Category: socialmedia

Local news is going the wrong way

Google’s new Local News offering misses the point entirely.

As Chris Tolles points out, Topix.net and others have been doing exactly this for years. Agregating information at the hyperlocal level isn’t just about geotagging information sources. Chris explains why they added forums:

“…there wasn’t enough coverage by the mainstream or the blogosphere…the real opportunity was to become a place for people to publish commentary and stories.”

He shouldn’t worry about Google, though. He should worry more about startups like Outside.in who upped the ante by adding a slightly more social and definitely more organic experience to the idea of aggregating local information.

Yet information aggregation still only dances around the real issue.

People want to know what and who are around them right now.

The first service that really nails how we identify and surface the things that matter to us when and where we want to know about them is going to break ground in a way we’ve never seen before on the Internet.

We’re getting closer and closer to being able to connect the 4 W’s: Who, What, Where and When. But those things aren’t yet connecting to expose value to people.

I think a lot of people are still too focused on how to aggregate and present data to people. They expect people to do the work of knowing what they’re looking for, diving into a web page to find it and then consuming what they’ve worked to find.

There’s a better way. When services start mixing and syndicating useful data from the 4 W vectors then we’ll start seeing information come to people instead.

And there’s no doubt that big money will flow with it.

Dave Winer intuitively noted, “Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!”

I like that vision, but there’s more to it.

When someone connects the way information surfaces for people and the transactions that become possible as a result, a big new world is going to emerge.

Announcing baby with Twitter

I get Twitter now.

Announcing baby with TwitterUntil last week it seemed a bit silly to me, perhaps overhyped. But after using it to share updates of my son’s birth with friends and family members distributed across several time zones in near real-time, I’ve become a new fan of this fantastic tool.

Whereas I may have used email to announce his arrival before Twitter (something I also did after the fact), I was able to Twitter the experience of my son’s arrival throughout the day using my phone to simply send a little bit of info at a time via SMS.

Email would have been way too cumbersome for nearly live storytelling like this. Plus, the self-selective nature of it allowed some people to follow my posts who I probably wouldn’t have thought to email.

Flickr served a similar role for my daughter’s birth nearly 3 years ago, and it was invaluable to me again this time now that my mother and mother-in-law are both Flickr users finally. The photo-hungry grandparent is insatiable when it comes to newborns.

But Twitter adds a really nice new dimension to the way we share bits of our daily experience.

It was great knowing that my little brother in London and my older brother in Los Angeles were getting text messages on their phones as this major life event unfolded for me. Twitter made it feel like they were part of the experience, like bystanders, even if the details were as boring as where we ate dinner or what was on the TV in the hospital waiting room (Fresh Choice and Maury Povich, in case you’re interested).

Big sis checks out her new baby brotherSomehow I think the inability to share those inane details with the people we care about is exactly what makes people feel isolated in this modern distributed world. Well, maybe the world doesn’t need more meaningless data out there, but it certainly needs better ways to get the right data to the right people at the right time.

Twitter does just that.

Gatekeepers need to stop calling themselves gatekeepers

Time business columnist Justin Fox questioned the success of the new media methods in a recent post “The reign of the enthusiasts“.

He suggests the algorithms that proudly surface the deep dark corners of the Internet are actually just self-referential popularity contests. When searching for his name Justin found that the articles he’s written that are likely most influential in the real world fail to rank higher than the articles he’s written which attracted the most link love from media-obsessed blogger types, like myself.

“There are web2topians out there–Battelle and my friend Matt McAlister immediately spring to mind–who are convinced that the Googles (and Diggs and del.icio.uses and Amazons and Last.fms) of the future will do a vastly better job of steering people to what they want, such a good job that most of the gatekeepers of the current media universe will prove wholly extraneous.”

This isn’t the first time someone has accused me of being a Web 2.0 blogger. Coincidentally, the same day Justin posted this, I was mocked by a local construction worker waiting for the bus with his buddies as I passed on my way to the office. He shouted to nobody in particular,

“Man, you know what I hate? Dotcommers.” He watched me walk by stonefaced and waited for a response. The guys standing around him turned to look. Unsure still, he blurted out, “Architects, too. Hate all of them.” He got the laugh he was looking for.

Jeez, am I that boring? Or that obvious and annoying? (Please don’t say anything. I think I know the answer.)

Anyhow, Justin’s question is top-of-mind for a lot of people in the media business. Where I disagree with him and the wisdom of the media industry crowd is on the notion of “gatekeepers” or rather the need for them at all.

Perhaps the most important part of being successful in media is distribution, and the reason we’re asking what the role of the gatekeeper is today is because the Internet has disintermediated the media distribution models that helped them become gatekeepers in the first place.

Online search changed the way people access relevant information, and those who once thought of themselves as gatekeepers suddenly found themselves at the mercy of the link police, the new gatekeepers, the search engines.

Yet, Justin’s explanation of the weakness of Google’s algorithm is exactly what I think many people who get mocked for their trendy glasses, old man sport coats, carefully orchestrated facial hair events, designer shoes and man purses (I don’t have a man purse) all see improving with the introduction of explicit and implicit human data into the media distribution model. The act of hyperlinking to a web page is not a strong enough currency to hold together a market of information as big as the Internet has become in recent years. It’s a false economy.

But the link currency opened the door to the idea of using behavior to help people find things. I love Last.fm not just for the music it recommends to me but because it proves this to be true. The Internet is made of people, people with a wide range of knowledge, tastes, and interests.

Now, there will always be a role for experts, and there are many cases where being an expert is not just subjective. Experts are hugely influential on the Internet as they are in other media. But I don’t see that a gatekeeper is an expert by definition.

There will also always be a role for enablers. Good enablers are often community builders who understand the rhythms of human psychology and emotion. Henry Luce was such a man, and I think he might have been a very successful web2topian today.

If those who call themselves “gatekeepers” want to share their expertise in valuable ways, then they will need to understand how the role of human data helps with distribution of that expertise. If those who aim to be enablers of communities want to be relevant, they will find ways to do that in many of the social technologies that have proven successful in this new world.

Similarly, if the people Justin affectionately refers to as web2topians appear smug, glib or arrogant when talking about media, then they are only doing themselves and everyone in the business a disservice. Gatekeepers know better than anyone that expertise does not by definition make you important. That’s a lesson the Internet generation will learn the hard way when someday they become irrelevant, too, I’m sure.

Are big product launches necessary?

A commenter in Mark Glaser’s recent post on MediaShift about the USA Today redesign sheds light on a problem that Internet companies seem to struggle with a lot.

“I think there may be a lesson to be learned in how to roll these things out. Most of the problems people are having are usability issues that it is nearly impossible for designers/developers who are in the weeds to notice.”

Similarly, Scott Karp asked the right question:

“Could it be that it’s really the social media revolutionaries who “don’t get it” when they assume that what the people want is to rise up against the media autocracy and take control, when in fact what most people want is to get high quality information from a reliable source?”

Unfortunately, even if you do the user research the recommendations of the studies often don’t fit into tight product release deadlines. And the studies often just support product direction rather than fully investigate a user need.

But the problem isn’t the research, it’s the product roadmap. In order to deliver a big punch in the market and cut through the noise, you need to be bold. And big changes that get noticed by big audiences require a lot of planning and complicated scheduling. Big changes are expensive on many levels.

But do you really need a big punch?

Most of my favorite online services tend to evolve organically as if responding to the way people are using the tools. Last.fm, for example, subtely rolls out new features that can occassionally have a significant impact on my usage. They had a pretty crappy web-based player for a long time. Of course, they upgraded it, as I knew they would, and I found it when it was relevant for me to look for it. There’s no amount of marketing they could have done to make me upgrade, and if they had done heavy marketing I might have actually been annoyed with them and considered a competitor.

The online media market is way too fickle to annoy your loyal customers.

But what about reaching new customers? Subtelty won’t win market share.

Admittedly, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but the lessons of the web services market can be instructive. When you empower people to build businesses (or audiences) with your core offering, then you create a multiplier effect and reach all kinds of markets that you might never reach otherwise.

Winning market share in online media can happen by giving people the ability to distribute your offering for you, to create loyal customers for you out of their own customers, to build their own buzz for your product because they have an incentive for it to succeed.

Building the kind of passion required for a distributed customer model like this will never come from big bang marketing. It comes from fostering trustworthy relationships, establishing meaningful brands, proving tangible value, and responding quickly to market changes.

It’s not about noise. It’s about relationships.

I tend to agree with most online media insiders who appreciate the conceptual breakthrough for USA Today online and the balls to act on it, but I would be surprised if any of the positive comments in the blogosphere came from USA Today readers. And if USA Today damaged their relationship with their readers with this redesign, then they have made an incredibly costly mistake.

Online services need to roll out important new features constantly. But the days of hitting the market hard with a new product launch are fading. It works occassionally for major releases of things that are really new and require a reeducation of the market, like the iPhone. But fewer and fewer things fit into that category.

At the risk of invalidating everything I’ve said here by quoting a man who’s social and political beliefs go against just about everything I believe, Eric S. Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” included many astute observations about the way Linux development was able to scale so efficiently. Among the lessons is the classic “Release early and often” mantra:

“In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you’ve winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.

In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena…or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quickly when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.”

Product Managers and Marketers need to bake these concepts into their thinking as well or risk missing the wider opportunity, the ultimate in marketing and distribution efficiency — customers as partners.

Photos: marble2, ccarlstead

A start page on my own domain

With a quick copy and paste job using Kent Brewster’s Pipes Badger and a few widgets from services I use, I now have what is a mostly sufficient start page on my own domain that displays my various forms of online expression. Really interesting stuff here.

Membership has its privileges

Mark Glaser asks his readers this week to submit the answer to the following question:

“What would motivate you to contribute to a citizen media site?”

I can’t imagine that anyone is going to be able to answer that question in an interesting way. It’s the wrong question. It’s kind of like asking why do people sing at church? Or why do people meet their friends at the pub?


Photo: -bartimaeus-

If the church asks you to sing, you sing. If your friends tell you to meet at the pub, you go to the pub. The community and purpose of doing things together is already implied, so you do whatever everyone else in that community does if you want to be a part of it.

Jon Udell starts to dig into the critical mass hurdles for social networks in a recent post where he quotes Gary McGraw saying:

“People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a network. It’s called the Internet.”

The real question is not about getting people to do things. There are too many things to do and too many people to socialize with in a day already.

The question is about forming meaningful communities and the kinds of things that will help a community flourish. Meaning comes in millions of different shapes and sizes, but there are lots of precedents in terms of ideologies, aesthetics, and methods.

News, for example, is inherently about being first to report on an event. Successful community-based news sites enable people who care enough about a topic to either be the first to report on it or be clued in before less speedy outlets pick up on something. It feeds into a competitive and sometimes gossipy human nature. Just ask your best reporters why they became reporters. Digg appeals to the reporter in all of us.

I used to attend a charity event called Rebuilding Together where groups of people would assemble and fix up houses and schools around the city of San Francisco. There was a core team who selected applications for fix-it team deployments. Then there was a leader who would drive the work to be done by each team at each site. On the chosen date, people would jump on a project and invite their friends to join. It was impressive to see what a focused group could accomplish in a day, fixing plumbing, painting, cleaning, rebuilding fences, etc.

Why did people do it?

There was a purpose. We were helping people truly in need. The commitment was lightweight. It was 1 day a year. It was well organized. I didn’t have to debate with people about how things should be done. The result was impactful, a total overhaul of a building. It was fun. I had a laugh with my friends and met new people.

Often when people start asking how you get to critical mass, they’re losing the plot. Sure, it would be great to worry about scaling a site rather than fighting for a Digg. But if you and your community are doing something unique and valuable, then size really shouldn’t matter. And in many cases, it makes sense to make the community exclusive and smaller rather than bigger and diluted, anyhow.

The question then becomes, “Are you offering a service that a lot of people find unique and valuable?”

I think a lot of publishers fail to understand the size of a potential market, what’s unique about an offering, and the value of that offering to the people who do actually care about it.

Then there’s also the issue of recognizing what you can actually deliver. You have to play to your strengths.

Yahoo! Answers is a good example of that. The idea of getting immediate answers to any question you can think of from real humans is outrageously ambitious. There are lots of ways to get answers to questions out there. But Yahoo! played to its strengths to get it off the ground, then it just took off. It’s easy. It’s fun. It works. And, therefore, it’s meaningful. And now there’s nothing like it out there anywhere.

Of course, not everybody can point a firehose of traffic at a domain, but there are plenty of cases where Yahoo! failed to create a community by pointing a firehose of traffic at it.

So, what makes a meaningful community that has a definitive purpose? Yeah, well, that’s an answer you can get from Cameron Marlow, danah boyd, and a lot of people a lot smarter than me.

Though perhaps this is all just echo blogging and the real question gets to something people already understand. Maybe the question is simply: “How do you make membership in your community desirable?”

Wikipedia defines “privilege” as follows:

A privilege—etymologically “private law” or law relating to a specific individual—is an honour, or permissive activity granted by another person or a government. A privilege is not a right and in some cases can be revoked.

I think the answer is in there somewhere for everyone who is struggling to get their community to do stuff.


Photo:Manne

The breakthrough that is MyBlogLog

There’s something very uncomfortable about seeing your face appear on another web site while you’re visiting it. That’s exactly why I think MyBlogLog is going to be a really big deal. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens now that it’s part of Yahoo!.

The quotable Paul Saffo visited Yahoo! last week and said this about technological breakthroughs: “It takes 20 years to have an overnight success.” That’s spot on in this case, too.

First there was email, and then we got instant messaging. The next online communication breakthrough was the social networking app. Now there’s distributed identity, another variation on personal expression and communication.

It’s a more explicit expression of implicit behavior, if that makes any sense.

And just like each predecessor in the social software space, resistence to the new paradigm will widen generational gaps for a time until the concept is adopted widely enough. Change like this is an ongoing theme in the evolution of the Internet.

I remember a time when it was uncomfortable to discover that marketers had my email address and sent things directly to my inbox. It was uncomfortable to know that friends and colleagues could see when I was online via IM and be able to ping me any time they wanted. It was uncomfortable to know that people were looking at, assessing, and deciding whether or not to mark me as a connection on social networking sites.

MyBlogLog now exposes access to another channel that was previously known only to me…my browsing history.

The numbers I’ve seen internally tell an amazing story, the classic hockey stick. But an even bigger indicator is the number of requests for connections that I’ve received since becoming a member. Many are people that have likely seen my face on web pages as I traverse across the Internet, not people who found me through a search or via another friend.

MyBlogLog makes the Internet feel like a huge party where you bump into random people that might be interesting and see friends that you didn’t know were in the same place as you. It’s weird. It’s awkward. It’s fantastic.

What do these connections mean? I can’t say, yet. But intuitively I know that MyBlogLog is going to matter in lots of different contexts. The potential here is just massive.

More on the Yahoo!/MyBlogLog deal:

UPDATE: There’s been an explosion of coverage this morning on this announcement. TechMeme is doing a great job of capturing the links out there. Here’s a sample:


Yahoo! Snaps Up Mybloglog.com  —  Yahoo! is making notoriety a mouse click away.  —  The Internet portal has purchased Mybloglog.com, an Orlando, Fla.-based website that enables readers of web pages to leave information about themselves, building a social network among fans of such things
Webware.com
Mathew Ingram
Rex Hammock’s weblog
Elatable
Squash
Blogging Stocks
Business Filter
Zoli’s Blog
Bloggers Blog
FactoryCity
Between the Lines
Digital Inspiration
The Social Web
10e20
duncanriley.com
CenterNetworks
Clickety Clack
Susan Mernit’s Blog
Caroline McCarthy / Webware.com: YAHOO BUYS MYBLOGLOG. SO WHAT?
Mathew Ingram / mathewingram.com/work: Yahoo buys MyBlogLog — but why?
Rex Hammock / Rex Hammock’s weblog: Yahoo! buys MyBlogLog (deja vu all over again)
Elatable: MyBlogLog and Yahoo light up the blogosphere
Phil Sim / Squash: MyBlogLog will fizzle  —  10 million kudos to the guys behind MyBlogLog.
Melly Alazraki / Blogging Stocks: Yahoo! makes a (small) move — buys MyBlogLog
Mwelch / Business Filter: Yahoo! Snaps Up MyBlogLog
Zoli Erdos / Zoli’s Blog: Let’s Not Spam MyBlogLog
Bloggers Blog: Yahoo Buys MyBlogLog For Real This Time
Chris Messina / FactoryCity: Sticking eyeballs with toothpicks; or Yahoo buys MyBlogLog
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines: Yahoo’s MyBlogLog purchase by the numbers
Amit Agarwal / Digital Inspiration: MyBlogLog: Now Playing At the Yahoo! Theatre
Steve O’Hear / The Social Web: Yahoo buys MyBlogLog
Chris Winfield / 10e20: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog.com – For Real This Time
Duncan / duncanriley.com: Yahoo! buys MyBlogLog
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks: Yahoo! buys MyBlogLog – Yep, it’s confirmed
Junior Hines / Clickety Clack: Yahoo Buys MyBlogLog
Susan Mernit / Susan Mernit’s Blog: Weekend news: Myblog log acquired; Rafer joining Yahoo!
Om Malik / GigaOM: Yahoo buys MyBlogLog… for real!
  —  Updated: 8.58 pm: A few minutes after we had ordered our dinner at Mehfil Restaurant in San Francisco’s SOMA district, Scott Rafer, chairman of Orlando, Florida-based MyBlogLog, checked his Blackberry Pearl, and broke into a smile.

Valleywag
A View from the Isle
Mark Evans
Screenwerk
Web Worker Daily
Search Marketing Gurus
hyku | blog
HipMojo.com and Marketing Blog Bent …
Tris Hussey / A View from the Isle: MyBlogLog joins Yahoo, is this good?
Mark Evans: Yahoo Finally Acquires…MyBlogLog
Greg Sterling / Screenwerk: Getting Y!’s Mojo Back: A Release a Week
Chris Gilmer / Web Worker Daily: MYBLOGLOG, A VIRTUAL COMPANY, SOLD TO YAHOO
Li Evans / Search Marketing Gurus: MyBlogLog Acquired By Yahoo! or Not?
Josh Hallett / hyku | blog: Congrats to the MyBlogLog Gang
Froosh / HipMojo.com: Linked In: More Than Spam?
Jason Dowdell / Marketing Blog Bent …: Yahoo Aquires MyBlogLog for 12 Million
Chad Dickerson / Yodel Anecdotal: Bloggers unite!  Yahoo! joins forces with MyBlogLog
  —  There once was a time when bloggers basically lived in silos of independent existence.  Hunched over your keyboard, you checked your ego feeds every day, looked for inbound links, followed the various meme-tracking sites, and read who you thought was interesting.

Search Engine Land
CyberNet Technology News
10e20
Search Engine Watch Blog
Yahoo! Developer Network blog
Marketing Blog Bent …
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog & More On How It Works
Ashley / CyberNet Technology News: Yahoo! Acquires MyBlogLog (along with their statistics program too!)
Chris Winfield / 10e20: How Long Until Spam Becomes a Huge Problem for MyBlogLog?
Kevin Newcomb / Search Engine Watch Blog: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog
Jeremy Zawodny / Yahoo! Developer Network blog: MyBlogLog Joins YDN!
Evan Roberts / Marketing Blog Bent …: Something Smells Funny in this Shoe
Yahoo Buys MyBlogLog.  No, They Didn’t.  Wait, Yes.
  —  Ok so it’s official and confirmed from Yahoo: They bought MyBlogLog.  This was first rumored to be happening in November, but was never confirmed and we updated our post to reflect that.  This morning the news broke again but was pulled immediately afterwards.

Conversion Rater
Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim and Webomatica
Pat McCarthy / Conversion Rater: MyBlogLog Gets Yahoo’d
Andy Beal / Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog
Webomatica: Yahoo! Buys MyBlogLog
Eric / The MyBlogLog Blog: The Jig is Up — MyBlogLog joins Yahoo!
  —  Todd, John, Steve, Scott and I are pleased to announce that Yahoo! has brought MyBlogLog into the fold.  I’ve been drafting a post about this for the better part of a week and it’s just not happening.  No matter how hard I try, there’s just too much here that I can’t yet put into words.

Read/WriteWeb and Scott Rafer at WINKsite
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb: MyBlogLog Acquired by Yahoo – Grist To The Distributed Network Mill
Rafer / Scott Rafer at WINKsite: Yup, Yahoo! Bought MyBlogLog.
Pete Cashmore / Mashable!: Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog for $10 Million
  —  Valleywag started a rumor in November that Yahoo had bought MyBlogLog – Yahoo then denied it and everybody backtracked.  Another story popped up on MarketingShift early today, adding a $10 million price tag – that post was quickly pulled
Don Dodge on The Next …
Valleywag and digg
Don Dodge / Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Yahoo acquires MyBlogLog for $10M – Has anyone done the math?
Valleywag: SELF-REFERENTIAL: Valleywag, your premature news source
digg: Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog for $10 Million
Jeremy Zawodny / Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Welcome MyBlogLog to Yahoo!
  —  It seems like only yesterday that TechCrunch posted a premature story about Yahoo! buying MyBlogLog.  —  Well, now it’s official and I’d like to publicly welcome the MyBlogLog team to Yahoo.  In the last month or so, I’ve had the chance to meet and get to know the team
Owen Thomas / Business 2.0 Beta: Yahoo Spends Millions on Social Startup MyBlogLog
Rafat Ali / PaidContent: Yahoo Buys Distributed Social Network MyBlogLog; Reportedly Around $10 Million
Profy.Com
TechAddress
Message
MediaVidea and The Blogging Times
Paul Glazowski / Profy.Com: Post Analysis: The MyBlogLog Buyout
TechAddress: Yahoo Snaps Up Mybloglog.com – By Forbes.com CES Blog
Stowe Boyd / Message: Yahoo At The Center Of The Social Universe: But Where’s The Integration?
Pramit Singh / MediaVidea: Mybloglog: a better model for blog networks?
Minic Rivera / The Blogging Times: This time it’s for real: Yahoo buys MyBlogLog

A community site without a community

Taking a little time at home last week gave me a chance to play around with one of my experiments that was nearly at its end. FlipBait is a simple Pligg/MediaWiki site that pokes fun at the dotcom golddiggers out there.


It’s mostly a sandbox for me both technically and journalistically. But it’s not really helping to inform or build community the way I hoped.

First, after a month I still have no participants. There have been several passersby, but a group publishing site needs to have a core team looking after its well being.

Second, it’s just too much work in its current form for me to keep posting to it.

I sort of expected this to happen, but I’m a big fan of experimentation. So, I thought I might analyze the issues for a few blog posts and close it down…

…but then Pligg 9 was released.

The new version of this Digg-like CMS added a key feature that may alter the dynamics of the site completely: Feed Importing.

I give it a few RSS feeds. It then imports the headlines from those feeds automatically.

Now, I have a bunch of feeds all pouring headlines into FlipBait throughout the day. I’m aggregating the usual suspects like TechCrunch and GigaOM and VentureBeat, but I also found a few sources from various searches that effectively round out the breadth of the coverage

I can find new dotcom golddiggers without fail every day.

This is very cool. Though you can see back in the Pligg forum archives that there was some debate about whether this feature would destroy the whole dynamic of voting-based publishing. That may be true, but it’s just too useful not to have.

Now, this might be the most interesting part…

I’m also importing stories from del.icio.us using a new tag: “flipbait“. That means that if you tag an article with “flipbait”, Pligg will automatically import that article and make it available to the FlipBait community. That’s how I’m entering my own favorite posts for the site as opposed to using the ‘submit’ function directly at flipbait.com.

You don’t ever have to visit the domain, actually, because you can pull articles to read from the RSS feed and submit articles to the site just by tagging as you already do.

Hmmm…what does that mean? Interesting question. Can a meaningful community form around a word that represents an idea?