Ryan Block Stepping Down as Editor of Engadget: Adjust Pitches Accordingly

If you’ve got a hot new gadget you want to pitch and you want Ryan Block to write on it, you’d better act fast. Block will step down as editor of this publication in late August to start a new (undisclosed) company.

In his post today, he said of his new chapter, “I’m extremely excited — but there’s also simply no way I can give up working with Engadget that easily, so I’ll remain on as editor-at-large, where I’ll have a longer-term advisory role to the site (and do some writing from time to time, as well).”

Ryan Block and Peter Rojas built one of the most successful blogs on the Web in Engadget.

Engadget remains the go-to gadget blog and is #4 on Technorati.com’s top blogs.

With the departure of Peter Rojas and now Ryan Block, Engadget will be in the hands of Josh Topolsky and Joshua Fruhlinger. After August, you’ll want to be pitching them to cover your latest innovation.

Follow Ryan at www.ryanblock.com.

socialmedian Emerging from Alpha with Social News Network

(UPDATED July 30, 2007) socialmedian, which styles itself as a social news network, is slowly emerging from stealth mode has emered from alpha. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg and backed by notables, Gordon Crovitz (WSJ), Reed Hundt (FCC), Julius Genachowski, (IAC/ LunchBox Digital), Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and Allen Morgan (Mayfield Fund); socialmedian’s goal is to help users keep up-to-date on the news AND the news makers that matters to them. TheDeal has more on the funding.

Imagine FriendFeed meets Techmeme.

On socialmedian, users set up News Networks (ostensibly mini Techmemes) based on any topic(s) they are interested in and populated with content from the news sources they specify. It’s all fully user-customizable, which means people like “a VC” blogger Fred Wilson can filter news so he can hear from who he is interested in “…like seth godin, jeff jarvis, dave winer, scoble, umair, calacanis, nick carr…” (via tweet).

(Updated) MEDIAdeluge here:

• CNET, Socialmedian tweaks conversation mechanics
• TechCrunch, Socialmedian Brings A New Take On Social News Filtering
• LouisGray.com, SocialMedian Opens Up and Launches Beta
• Robert Scoble (via FriendFeed), “I’m testing out Social Median: http://www.socialmedian.com/sc… what do you think?”
• ReadWriteWeb, Socialmedian Launches Open Beta: Personalize Your News Filter

What interests me most about socialmedian is the filtering. In my post about the conversational Web, I disagreed with Jeremiah Owyang, who suggested, information on the social web needs to be sorted around people, not content My thinking: Jeremiah is a smart and interesting guy. I follow him on Twitter and FriendFeed, but I’m not really interested in what he ate for breakfast (not that he necessarily posts that sort of thing). That said, when he writes about the social web, I want to know about it.

socialmedian lets me do just that. I can follow everything Jeremiah posts, or just what is relevant to me. This could become a very popular feature as the noise online grows and it becomes harder to sift through all of it to find what you want.

As part of socialmedian’s emergence from closed alpha, it now connects new users to the people they follow on Twitter who are already on socialmedian using the Twitter social graph API. So, when a new user joins socialmedian using their Twitter username, socialmedian will pre-populate the people the new user already knows.

As socialmedian emerges from closed alpha, it has relatively few users – especially when compared to FriendFeed – but that appears to be changing as influential bloggers like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble commit to trying out the site.

What will be interesting for socialmedian will be the potential Scoble effect. What seems to be more and more critical for social sites to gain traction with the tech early adopter crowd is Scoble’s seal of approval.

Use this link as an invite to socialmedian. Follow me at http://www.socialmedian.com/christiananderson

ContentNext, PaidContent.org Publisher, Acquired by Guardian Media Group

The acquisition, slated to be announced today was reported early this morning by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. ReadWriteWeb, in post also early this morning, reported confirmation of the story based on a Twitter conversation between the Guardian’s Technology Editor Charles Arthur and travel writer Craig McGinty.

The move so far has been received very positively by new media content providers. Although, given the reported $30 million price tag, it’s easy to understand why.

With the acquisition of Ars Technica by Wired, Guardian Media Group’s acquisition of ContentNext and the New York Times’ apparent offer to buy CenterNetworks (via Twitter), there looks to be a trend developing in which the big blogs are being gobbled up by “old media.”

MEDIAdeluge here:

• VentureBeat, Guardian buys pathbreaking blog network ContentNext for rumored $30M
• GigaOM, Why Guardian Media Bought paidContent for $30M
• paidContent.org, Guardian News & Media to buy ContentNext Media
• mathewingram.com/work, Guardian buys PaidContent = Smart
• The Inquisitr, PaidContent acquired for $30 million
• CenterNetworks, PaidContent Acquired By Guardian Media Group
• BuzzMachine, Paid Content, indeed
• Mashable, Guardian Acquires paidContent for $30+ Million
• Techmeme has more here

For those who follow social media closely, this emerging trend really comes as no surprise. The savvy media people have been treating the big blogs like the highly influential media they are.

As the old ways of consuming content (read: print/newspapers) continue to wane, it is natural that they would refocus their distribution online. What seems to be slowly happening is media content providers are finally realizing what business they are in. As the writing on the wall gets harder and harder to ignore, we will see a huge uptick in media consolidation between traditional “old media” and new media. More specifically, when newspapers and magazines realize they are in the content business, radio realizes they’re in the audio business and TV realizes they’re in the video business; the acquisitions we’re seeing today will be small potatoes.

The better question is who will consume whom. Will old media get it soon enough to buy thier way out of their current perdicament or will they wait to long? It is conceivable that emerging new media companies like TechCrunch, for example, could buy “old media” outlets in a play for writing talent.

Yaari = Spam: Note to Emerging Social Networking Sites, This is Bad

Social Networks continue to pop up at quite a clip. The newest one to catch my attention was Yaari – the India-based social network. I received an invite from someone I respect and thought I’d check Yaari out. I went to the site, gave an email address and password.

Everyone in my Gmail address book knows what happened next because you received an invite to Yaari anyway. My apologies to all who Yaari spammed on my behalf.

Of course, I was embarrassed and mad and conveyed as much on Twitter and FriendFeed. Today, I received a note from Yaari CEO, Prerna Gupta. She wrote, “…By registering for Yaari and agreeing to the Terms of Service, you authorized Yaari to send an email notification to all the contacts listed in the address book of the email address you provided during registration. This is clearly stated in our Terms of Service and on the Registration Page.”

Yaari does in fact note this in the fine print in a tiny, gray font at the bottom of the registration page. You can see how I missed it.

Shame on me for not reading the fine print in the footer, but there is a bigger issue here. You don’t grow your site, social network, etc. – no matter what it is – by tricking users into inviting their friends. If you build a valuable service, they will do so on their own. The key here is to be compelling, or interesting, or valuable, etc. and people will find you.

Lead with the product, not the marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t encourage your users to invite their friends to your site. By all means, make your site as viral as you can. But, there is a line and Yaari has clearly crossed it.

According to the note, Yaari will – at some as yet undefined point in the future – change its TOS and will no longer notify your entire your address book when you sign up. I, however, will not be back to Yaari to test that promise. As an emerging web destination, you get one chance to win the hearts and minds of your users. Breaching that trust right out of the gate sets a terrible tone going forward, that is assuming you get any users to go forward.

Plurk Makes Compete's Top Five Fastest Growing Sites

Compete.com just released its June 2008 Top Movers data. In the top five was Plurk. Landing the #4 positioin was the newest microblogging site to hit the web.

In my June 1 Twitter versus Plurk post, I wondered aloud if Plurk might be the prime beneficiary of Twitter’s trouble scaling and related downtime. Based on the Compete data, that appears to be the case.

I’ve continued to play around with Plurk, here.

With all of Twitter’s faults, it has remained sticky – mainly due to the inertia it has created, couple with all of the Twitter apps that make accessing Twitter so easy. While Twitter continues to grow, part of that growth may be due to PR momentum that to date has help Twitter add more user that it is losing due to performance. Whether Twitter can shake off the “dead man walking” moniker remains to be seen.