SocialMedian was barely a thought for people back in February, but it has gained a solid following in the 9 months

of its existence. Many people would ask why this startup has gained any traction. It is yet another social news site with voting and commenting. Did we really need another? Given the amount of traffic that socialmedian is getting, it is obvious that they are onto something.

With this in mind, I figured it was time to chat with SocialMedian Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg and find out if things were actually as good as they sounded.

A look Back

During the summer, there was rapid growth as SocialMedian added Google Reader and other service integration, as well as replize. These features were added because of user feedback. Goldberg has stated several times, “Our model at SocialMedian has been:  small, fast, and listen to users.” You have probably noticed that you do not see any advertising or many press releases plastered all over the major news sites. Essentially, SocialMedian has been built through its user base. The only “press coverage” you tend to see are reviews from various blogs, including here on Mashable.

Almost a month ago, SocialMedian integrated with Facebook and users saw a large amount of traffic coming from the popular social network. Also, in the weeks leading up to the election, socialmedian announced partnerships with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Their election widget was gaining adoption, and Goldberg stated that the few days following the widget release had seen a 300% increase in traffic. Why? It is probably due to the partnerships created through the Election Talk widget.

A chat with SocialMedian

Rob: How big of a traffic boost did the Facebook integration give you?

Jason: We got a nice initial boost when we launched our Facebook integration as our existing members were suddenly easily able to find and follow their Facebook friends and to invite new friends to check out SocialMedian. Since then, Facebook has been a steady boost for us as our users have amplified their SocialMedian activities to their Facebook friends and new users have also taken to our Facebook features. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of overall impact to our growth and engagement, I’d say Facebook integration has been about a 7, but has the potential to be a 10 with some new developments we have planned to even better leverage the Facebook platform.

One thing the Facebook integration launch did though was it really went a long way towards starting to mainstream SocialMedian. I used to measure our growth entirely on new registrations. It taught me that awareness comes first then adoption. The Facebook integration made a whole bunch of new people suddenly aware of SocialMedian via their Facebook friends. After seeing SocialMedian postings on their friends’ Facebook pages for the 5th, 10th, 50th time, you start to see adoption. The second thing it did was really up the engagement level on SocialMedian. Suddenly it was really easy to follow people via Facebook. That hit our currently active users with a slew of new follow messages, which ignited them.

Rob: Obviously, the Washington Post and Guardian partnerships are a big deal. Do you see SocialMedian making several partnerships like this?

Jason: YES! It took us two weeks to put together the micro-site election.socialmedian.com for the Washington Post and then 1 phone call to get The Guardian excited about taking the widget. Now we know how to do it fast and know better to get ahead on working with more partners to include them. We also built this in a way in which we can replicate it again and again and again with only 2 days to get a micro-site up and running for any topical SocialMedian news network.

We’ll do our second one next week for the Monaco Media Forum event in Monaco November 12th, where the Prince of Monaco brings together 300 leaders in the transformation of media. It’s a closed event but SocialMedian will enable people to follow every blog post, video, picture, and tweet from home. You heard that here first. The page for that will be http://mmf.socialmedian.com.

Rob: Do you see any scalability problems with the micro-site idea? Meaning how often can you do these without affecting how much staff you must maintain?

Jason: No. It basically builds right on top of our “news network” concept in which anyone can create a news network to gather and discuss news about a particular topic. For these microsites like election.socialmedian.com or mmf.socialmedian.com, all we really do now is apply a template created for the election site which adds some additional views like “rising fast” in addition to “popular” and “recent” and which enables anyone to grab and embed a widget for the news network. We can do hundreds of these without any negative resource impact.

Rob: At the beginning of November Quantcast showed SocialMedian at just over 160K page views, what is the real traffic? I saw the email regarding the 300% increase over 3 days. Does that give you over 475K pageviews?

Jason: Conservative estimates had socialmedian at 500K pageviews (rolling 30 days). October ended consistently above 20K per day. Overall, there were 225K pageviews in September, 280K in October, and 120K the first week of November with traffic rapidly increasing as we got closer to the election. Quantcast has significantly more conservative numbers.

Rob: So how do you measure user engagement?

Jason: Clips/day is our best measure of engagement. Clips aggregate all user activities: clipping, sharing, like/dislike, and 1st comment a user makes on a story. In the past 60 days we’ve gone from averaging 1500 clips/day to more than 3500. We have seen the same sort of increase in comments as well. We attribute our replize feature, where users reply to other users vs. just leaving comments, as the key to the rapid rise in comment levels. One thing worth noting is that Mixx has probably 4-5x our traffic, but we are far higher than them on clips/story vs. their votes, and comments/story. In other words, we have more quality traffic we think and more engaged users.

Rob: Have you seen a traffic boost due to the election partnerships?

Jason: We see that our user growth has been more about the tech community suddenly all talking about SocialMedian at once vs. being all about the election. Over the past 4 days we’ve added more new registered users than in the previous 4 weeks. We’ve seen our 3 biggest traffic days yesterday (on a Sunday!) and the two prior days. It happened because users started talking publicly about how they seem to be getting value from SocialMedian. Nothing beats positive word of mouth. And we’ve worked really hard to cultivate that, while spending $0 on outbound marketing.

It’s all about satisfying users and getting them engaged in the service. Then, when they recommend the service to their friends or readers, it helps that newbies see a party going on when they get to SocialMedian (a vibrant community) that they can join in on vs. have to create. Notably, our strongest area is still tech news and we still have a very tech-oriented early user base, but at the same time our users have created more than 2000 news networks on all sorts of topics.

Rob: Will end of election season hurt traffic significantly, or are you seeing increased engagement from the new users?

Jason: So far we are holding up very nicely as new people introduced to SocialMedian because of the election and from Twit.tv seem to largely be staying around. This past Sunday was our biggest Sunday in history and Monday was better than the Monday before the election…so far so good. I think it’s fair to say that the election helped draw people in but the discussion continues around the news of the day.

Rob: What is the biggest complaint from users and how are you addressing it?

Jason: The biggest feature request we have is for us to add topical news search. We have none right now. That’s coming in just a couple of weeks. We’re also working on better filters and cleaning up the UI, which have been big user requests/complaints.

Rob: What do you see as the biggest reason for success?

Jason: The biggest reason for success is simple. We listen to users. We have done very little to focus on growth and marketing and instead focused almost entirely on helping one users at a time find value and get more engaged with the service. Our theory is that one happy user will bring 10 over time. That’s our focus.

Looking forward

Obviously, things look to be going very well for Jason and SocialMedian. It is still too early to determine whether the traffic will decrease now that the election is over, but the micro-sites give SocialMedian the ability to have focused coverage on any major event or conference. SocialMedian is maturing nicely, and I would definitely keep an eye on their future.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or LessSocialmedian Releases Replize to Start Conversationssocialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social NewsSocialMedian Adds News Streaming and Opens its Walled GardenPick a Startup to Get Funded: The VenCorps Mashable ShowdownSocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Based on the developments of the past year, the future of music may very well be free. The record labels are suddenly willing to work with Web companies on free and legal music distribution, leading to the high profile launch of MySpace Music, as well as the continued growth of startups like Imeem, iLike, and Amie Street. CBS-owned Last.fm also got on the free music bandwagon, offering up full tracks with limited free streaming.

However, those are far from the only sites that made noise in the online music scene in the past year. We recently compiled a list of more than 30 different free and legal sites where you can get free music, each of which has its own unique twists for discovering the best artists and songs. Nominate your favorite using the widget below.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Moshable: Great Name, How’d Ya Think Of It?Free Streaming Music Is The Next Big SoundAnimoto Officially Launches Video Mashup ToolLast.fm Partners with IODA - Even More Music on Last.fmMxPlay Launches A Browser Plug-In Music WidgetMusic Nation Partners with Bug Music to Find & Sign TalentNokia Opens Music Store (Which Sucks)

Some interesting things were said, including remarks by Bronfman that Warner will only sign new artists if they agree to give the label a cut of all possible revenue streams. But the biggest story about the talk, by far, was this: MySpace may be creating a music device.

At least that’s what dozens of blogs and mainstream news outlets reporte. A sample:

Today at VentureBeat’s Downturn RoundTable, two panels of Silicon Valley’s elite - one made up of Venture Capitalists, the other of experienced entrepreneurs - offered a roomful of startup CEOs their advice for weathering the economic crisis. And while the two panels differed in some respects (with the VCs saying that they’re open for business and the startup veterans calling this a falsehood) the general consensus was at least in part optimistic: Money will be tight and many companies will endure painful cost cutting, but it’s cheaper than ever to run a startup and innovation will continue to thrive.

The VCs

In a panel moderated by VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led off by agreeing with the themes in Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation of Doom, expressing his concern that we are just entering an economic crisis of confidence, and that startups must enact swift and effective cost cutting - a sentiment that was echoed throughout the panel.Source:TechCrunch
Courtney Holt the top job at the newly launched MySpace Music, CNET reports. We’ve confirmed this through our own sources, and we believe Holt has all but accepted the position and is in the final stages of contract negotiation.

The hunt for a CEO is nearly a year old. Earlier this year we reported on some of the early candidates. Last month we reported that ex-Facebooker Owen Van Natta was interviewing for the position, but those discussions were somewhat complicated by a simultaneous effort by Van Natta to sell Project Playlist to MySpace as well.

Currently Holt is Executive Vice President, Digital Media, MTV Networks Music and Logo Group where he oversees all digital initiatives.

Color me impressed: Google has released a custom Google Earth application for the iPhone, and it’s stunning.

The Google Earth geographical software has been altered to make maximum use of the iPhone’s screen and functionality. You’re able to tilt the device to adjust your view when browsing mountainous terrain, use the ‘Location’ feature to jump right to where you are in the blink of an eye, and use Google’s local search engine to look for information on cities, places and businesses. Google has also added additional layers to the application, namely Panoramio and Wikipedia, for geo-located photos and informative articles respectively.Source:TechCrunch
Project Playlist is one of the many online music services that have popped up over the last few years. It’s both a search engine and a playlist generator - users search for music that’s located on third party websites and then create playlists which can be embedded elsewhere.

The legality of music search engines is far from clear, as we’ve written about earlier. The company says they pay royalties for songs that are streamed, but that wasn’t enough to stop the RIAA from suing them for copyright infringement in April 2008.

The reason for the lawsuit, which is aggressive even for the RIAA, is that Project Playlist has grown into one of the larger sites on the Internet. Worldwide Comscore stats say the site had 822 million page views from 9.3 million users in September, up from 446 million and 5 million, respectively, a year ago. The number of users is probably somewhere around 20 million.

MySpace Music  just sent over an announcement that they’ve signed a deal with IODA, an indie music label. The partnership promises to add over “one million new songs into MySpace Music’s growing indie catalogue.” 

The IODA roster includes thousands of labels, including Arts & Crafts, Ace Records, Bonnier Amigo, Cherry Red Records, Cooking Vinyl, Demon Music Group, Fat Cat Records, Kanine Records, Light in the Attic, Paper Bag Records, Naïve, Premium Latin Music, Relapse, Rounder Records and Six Degrees.

The partnership is pretty significant since there remain very few other large established music distributors that MySpace lacks a partnership with at this point.

In January of 2007, MySpace signed on Merlin, the largest indie music distributor and fifth largest record label. In October of 2007, MySpace signed on The Orchard and a host of other distributors including CD Baby, Baby New Year, Big Fish Media, Panartist, Redeye Distribution and Virtual Label. The deal with Orchard and the rest also added over a million songs to the MySpace repertoire.

All this is in addition to their existing deals with the four major music labels.

The financial details of the deal with IODA were not disclosed, but as noted by Billboard earlier today, the fact that MySpace has struck equity deals with the major labels “while not offering the same terms to indies.”

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SendMe Mobile Signs Indie Online Music AllianceLast.fm Partners with IODA - Even More Music on Last.fmMyWaves Partners with Nettwerk for Mobile Music VideosSonific on the Right Path: Growing its Music LibrarySlacker Signs Deals with 3 Major Record LabelsKanye West Picks Featured Artists on the MySpace Music Channel5 Songs on Your MySpace Profile

Company Name

Azuki

20-Word Description

Azuki provides an interactive mobile media services platform, enabling users to build, engage and monetize mobile audiences around rich media services.

CEO’s Pitch

Azuki Systems provides the industry’s first comprehensive interactive mobile media services platform. Azuki enables content publishers and mobile operators to build, engage and monetize mobile audiences around rich media services. The Azuki platform provides everything needed to establish new revenue streams through the delivery of highly interactive and personalized mobile content and social networking services.

Based in Acton, Mass., Azuki is led by an executive team that has built some of the communications industry’s most successful companies, including ArrowPoint, SightPath, Arris Networks, Acopia Networks and DataPower.

Mashable’s Take

To be a mobile content consumer, you of course need content to consume. And for providers, there are a number of ways to get data to your screen. Perhaps too many to count, given the ratio of service carriers to middlemen. Azuki Systems, a recently launched platform, was created to ensure that all things in the proverbial workflow maintain speed throughout. This goes for content, advertising, social Web solutions, and most anything else that gets transmitted through to an end user’s handheld - and vice versa.

Based out of Acton, Massachusetts, and headed by former SightPath and DataPower executive Jim Ricotta, Azuki is formerly known under stealth operation PeerMeta. Azuki is the name behind the MashMedia platform, a system that promises to handle any and all connectivity details insofar as content and media is concerned.

It’s involved with contextual aggregation, producing so-called “snackable” data for providers and users who both prefer easily consumable items, ensuring compatibility with native handsets of all sorts so that media does in fact reach the largest number of viewers possible. At the same time, making available a series of those bits that make content providers stay in business and remain content providers. All things “monetization…advertising, revenue sharing, and subscriptions.”

Again, Azuki is but one actor among many involved in the content delivery and connectivity in the mobile arena. But if you are a producer of some manner of media and you wish to reach a particular audience without need to consider the logistics of handsets and their respective software designs and whatnot, it may well be an ideal suitor to achieve the ends you want by most any reasonable means necessary.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

The long-standing rumor that Facebook will launch its own digital music service is back in the news today. According to The New York Post, the social network is in talks with a number of existing players in the online music space regarding what the paper calls an “outsourcing deal.”

As opposed to MySpace, who forged a deal with the four major record labels to launch its own digital music venture last month, Facebook already plays hosts to a number of popular music apps on its site. With more than 5 million active users, iLike is by far the most popular, with other apps like imeem, Pandora, and My Music (by Qloud) with user counts in the low six-figures.

So what might a joint venture between Facebook and one of these applications look like? While The Post is scant on details, what seems likely would be a partnership where Facebook either takes an equity stake or gets a cut of revenue produced by the application they choose as their partner.

Through its Great Apps program, Facebook has already demonstrated that it will give certain apps within its ecosystem preferred status. If Facebook were to take a stake in iLike, for example, there are certainly a number of buttons the social network could push in order to make the app more successful and drive more revenue, such as giving iLike more prominence in user’s News Feeds.

One way or another, Facebook will get into the digital music business at some point – it’s simply too big of an obvious revenue generator to ignore. How they do it is the question that will seemingly remain a subject of speculation for at least a bit longer.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Facebook Music?InTune.fm Allows You To Discover Music On FacebookRumor: Facebook to Launch MP3 Store?Facebook WidgetsFacebook Brings on New CFO: YouTube’s Gideon YuMusic Gifts Facebook App Sends the Real ThingStupid Rumor: Microsoft Buying Facebook for $6 Billion

Earlier today we noted the arrival of The Karaoke Channel Online in the sing-along ventures market. Interesting enough, MySpace Karaoke too is pushing its name out into the news cloud to mark the debut of video support as well as a redesign, a new recommendation engine, and more options for users to share media.

Amy Walgenbach, MySpace’s manager of communications, says that the company believes online karaoke is analogous to music as blogging is to writing. Which can make for fairly deep or shallow analysis, depending on one’s perspective of that particular juxtaposition. But whatever the case, the features now being touted by the network, along with the statistics being flashed for the public - 4 million MySpace Karaoke users with over 500,000 recordings - are certainly ones that many karaoke fans will consider crucial to the art of jukebox heroism.

Design-wise, the new MySpace Karaoke is none too shabby. It’s uniquely MySpace-like, for sure (be that a pro or con, you decide), but give it a generous glance here and there, and chances are you’ll find it to be laid out quite well. Options are clearly represented, and jumping from place to place is easy. To be perfectly honest, I wish the well-publicized MySpace Music were as intelligently drawn as the network’s Karaoke site is. It’s that good.

Will video drive MySpace Karaoke’s usage numbers to much grander heights? I suspect not. The YouTube generation surely enjoys the limelight to significant degree, but the attraction of watching a user’s emulation of Elvis or The Beatles isn’t likely to pull a consistently big crowd. Unless of course there are to be phenomena among the mix, such as a LonelyGirl15 of harmonic allure. And since I wouldn’t put it past anyone to “break out” from the masses in such an unpredictable way, let’s just say that the new MySpace Karaoke is here and is open for goods and bads to strut their stuff. Let your voices be heard, if you dare.

Note: MySpace Karaoke recording can be heard and viewed on Windows- and Mac-based computers, but recording is only possible with Microsoft’s operating systems.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Will You Use MySpace Karaoke?SingShot’s YouTube for Karaoke - Now Free!Votigo Challenges Bix in Video ContestsBreaking: SingShot Acquired By Electronic ArtsThe Karaoke Channel Goes Online (Invites)eSnips Launches MicroPortalsYouTube Underground Contest

But today, based on the calls I’ve received from CNET and the San Jose Mercury News, we’ve actually been sued. Earthcomber, the holder of a very shaky mobile patent, first sued Loopt last week, and yesterday added us in an amended complaint. They didn’t even bother with making nasty threats before they filed the complaint. They just sent it into the court and started making calls to the press.Source:TechCrunch

Our co-editor Erick Schonfeld had the chance yesterday to discuss the significance of MySpace Music and free, ad-supported music in general on WYNC’s Soundcheck, a program produced daily by New York Public Radio.

He was joined by Farhad Manjoo, a columnist for Slate, who took issue in particular with MySpace Music’s user interface. Erick argued that, regardless of its execution, the service represents a step in the right direction and marks an important shift toward ad-supported streaming. The music industries are watching this experiment, and if it turns out well, they will likely extend the free streaming model to other services.

Listen below.

GoodReads, a social network for book lovers, is adding the increasingly ubiquitous status update feature to its site. Taking a page out of Twitter’s book, GoodReads asks not “What are you doing,” but rather, “What page are you on?” Once you’ve answered that question, you can also input your current thoughts on a given book in 140 characters or less.

Status updates will be displayed throughout GoodReads, which in turn serves as both a way to read microreviews and also discover other people who are reading the same things as you. For instance, each book’s page will feature recent status updates from members, with the homepage featuring a Facebook News Feed-like display showing recent activities of your GoodReads friends, including their latest status updates.

GoodReads has been on a healthy growth trajectory since launching in early 2007. The site now has more than 1.5 million users who have added more than 30 million books – up significantly from the 5 million books users had added around this time last year. Unique visitors are also up sharply according to data from Compete:

So are microreviews likely to be the next big little thing on niche social networks? The GoodReads integration certainly makes a lot of sense, and given the number of Tweets declaring that “Tropic Thunder was hilarious!” or “the new Zune is sooooo cool” (ok I made that one up) there would certainly seem to be an opportunity to increase engagement by adding targeted status update features.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:GoodReads Hits 5 Million Books & Launches Interactive WidgetFacebook Removing “is” from Status UpdatesFacebook Status Updates: The “is” is No MoreGoodReads Social Networking Site Well On Its Way To 1M UsersTwitter Updates Now Connected to Facebook StatusThe Daily Poll: How Often Do You Broadcast Your Status?Facebook for BlackBerry Drops The “Is” From Your Friend’s Status Updates

Source:Mashable!

If you want to share a webpage with one or more people, you might use a social bookmarking service such as Delicious or Faviki. But if you want to highlight a particular section of a page, or a sentenc