socialmedian is now a public website. beta 7/31/08

NEW YORK, New York -- July 31, 2008 -- socialmedian,
http://www.socialmedian.com, a new social news network that is
working on solving the information overload problem, opened its
website to the public today. The public launch follows a four month
invite-only alpha period with more than 4300 participants
from around the world. The socialmedian site is a public beta
and continues to be a work in progress. The company's model is
to ship new features and enhancements every other day in direct
response to user feedback.

Interested parties are encouraged to check out the company's
about pages at http://www.socialmedian.com/aboutsocialmedian/
about-socialmedian for more detailed background
information or to log onto the site at
http://www.socialmedian.com and give it a whirl.  A copy of the
official press release can be found here and a copy of the company
fact sheet can be found here.
socialmedian updates can also be followed on Twitter at
http://www.twitter.com/socialmedian.

socialmedian is founded and led by Jason Goldberg who
previously founded and was CEO of Jobster Inc. from 2004 to
2007.

Goldberg founded socialmedian in January 2008.

The company is backed by Washingtonpost.Newsweek
Interactive and personal investments from Goldberg and leading
angel investors such as Allen Morgan (Mayfield fund), Reed
Hundt (fmr. FCC Chairman), Gordon Crovitz (fmr. WSJ
Publisher), Julius Genachowski (LaunchBox Digital), and Johnny
Taylor (CEO of IAC's Rushmore Drive). Morgan, Genachowski,
Crovitz, and Don Baer (Burson-Marsteller, fmr. Discover
Communications Executive) also serve as active advisors to the
company.

socialmedian has offices in New York, NY and Pune, India.

socialmedian is a user-driven website both in the manner in
which it has been developed as well as in the functioning of the
site.

The company released its first code to an early set of alpha
users in March 2008. Users can submit feature requests directly
on the website. More than 350 user-submitted features have
been built and launched on the site during the alpha period.

socialmedian aims to help anyone anywhere easily discover,
share, and discuss news and information that meets their
specific topical interest through collaborative filtering by people
with common interests. The site was created in response to
peoples' need for better ways to access the rapidly increasing
amounts of news content created daily while at the same time
enabling them to easily filter it down to just the most personally
relevant content. socialmedian helps solve the information
overload problem by enabling people with common interests to
highlight to each other what to read and discuss on a particular
topic from an infinite number of sources, whether it be from a
traditional news outlet or a new media website or a blogger with
a great analysis.

socialmedian's founder, Jason Goldberg, said of the site: "The
name socialmedian itself represents what we believe to be the
next evolution of media; as information becomes more
universally accessible and people socially can create, share, and
discuss it online, what we're witnessing is a massive
democratization of information around the globe as people who
share common interests can instantly become newsmakers for
each other without any regard to political borders or boundaries.
Increasingly, when it comes to news and information, it's no
longer about the have's and have not's, we are all the social
median."

socialmedian's thesis is that people who share topical interests can act as effective filters for each other.

Here's how socialmedian works.

• Users of socialmedian can create "News Networks" on any topic. A News Network enables a group of people to track, share, and discuss aggregated news on a particular topic.  Within a News Network, users can share RSS feeds or submit content to socialmedian via a browser bookmarklet, by email, or directly on the site.
• Users "clip" stories of interest to highlight them to people in their Networks.
• Every user gets a personalized news feed on their socialmedian homepage which presents relevant news clippings from people in their networks.
• Users can also specifically follow other users as their "Newsmakers" This enables one user to effectively get their news through another user, following what the other person is clipping, discussing, and sharing. Users can elect to follow all updates from another user or only those updates relevant to that person's topical interests. For bloggers, journalists and others opinion leaders, becoming a "Newsmaker" provides a new way to engage with their audience.
  

Here are some facts on the alpha period:

• socialmedian's 4300 users have created more than 1125 News Networks
• The most popular News Networks (http://www.socialmedian.com/network?s=popular) on socialmedian include:
• Web 2.0, 1250 users http://www.socialmedian.com/network/web-2-0
• Social Media Watch, 685 users http://www.socialmedian.com/network/socialmedia-watch
• Twitter, 442 users http://www.socialmedian.com/network/twitter
• Campaign 2008, 305 users http://www.socialmedian.com/network/campaign-2008
• iPhone, 116 users http://www.socialmedian.com/network/iphone
  

• The most popular Newsmakers on socialmedian already have more than 100 followers.http://www.socialmedian.com/users?s=popular
  
  
• The U.S. represents just less than 50% of the alpha users. Top countries represented on socialmedian thus far:
  

 U.S. 48%
 India 10%
 UK 10%
 Italy 4%
 Canada 3%
 Germany 2%
 Netherlands 2%
 Australia 3%
 China 2%
 Japan 2%

Also notable:

• socialmedian beta also includes several progressive innovations in areas such as use of the Google Social Graph API and Twitter integrations.
• With the beta release socialmedian users can now share news from socialmedian on Twitter from the socialmedian site
• The socialmedian site is built upon the Ruby on Rails web framework along with nginx as a web server proxying to Mongrel instances. socialmedian uses multiple MySQL database servers, and memcached;, a distributed memory caching system, to help withstand high traffic.
• The company has built an engine for crawling and parsing tens of thousands of RSS feeds using solr, an open-source search server based on Lucene search library.
• Socialmedian recently held a global contest for user experience designers to design the socialmedian iphone application, one of the top user requests. The contest concluded on July 28, 2008 and submissions will be displayed on the company's blog at http://blog.socialmedian.com in the coming days.
  

For additional assistance, journalists, bloggers, and analysts
may contact Scott Wheaton, Scott@socialmedian.com 1-315-751-4372 or Jason Goldberg Jason@socialmedian.com 1-917-455-1020.