 sites. It won’t make you money and it can’t make money. Its early investors and founder will make money, and if they pull off a sale, management and the founders will have done their job.

The latest rumor is Google buying Digg for $200 million. That would imply that Google (GOOG) needs traffic from the lunatic fringe. They don’t.

So far, the media companies have not liked what they see, be it price and/or opportunity. No surprise to me.

Read the full article at www.alleyinsider.com

Microsoft also said that the first beta of the browser, intended for developers, will be available after today’s keynote.

One of the new features, WebSlices, allow users to break a Web site into parts and only get updates from the part they want.

In IE 8 users can subscribe to parts of Web page,” Hachamovitch said. He showed an example in IE 8 where users can use Web slices to subscribe to a single eBay auction.

Apple has its own Web-clipping subscription method that is part of Mac OS X.

Read the full article at news.cnet.com

So, as promised last week, I’d like to list some of what I regard as the best Firefox add-ons

there are thousands of extensions and themes available and so this is a highly selective list

Here are my must-have Firefox additions:

* Clipmarks: A handy extension for people who need to capture information from the Web. It lets you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images of video). Clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can be easily syndicated to Twitter, Facebook and other sites and they are available from any computer with an Internet connection.

Read the full article at www.fmtech.co.za

Today Google has launched Knol, its Wikipedia alternative that holds authors accountable for the articles they write. Each article is created by a team of authors who receive attribution, and are allowed to take part in a rev-share for AdSense ads on their page. Other users can submit changes, but they have to be approved by the article’s original authors before they go live on the site (it’s basically a moderated Wikipedia).

The big news here is that by assigning ownership and allowing authors to include AdSense ads on their articles, Google is effectively offering a monetary incentive to create good content.

Wikipedia works well because it’s almost like a charitable organization. Everyone contributes what they can in the hopes of furthering the world’s knowledge. Knol’s community will likely be far more concerned with earning money than the general welfare, which may hurt both its credibility and the amount of participation it sees from the community.

Read the full article at www.techcrunch.com

Digg, a popular news site where readers rank stories, was the subject of renewed takeover rumors on Wednesday, as the Valleywag blog, citing anonymous sources, said a “major media player” was close to acquiring it for $300 million to $400 million.

The report said that neither Microsoft, Yahoo nor Google were in the running for the site, which recently signed a $100 million advertising deal with Microsoft.

Valleywag cited The New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company as possible suitors.

CNET News.com noted that social news and bookmarking sites have indeed proven to be hotter buys for media companies rather than technology companies, with Conde Nast’s acquisition of Reddit a year ago and Forbes‘ very recent purchase of Clipmarks.

Read the full article at dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com

Google has been quite interested in “social search” for months — broadly defined as the use of social data like you and your friends preferences, to help determine search results. It has more recently been experimenting with letting its search users vote on the quality of rankings, similar to how Digg users vote on stories. Just maybe, Digg could teach Google something about social search.

Read the full article at venturebeat.com

One of the ideas behind the redesign is to make the site more compatible with micro-blogging–adding snippets of text, images, or video clips.

Read the full article at news.cnet.com

Techcrunch and related blogs reach an audience of early adopters, but these may not be the earlier adopters that you want. After all, what’s the point of launching a music startup on Techcrunch, for example, if your startup is primarily for the teen mass market?

And thus as a corollary, if your market is moms, there are cool moms that are likely to try out the new technology. And if your market is Asian immigrants, there are cool members of that group who are trying out new technology

In 99% of all cases, the Techcrunch early adopter crowd is probably NOT the ideal early adopter crowd to go after - your target market lives somewhere else

The exceptions I’ll make to this are B2B tech startups like Gnip, or companies primarily trying to target VCs in their announcements.

Read the full article at andrewchen.typepad.com

When Seth Godin released his first marketing book, Permission Marketing, he gave away the first four chapters for free via pdf to over 150,000 people. It generated a lot of buzz about the book and was a big factor in the book’s success when it eventually became available in hardback.

when he followed up with Unleashing The Ideavirus, he went one step further. He gave away the entire book for free in pdf

over 2mm copies were given away

And yet when the book was published in hardback it went to #5 on Amazon

It was a demonstration of the very tactics Seth was evangelizing in the Ideavirus book

by giving away your product early to your greatest fans who will do more work and put up with a less than optimal experience, you prime the pump for the mass market

because your early fans will spread the ideavirus and market the book for you

Read the full article at avc.blogs.com