A social media blog catering to those interested in web 2.0 tools, applications, addons, plugins, greasemonkey, internet marketing & making money online.
This is a Guest Blog Post by Kyle.
Social Median is a new site that, at first glance, looks like another life streaming site, but digging a little deeper uncovers some unique features that give Social Median a lot of potential. What makes Social Median different is its focus around news and news stories instead of every event going on in your life.
It also has characteristics of Digg, because users can “Clip” stories as a way of voting on them. I think it is hard to fully describe Social Median, but I’m sure an overview of the features will do a better job of explaining how Social Median is trying to be different.
Why would making my morning or evening news more social help me? The idea is to get into a group or groups of like-minded people in order to get a cleaner stream of news. How much of the morning paper do you read? Do you just read the business section or the sports section? If that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better if your newspaper was only business or sports news?
Getting a more focused stream of articles about the topics you really care about allows you to be more informed on those topics and get through your reading faster, since you don’t have to look very hard to find the stories you want. For this reason, Social Median might replace some people’s newspapers in the future.
Social Median makes it easy to submit the stories that matter to you. They give you four options: a bookmarklet, email, from other social networks or adding a story directly from their website.
The bookmarklet is super easy to use. Just click on it when you want to submit the page you are looking at to Social Median. There is also a nifty shortcut with the bookmarklet. If you highlight some text, then hit the bookmarklet that text will be used as the summary for your submission. This makes it even quicker to submit the news that matters to you.
News will also get submitted automatically from the other services you add. Social Median makes it easy to add all of your other social networks. It even detects them for you.
Social Median allows you to make or join various groups called News Networks. These networks are great, because you get to control all of the information you see in them through a few different controls. Being able to control the groups is an area that makes Social Median really stand out from its competitors.
The first way to control the content in your groups is through a Noise Level. The Noise Level allows you to zero in on your group’s topic or broaden it out a little. This is great, because it allows you to be very specific about the news you want to consume.
Topics is another area in News Networks that allows you to customize the content of that network. As you can see, you can vote topics up or down for your group as you see fit. You can also add other topics in order to expand the scope of your network.
In addition to the topics option, there is an option for sources. The sources are the blogs or websites the stories come from, and you can increase or decrease their importance in the same way as the topics. You can also add that underground blog you love so much as well.
In addition to joining News Networks, you can make your own. This way, if you don’t like the way other News Networks are set up, you can make one that is perfect for your needs.
This is one of my favorite features, as it really lets Social Median function like a newspaper. Social Median allows you to set up your notifications to function just the way you want. You can get them “With my morning coffee”, “with my breakfast and dinner”, “three meals a day” or “I’m a news junkie.” You can also turn your news alerts off, but that isn’t as much fun.
I really like the idea of getting all the news in the morning, because it really does function like a newspaper then. This may not be as good as Google Reader for really big news junkies, but I really see the potential for Social Median to attract the more average user for its ability to deliver the news you want and nothing else.
Social Median shows a lot of promise and potential and could become a great news source for many Internet users. I’m not sure this will take the power user away from Google Reader (me included), but the less serious people will definitely find lots of value and save lots of time with Social Median.
Technorati Tags: social median, lifestream, news, news stories, reader, bookmarklets, networks, alerts, notifications
Hi!
This is great resource! I’m going to tweet about right away. Thanks for your comments on my blog.
Warmly,
Ron
Ron Hudson Influence Persuasion NLP´s latest blog post..How to Deeply Influence Others and Yourself
You’re welcome Ron (for the comment on your blog)!