Test Drive: Socialmedian, a new social bookmarking tool backed by Washington Post
For the past week I’ve been playing with the private “alpha” of a new social bookmarking tool called socialmedian. You can also give it a try. To register as a tester, use this code on the signup page: wemedia. (This code is available for 100 testers).
What’s social bookmarking? It’s Digg, del.icio.us, Mixx, or my favorite of the bunch, Diigo. Here’s another one I have’t tried that sounds similar: Twine. NewsTrust, a non-profit focused on group evalutions of journalism to assess trustworthiness, also fits in this group (Disclosure: I’m an advisor there). I think Publish2 is a similar concept designed for professional journalists and newsrooms. These are all tools that allow you to bookmark your links to a web server, share those links with other people (or professional colleagues) and benefit from their links and recommendations.
Here, for instance, is a page that aggregates feeds and links about social media. It aggregates items from various sources I know well, such as TechCrunch and investor Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC.
But it also includes some sources I don’t know well, such as louisgray.com. Socialmedian allows users to rank the relevance of the sources to adjust the feed. I’m not sure how those rankings impact what I see.
Here’s a longer explanation of how socialmedian works at ReadWriteWeb.
I’m not quite sure where this fits. It’s partly an alternative to del.icio.us or Diigo, and I like Diigo too much to drop it; and partly an alternative to personal feed collections. I track my feeds through Netvibes – and I’m not looking to drop that either. Meanwhile, social feed tools that incorporate all of someone’s online behaviors, like friendfeed, suggest another way to learn from the behavior of friends.
In other words – there are lots of companies playing in this space.
Also worth noting: The company was founded by Jason Goldberg, formerly CEO of Jobster. He told me via email that he’s backed by undisclosed angels and an investment (amount not disclosed) from The Washington Post Co.
