Recently in social|median Category

WHAT:  

• The first socialmedian design contest.
• $1000 top prize.
• Potential second prize of $500 (see details below)
• Potential ongoing work for winner(s).
  

WHY:

• The purpose of this contest is to spur some creative thinking on how to make the socialmedian member homepage work well for the user, while uncovering some world-class design and user experience talent
  
• We're also on the hunt for some world class designers to join our team for project work or more.
  

WHO:

• Anyone from anywhere in the world can participate

HOW:

• Contestants will have until 5pm pacific time on May 5 (midnight GMT) to complete the following task.
• Contestants will need to submit (1) a proposed design for the "logged-in member homepage" on www.socialmedian.com.  This page can be found at http://www.socialmedian.com/[username] with [username] representing the individual's username on socialmedian.  (2) a proposed redesign of any other page on socialmedian, following a similar template to #1.  
• Contestants can access www.socialmedian.com by going to www.socialmedian.com, clicking on "create an account" and using the invite code "design contest".  Only 100 people will be able to use this special invite code so PLEASE do not use this invite code if you are not intending to participate in the contest.
• Contestants should join at least 5 News Networks and then come up with a proposed design for their homepage.  Contestants should have clipped a few stories as well.
  
  
• Key elements of the homepage:
• The Hot List presents a running feed of personally relevant news and activities from the member's News Networks.   Members identify to other users news of interest through our algorithm which pushes certain activities to the Hot List.  Every member's hot list is personalized to his or her own interests.  Currently, there are no filters for the Hot List . 
• Other elements of the member Homepage currently include:
• Links to the News Networks the user belongs to
• A list of the items that member has "clipped"
• Some quick links to some of the key site functions (add news, snips,  find/create news networks, browse users, and a quick link to our browser bookmarklet).
• Our user surveys have uncovered the following areas of member feedback on their homepage design:
• Easier ways to filter or view their Hot List by News Network and/or by people of interest
• Easier quick links to my News Networks (currently buried on the page)
• More quick links and widgets for hot topics, popular stories across socialmedian, etc.
• Less emphasis on my history of clips (takes up more real estate on this page than necessary).
  
  
• How the contest will be judged:
• There will be two prizes.
• The first prize will be for $1000 US and will be judged by the socialmedian team.  
• Entries will be judged based on overall design aesthetic, enhancements to the current user experience, and creativity.  Please Note:  The socialmedian team favors simplicity in design and use of white space, so please keep that in mind. The result should be a visually pleasing, cohesive design that is user friendly and easy to navigate.
• You may submit you entry either as a picture or html or any other format you choose.  
• The judges will look favorably on designs which emphasize how the site will interact (e.g. where ajax would be applied, etc.)
• The potential second prize will be for $500.  We will post images of all of the entries to this blog along with info on the design, and then enable anyone/anywhere to vote for their favorite entry.  IF the blog vote winner is someone different than the first prize winner, then that individual will also get $500.
  

To enter the contest:

• Send an email to Jason Goldberg by the deadline with your submission attached or a link to access it.      Any explanation in writing, audio, or video is also welcome but not required.

The winners:

• Will be paid immediately via pay pal.
• Will most likely see derivatives of their design elements applied to the site
• Will be interviewed for potential project work or more with socialmedian.
  

Here is some additional background on socialmedian as pertains to this contest:

• socialmedian connects people with personalized news and information. 

• The service is currently in an invite-only alpha.  We started working on socialmedian in February and went live with our first features in early March.  Since then we've been iterating rapidly based on alpha user feedback.  We are passionate about simple clean designs which utilize a lot of white space.  We have just recently (past couple of weeks) begun to add any design elements to the pages, as our focus has been foremost on features first.
• At the highest level, what we are trying to with socialmedian is to present people with the most relevant personalized news from any source.  There's a ton of content out there (and more being created every day) and as the noise level increases, people need help discovering just the most important stuff to them.  That doesn't matter whether you are interested in broad topics like Tech News, or Politics, or more specific topics like Rock Band (the game), or android, or modern interior design, etc.
• Our thesis is that a way to solve this problem is to utilize collaborative filtering to help people with specific similar interests identify/discover what to read/view.  The notion is that on any specific topic, there are a set of people who can help other people discover what matters, from any number of sources.  Or, put another way, help them filter out the noise and discover news of personal interest.
• In our socialmedian language, a group of people who share interest in a common topic or set of related topics form a "News Network" -- which enables them to collectively discover and identify to each other relevant stories.  Wiki-like, socialmedian's members can create and join News Networks on any topic they desire.  socialmedian's 2000 alpha members have already created and joined more than 600 discreet News Networks on broad topics like "tech news," more focused topics like "campaign 2008," and very specific topics like "android" or "indie movies."  Users have also frequently created News Networks to track competitive industry news.  Also Wiki-like, members of a News Network also decide what "Topics" to include (like keywords) as well as which sources to include.
• When users see something of interest on socialmedian, they "Clip it."  Every time someone clips a story it alerts people in their News Networks that the story is worth checking out.
• The logged-in member homepage is intended to be the member's dashboard on socialmedian, providing quick access to all the key information they need to navigate the site.
• We have not yet applied any design elements to the member homepage.
  

 

See here for details.

I will also Tweet about it.

If you're into tracking our development here at social|median, this page shows what we're working on.

We doubled our invite-only user base in the past 3 days from 750 to 1500.  Now, we're gathering feedback and absorbing.  We got to the point where we needed more users to get to the next stage of our feedback loop.  It's still VERY early though.  We wrote our first line of code in early Feb and went alpha in early March.

For those who care about such things, we gave out some invites this past week on Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable, and Read Write Web.  RWW outperformed the other sources by 5x in terms of producing alpha sign-ups. 

I put a few alpha invites on my friendfeed tonight to test that too.  It's off to a promising start as a source of quality alpha users (people who sign up and use it and who report bugs and/or feature requests).

Our next code push is Wednesday.  I'll update about it on Twitter and on the web page referenced above.

Subscribe to our twitter updates to track our latest developments.

Here's an example of what we work through each day.

The best NEW way to follow our product development updates, feature requests, bug fixes, etc. is by following Jason Goldberg on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/socialmedian

I'll post everything on Twitter as it happens.

We'll also keep this more detailed page updated.

Following fast on the heels of our first social|median salon dinner on 4/7/08 (which was an intimate discussion amongst silicon alley startup ceo's), our second social|median salon dinner is being held this Thursday evening 4/17/08 in Washington D.C.

This second dinner is an executive-level discussion on "the future of the news."  Executive representatives from The Washington Post, IAC, Conde Naste, National Journal, Motley Fool, the Newseum, and other key interested parties will be in attendance.

While the DC dinner has mostly been invite-only, I wanted to extend an open invitation to any other DC-area execs who might want to attend.  We have space for 1-2 more people.  You should be actively involved in the news space.

Shoot me a note if interested and we'll discuss details.

I resisted for a good while, but am now on twitter and quite impressed and addicted.

follow me here :)

File under: WOW!

Closely held social|median will announce today that it is acquiring the New York Times. social|median investor and advisor Allen Morgan, who was recently put up for the NY Times board of directors, brokered the deal.

social|median's CEO, Jason Goldberg was quoted as saying: "April Fools!"

We just moved from our dogfood version of social|median to a private alpha.

We'll be gradually adding more users over the next few weeks as we listen to user feedback and add more features.

If you request an invitation code on the site, we'll do our best to get back with you shortly. 

Back in the early days at Jobster we had some catch phrases we used to repeat all the time:

"Your #1 job is to have fun"

"When you're having fun it's no longer work."

I can safely report that I'm currently having more fun at work than I have ever had in my entire professional career.  Starting up social|median is a blast.  I'm over in Pune, India right now working 18 hour days with our development team.  This is my second trip over here in the past 4 weeks.  In between trips we're on skype each day for 2-3 hours per day. 

Our top 3 priorities right now are: 
(1) product
(2) product
(3) product

That's how it should be early on.

We're a small team which means that its always on:  if we don't do it, it doesn't get done.

I haven't hired anyone in the states yet, which means I'm a fulltime product manager.  Which is a fantastic back-to-basics approach.

We've been cranking on our alpha code for about 8 weeks now and it is starting to come together nicely.  We're shipping new code daily and getting awesome immediate feedback from our early users.

We have no idea if this idea of ours is going to actually amount to much, but it sure is fun to give it a try.