We covered SocialMedian’s Beta launch earlier this summer, and since then they’ve been listening to their members. After several weeks of feedback and hundreds of suggestions, they’ve just announced their first major release with several major changes to the service. Here are the four new core features:

News-Streaming

SocialMedian calls this feature News-Streaming because it allows you to create a News-specific form of content streaming and connects your social networking feeds to SocialMedian to get just the right content shared to the right people and pages. For example, you can share specific news-related tweets or photos from Flickr, but not your Pownce messages. To add links and feeds there’s a new SITE option next to the Snip and News tabs.

The key to this feature is a powerful filtering system that can help you share only the content that you want to share based on the keywords that you specify. The options are plentiful and can be as granular as you want them to be. The same process works with many popular sites such as Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, etc.

Reverse-Blog Widget

This feature allows users to promote their own blogs on SocialMedian through the use of a new widget. After setting up the feed to their blog, the widget is displayed whenever anyone is reading or commenting on a story from that blog on SocialMedian. This will also be the case if they are reading about someone’s blog via a share from Google Reader or Delicious, etc. This is a good idea because it gives credit not just to the person who shared the content, but also to the original source of the content. In the future, this widget will be customizable so bloggers can change the way it looks, the colors, add their logo, etc.

Better ways to find hot discussions and popular stories

There’s a new option menu for finding all of the most popular stories and hot discussions. There’s Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast and Hot Discussions.

Make the socialmedian site more publicly available

SocialMedian has opened up just about every page so that they can be crawled by search engines. They also listened to their users who wanted to be able to expose links to their own pages on SocialMedian, which enables anyone to have their own version of the Drudge Report.

Other changes and future plans

They’ve made the site more publicly available by removing registration walls on SocialMedian pages. People will now be able to navigate throughout the entire site and all external links without having to register on the site unless they want to take advantage of personalization features, clip a story, add a comment, etc.

Conclusion

SocialMedian might not be everyone’s cup of tea because it does require more input and just plain work than most sites these days. However, these new changes will make SocialMedian very attractive to those who love sharing news and information, especially bloggers. It’s like Digg, Google Reader and FriendFeed all mashed up together.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social NewsSocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or Lesssocialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]SocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good EnoughGeoTwitterous: Personalized Twitter on a MapBrabblr Updates Your Twitter, et al.

Less than a day after Disqus announced the launch of their updated Wordpress plugin, blog comment replacement service IntenseDebate is out with their own. The IntenseDebate update will ship in private beta mode this weekend with a public release shortly thereafter says ID.

The updated IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin features a better admin control panel along with full data synchronization. This means that comments entered in IntenseDebate will also be sent to the core Wordpress install. This means that you can test IntenseDebate without the fear of losing comments should you decide to leave at a later point.

They have also updated the main IntenseDebate site with a "Swedish" look and feel they say. And there’s also updated Akismet spam protection. 

Check out our interview with IntenseDebate co-founder Jon Fox and our technical interview with developer Austin Hallock on our sister site HTMLCenter.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

I’ve written about the three leading comment replacement services (Disqus, JS-Kit and IntenseDebate) a good number of times. Today Disqus is launching the second version of their blog comment replacement service. Disqus launched last October and since then has won over 30,000 content creators who use the service on their blogs and Web sites.

I spoke with Disqus CEO Daniel Ha last weekend to learn more about the second release of the Disqus platform. We began by speaking about my last post about Disqus where I noted that they were taking some of the traffic that should have been directed to the content creator for themselves. On the post Daniel said that the issue would be fixed that day but it wasn’t. However Daniel does say that the v2 release today fixes the issue and traffic should no longer route to Disqus but directly to the content creator.

The major updates in Disqus v2 are a new Wordpress plugin and a new developer API. The Wordpress plugin makes comments SEO friendly - meaning that any comments will have associated Google juice. Similar to what JS-Kit launched last month, all comments will be syndicated back to the original source Wordpress comment system - this allows you to leave Disqus at any time and not lose the associated comment data. There’s a new import process which makes it easy to import and export comments into Disqus. Lastly you can moderate Disqus comments directly from the Wordpress admin - no need to go to the Disqus site. My hope is that a similar plugin will be available for other content platforms soon.

Daniel also walked me through the updated Disqus Web site which now features a page for each member that is public. What this means is that if I signup for a Disqus account, my friends can easily track all of my comments on any Disqus-enabled blog. Daniel calls this a "comment blog". Here’s a sample of my comment blog on Disqus:

One of the interesting bits Daniel noted during our discussion is that he believes that he is a heavier commenter than the CEOs of his competition. He believes they went into the comment replacement business because, "it’s what’s hot".

There’s no doubt that the comment space is hot. From the message board application FriendFeed to all of the new comment replacement and reputation services, this space is one to watch.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

AOL has announced the launch of a new blog under their AOL Latino division. Fánaticos is a spanish-language blog focused on sports content including: football/soccer, baseball and boxing from the United States, Mexico, Latin America and Spain. Ads will come from AOL’s Platform-A ad division. In my testing this morning, all of the ads were in English, but the content is in Spanish. If the site is geared towards Spanish speakers, it seems like the click rates would be pretty low if the ads continue to be served in English. The ads did appear like remnant CPM ads so Platform-A probably doesn’t care since the ads are impression-based.

AOL has brought together nine sports bloggers as the initial content team members. Content from other AOL properties will be added over the coming months including a Truveo video search. There’s also an Olympics section which appears to drive users back to the main AOL Latino Web site.

AOL has apparently had a round of cuts and changes in their blog network which began last month. Interesting to see AOL launch a new blog when some writers may be writing for free.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

The world of commenting has seen a number of developments lately, from JS-Kit’s acquisition to socialbrowse’s latest expansion on its own commenting capabilities, all enabling comment creators to have greater control over comments. coComment, a prominent comment-tracking service, is adding a few upgrades to its own site for improved control as well.

Site owners can now automatically delete any unwanted comments based on words or phrases they don’t think are appropriate for their sites. The automation capabilities allow for a more effective management of user-generated site content, as managing comments on your own websites can become quite time consuming depending on volume. Coupling this with coComment’s new option of assigning multiple moderators gives yet another opportunity for the management of site comments to become more streamlined, depending on your needs as the site owner.

Perhaps an even more interesting aspect of coComment’s upgrades is a new Google Desktop widget that displays a user’s last active conversation, which includes a pop-up for comments. This gives users a remote way in which to interact with comments, and makes them a bit more mobile in terms of accessibility across the Web, as that user’s latest activity from any site in which they’ve got a participating comment will display on this widget. As users begin to expect more control and portability for their own data, any expansion on this widget will likely be greatly appreciated, especially as such widgets and remote accessibility could easily tie into the indirect marketing capabilities that we’re seeing within the comment-tracking space.

Combined with the rest of the coComment upgrades, including auto crawl of new posts and comments for Technorati top 100, RSS feeds and email notification of updated conversations, coComment users will be able to better keep track of their own activity as well as the activity of any content that may be of interest to them.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:coComment Adds Blog Plug-in for PublisherscoComment Yourself on FacebookCoComment Adds CoCoCrawler, YouTube SupportCoComment Officially LaunchesCoComment Gets $1.5 MillioncoComment Version 2.0 with More Social FeaturescoComment Preparing Version 2.0 With More Community

Jeremy Wright, b5media CEO, has posted an open letter this evening to the staff and bloggers from Know More Media. He opens the letter by saying that various sources are telling him that Know More Media is closing shop soon, as early as next week. I sure hope that the KMM bloggers and staff already know this and aren’t first learning about it here or on Jeremy’s blog!

Jeremy notes that bloggers will have the option to buy their Know More Media blogs and run them on their own. Jeremy says that he is open to acquiring the blogs and incorporating them into the b5media blog network. He notes, "We will ask that you blog for $50 for the first month, while we ascertain the value and advertising potential of the blog. After that month, we will likely need to restructure the network (there’s a reason it wasn’t making any money), redo the pay structure and even let some bloggers go. But, if you let us, we will turn the network around and make it profitable. We are fully committed to doing what’s fair (and in many ways, being more than just fair)."

Jeremy also is willing to discuss hiring the staff at Know More Media along with attempting to contact the Know More Media owners to look at a full acquisition. He says that b5media is the only blog network that can takeover their network with little muss or fuss.

Check out my interview with Jeremy and all of our b5media coverage to learn more about their blog network.

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This week’s edition of Advertising Age has a somewhat revealing piece concerning movements in Web media space by some old media titans. In particular, The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. We’ve heard the WSJ talk adventurous talk in months past about conditioning itself to compete more effectively in the general news space with the NYT. Now it’s being said that, in addition to the NYT’s attempts to draw itself further into the social realm online, the outfit is pressing to meet the WSJ in its own court: business.

Indeed, according to Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the NYT’s website, coverage will grow in the areas of “the economy, energy, small business, personal finance and enterprise technology,” all of it constructed into verticals in vein of the popular DealBook blog. This move was recently hinted at by John Markoff, a writer and reporter for the paper, while sitting as a guest on a recent episode of “Cranky Geeks,” a weekly video podcast hosted by John C. Dvorak.

I must say, this is fairly interesting information to consider. The Wall Street Journal has made known its intention to increase the value of its website’s components in the area of business, along with a general site-wide refresh scheduled for the fall season, which might help to spur its paid subscription platform further. (This despite a move by The New York Times to eliminate virtually all reader fees on the Web.)

And now that The New York Times is said to be working on delivering expanded business coverage, which one would presume will be entirely ad-supported, The New York Times is evidently leaving little to chance. Staff layoffs aside, it’s evidently working to challenge The Wall Street Journal in its primary domain. The logic seems to be, when all is said and done, to fight fire with fire.

The questions to ask now seems to be: Could this mean that WSJ.com will have to play defense against NYTimes.com? Will favored business coverage continue to fall to WSJ.com? And, reversely, will the traditional strength of varietal reporting by NYTimes.com become stretched and diminish in stature with the WSJ.com coming up closely behind?

It seems to me that both news organizations will retain some allegiance among readers. But while the generations that have lived largely with paper are replaced with the generations that rely mostly on computer-enabled information consumption, crossover will occur at an increasing rate. It’s already done so to large degree, in fact. And at this point in time, my impression is that, for WSJ.com to achieve the ends it seeks, it will have to submit to the call for free-access to its content.

That simple. On the Web it’s a numbers game. It’s a matter of who has more readers and how much they read. In that respect, NYTimes.com is the better bet right now. (Eventually, reader wealth demographics will become more and more important as well.)

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Business 2.0 May Be Getting the Axe from Time Inc.Business 2.0 Says GoodbyeBusiness 3.0 Facebook App Doesn’t Live Up to its NameGoogle Will Pay You to Add Business Info to MapsiPhone Now Wears a Suit: AT&T Unveils Business PlanZoho Business Launching At Office 2.0 ConferenceBusiness Week Online Covers Web 2.0

Yesterday I spoke with JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux who briefed me on several major updates for JS-Kit and their product roadmap. The first update is that JS-Kit has acquired comment replacement service HaloScan for an undisclosed sum. Loux says that HaloScan was actually the first comment replacement system and has over 500,000 active blog installations. He says while the new crop of comment replacement services including Intense Debate and Disqus are getting some press lately, HaloScan is "magnitudes larger". This size was the reason that JS-Kit has acquired HaloScan. Loux believes that these comment replacement services must have very large scale to be successful - and that HaloScan gives JS-Kit that size.

The acquisition is an IP-only acquisition and JS-Kit bought the distribution and customer base. They are currently swapping out the widgets in place that are branded HaloScan to use the JS-Kit widget and it should be transparent to the blog owners. They are 20% done with the swap so far and currently are replicating all comment data into both systems to make certain that nothing is lost. The new JS-Kit is adding sites at 300/day and will have over 8 million users.

The only question I have is why they didn’t push JS-Kit functionality into HaloScan and kept the HaloScan name. I’ve never been a fan of the JS-Kit name, it’s no longer just a javascript kit of tools.

As for the new features, they include a portable comment profile, comment synchronization and search engine accessibility. The portable comment profile screenshot is listed below. Loux noted that unlike Disqus, JS-Kit isn’t redirecting users back to their site - everything goes back to the content creator.

The synchronization feature which is called "sync" is game changing I believe for comment replacement systems. If you’ve read my previous posts around this technology, one of my concerns is what happens if the company goes out of business. Your site’s comments are gone forever as well. JS-Kit believes they have the answer using Sync. What Sync does is pull in comments from your current platform and then back updates live to the blog software you use. So let’s assume you put JS-Kit on your blog, tomorrow a person makes a commment. That comment is sent behind the scenes back to your blog commenting system along with the JS-Kit powered comment. This means that you can turn off JS-Kit anytime and still maintain your complete comment base. Sync currently works with Wordpress and Blogger blogs and Loux says more platforms are coming.

The other update is that now there’s SEO (search engine optimization) support for your comment data - everything will be indexed properly.

Loux concluded by saying that they don’t compete on lock-in like the other comment replacement services do. He believes they must keep innovating to keep your business.

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