“There are actually 7 million blogs being watched on this one site called Technorati. And it gives you an idea of what is going on. And there’s so much out there. And it’s so hard to keep track of it all. But if you take a look at a site like this it will break it down for you.” — Jacki Schechner, CNN’s blog reporter, talking on “Inside Politics”

Nothing could be weirder than the first time you watch CNN’s “Inside the Blogs,” a segment on Judy Woodruff’s “Inside Politics.” CNN’s “blog reporter” Jacki Schechner does a tag team with producer Abbi Tatton, as they bring up Weblogs on dueling computer monitors and tell you what the blogs are saying about the issue du jour.

But this is the logical next step in the evolution of blogs — whether the old-school bloggers like it or not — as mainstream culture grapples with the concept of Weblogs and their growing power in punditry. Increasingly, mainstream media outlets will need to explain how memes spread in the blogosphere, who is saying what, and what their agenda is, if any.

While bloggers might resist attempts to superficially or technologically assess “what the blogosphere thinks” on a particular issue, these aggregated looks by CNN and now Slate’s “Today’s Blogs” (also launched in February) are windows into a world that is new to so many people. Plus, very few bloggers would turn down the promotion they receive from mainstream media exposure.

And for journalists, aggregators can be a blessing, giving them a quick read on an issue, offering new insight on a topic of research, or putting them in touch with new sources for a story. After journalists’ stories have been posted online, they can track feedback by searching via engines such as Technorati or Daypop.

So here’s a guide to some of the better blog aggregation efforts so far. I’ve kept away from pure RSS readers such as NewsGator or Bloglines, as they offer more of a software solution than an editorial or weighted view into blogs. Keep in mind that most of these features and services are new and sometimes buggy or inaccurate. But having a flawed reading is better than the alternative: reading all 7 million blogs yourself.

The list is in order of those with the most human touch to those that employ the most automation. In all cases, I tried to focus on how blogs viewed the recent death of Pope John Paul II.

CNN’s Inside the Blogs

So how do you do good TV about blogs? Many cable news shows have started booking bloggers such as Robert Cox and Jeff Jarvis regularly. But CNN decided to take a different tack with its blog reporter and politics producer going on-screen in a special section of the set. The pair shows actual blog pages and postings with the CNN talking heads poking out of a small box in the corner of the screen. On the pope’s death, they noted that some bloggers were actually happy about it (though they didn’t name names), and pointed to The Pope Blog and the Catholic Insider podcast as good sources.

The broadcast has shades of the old TechTV channel, though the segment was severely hampered by not even listing the blog URLs — nor were they even on the show’s Web site or transcript. Predictably, some bloggers cried foul for bias, and one knocked CNN for referring to many more conservative blogs than liberal ones. Still, the segment is worthwhile despite its shortcomings, even if it only helps Woodruff and other newbies “get” the blogosphere. Of course, the special guest on “Inside Politics” that day, Rev. David O’Connell, president of Catholic University, couldn’t help getting off a dig about the “incivility of blogs” that didn’t respect the pope.

Grade: A for effort, C+ for execution

Today’s Blogs

Slate has made its mark not just with political reporting and insightful features, but with its people-powered aggregators like the groundbreaking Today’s Papers and In Other Magazines. The concept is simple: Have a writer read other media and sum it up in a witty way for the time-challenged consumer. Taking on Weblogs makes a lot of sense for Slate, and they promise in their promos to deliver “Five Million Blogs in Five Minutes.”

Today’s Blogs is a lively read and largely focuses on the most popular A-list bloggers and the memes they are following. The feature, written by rotating interns and editorial assistants, has the disadvantage of trying to sum up millions of blogs in the space of a short column — unlike Today’s Papers’ limited purview of the top stories in the top five newspapers. Worse still is the ethical mire the column descends into by almost always linking to news stories in the Washington Post, the flagship paper of Slate’s new owner. There are plenty of resources such as Daypop Top 40 and Blogdex that can help point the Slate interns to which news stories are most linked in the blogosphere; these should be the ones that get the links from Today’s Blogs.

[Update, 4/6: Slate editor Jacob Weisberg said: "We do NOT have a policy of favoring the Washington Post for newslinks in the body of stories. Our policy is to use whatever story seems best to us, or whichever one has more relevance to the bloggers we're covering. Apparently, the editorial assistants have been favoring the Post for just the last week. This was not according to our editorial policy, and they won't be doing it that way any more."]

Grade: C+ for effort, B+ for execution

CJR Daily’s Blog Report

From the ashes of CJR’s much needed CampaignDesk.org site during the election comes CJR Daily, a continuation of that site with an expanded focus on daily journalism. One of the regular features has been Blog Report, which also has its roots in election coverage and politics. CJR Daily’s managing editor Steve Lovelady has taken heat for saying, “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail,” in reference to bloggers taking down former CNN honcho Eason Jordan.

But that hasn’t stopped Blog Report from being a smart read on chatter in the blogosphere. Sometimes CJR’s rotating writers take on a more patrician tone toward those unruly bloggers, but other times they get into the spirit of things. On the day of the pope’s viewing at the Vatican, for example, Blog Report was agog over the start of the baseball season and how bloggers reacted to the Yankees’ win over the Red Sox. In their defense, though, CJR Daily had a number of other items on papal coverage.

Grade: A- for effort, B+ for execution

Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire

Goddard, an author and political consultant, runs one of the more interesting hybrid aggregator sites, Political Wire. The Front Page is a blog that Goddard maintains with an editorial voice, looking mainly at mainstream news reports on U.S. politics. Then he has two separate automated sections for liberals (“Southpaws”) and conservatives (“Wingers”). Again, the focus is on established A-list bloggers such as Daily Kos and Powerline, but it often has the look of a high-powered group blog, with a clean layout that doesn’t force you to click through to the blog posts themselves. On the pope, Goddard had a nice pointer to “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” an old novel and movie about a Russian pope that foreshadows in many ways the rise of Pope John Paul II. Political Wire does a better job of making sure you don’t miss the top political issues without digging much past the A-list.

Grade: B- for effort, A- for execution

Memeorandum

While programmer Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum is a fully automated look at the top news stories and blog posts relating to those stories, there is a very human element in Rivera’s choice of which Weblogs to aggregate. While Google News has also made the claim of full automation, we know that some person had to program the software, pick the sources and rank them. Rivera was aggregating in “the low hundreds” of blogs as of last summer, and he mainly focuses on top U.S. news stories and controversial op/ed columns that catch fire in the blogosphere. Rivera maintains that stories are chosen by popularity of links in to them, as are Weblogs, similar to the Technorati system. The page is simple and clean, but the headlines and blurbs don’t always give you an idea of the subject matter. For example, an item on Peter Jennings’ lung cancer originally linked to his bio instead of an AP news story.

Grade: B for effort, A for execution

Kinja

Though it hasn’t received as much attention as Nick Denton’s other blog ventures, Kinja could evolve into a valuable blog aggregator in time. Currently in beta, Kinja allows you to follow various favorite blogs on its site without encumbering you with the nuances of RSS or reader software. As for aggregation, there’s the Editor’s Digests of subjects such as Baseball, Food, Sex and Politics (with Liberal and Conservative subgroupings). A strength of the site is the simple navigation and nice layout for newbies, but its weaknesses are pretty glaring. Technically, headlines spew out in unintelligible bites at times, as do the blurbs from blog posts; editorially, some blogs were miscategorized (e.g. Outside the Beltway in the Liberal section); ethically, you can’t help but sneer at the prominent placement of Denton blogs Gawker, Wonkette, et al. However, in the Editor’s Showcase of good blog writing, there was a recent inclusion of LA.comfidential, a competitor to Denton’s Debaser blog. With some technical attention and a more neutral viewpoint, Kinja could become indispensable.

Grade: C for effort, D for execution, B for potential

Findory

This comes in as perhaps the most high-concept entry. Findory attempts to take the Google News format two steps further — by offering an interface with just news headlines and blurbs, and another with just blogs. But Findory’s most interesting feature is that the weight and placement of stories depends on what you click through to read on repeat visits. There’s even a little icon that comes up next to stories it considers to be of keen interest to you. I decided to have a little fun by clicking on the weirdest news stories relating to aliens and a woman breastfeeding tiger cubs in Myanmar. Sure enough, on future visits, I was presented with more of those types of stories. Findory makes you think before you click through (“will I be permanently tainting future recommendations?”), but still provides you with top world stories despite any fetish you might have for less newsy items. It has a very simple design that could use photos to break it up. And blog posts are sometimes miscategorized by the blogger’s background rather than the subject matter. Otherwise, a fascinating experiment.

Grade: A- for effort, B+ for execution

Which are your favorite blog aggregators, human or automated? Click the button to tell us which ones you like and why.

In the last two years social networking sites mushroomed across the net, heavily fertilized by hype and the promise of six degrees of connection between socially dispersed people who shared common interests or friends. Now companies actively apply social networking principles to shift more stock and lure more clickthrus to their site.

In 2003, social networking sites Friendster, tribe.net and LinkedIn started business. Now there are up to 200 social networking sites covering everything from business contacts to dating. In New York and Boston mobile service Dodgeball informs users when a friend of a friend (FOAF) is within 10 blocks. FOAF is now also the name of web-based software protocol that describes people and their friends.

Eurekster is a search engine that matches your search terms with pages viewed by your friends and FOAFs. In December Netflix launched a new tool, where members can see recommendations from their friends. Delicious Library, a hugely popular book, CD and DVD inventory management program for the Mac will include social networking tools in the next version so friends can share their tastes.

The concepts, then, are all around the Net, but what are social networks, really? How do they work, and what’s their relevance to the news business?

There are two flavours of social network: the broad and the deep. Broad social networks are any form of on-going interaction between people, and they have existed since the emergence of tribes in human evolution.

“There’s a whole spectrum of relationships,” said Howard Rheingold, who in 1993 wrote a book about social networks and virtual communities. “For example, somebody in the store, whose name you don’t know but from whom you might buy regularly, they are part of your social network, the person who delivers your mail, your friends and family. There are all sorts of degrees of relationships within social networks.”

This sociological definition comprises a broad matrix of relationships that feeds one of the most powerful appetites in people: the hunger to connect with others through a common goal, shared interests or mutual benefit.

The deep definition refers to the increasingly common online practice of developing tools to leverage the friends of a friend for mutual benefit. “I think the use of the term social networks has changed. Since Friendster, I think it’s come to mean services like Friendster. Of course, the term pre-dates the Internet,” said Rheingold.

On the Internet, social networks are old news. In the early days of the Arpanet, originally designed for military communication, designers saw the new network as a means of collaboration between researchers. Collaboration was one of the ideas that inspired Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web.

“Social Networks, codified or not, provide a mechanism for prioritization and filtering of information, including news,” said Tony Gentile in an e-mail interview. Gentile, a strategic marketing consultant for Internet companies, runs buzzhit.com, where he writes about emerging technologies and trends.

Technologies, like bulletin boards, Internet forums, e-mail, chat, and instant messaging are all social networking tools. Amazon recommendations, its listmania, reader’s reviews and ‘people who bought …’ listings all serve as relevant context and timely information in a world of virtually unlimited choice. They are simple and basic functions that tap into low level, or broad, networking concepts.

Deeper social networking is emerging with weblogs, where people start a conversation and, often, invite others to comment. Add trackback into the mix and you get the formation of conversations, relationships and networks. Sites like LiveJournal exist to enable blog networks. Rathergate, Easongate and the Tsunami disaster are all examples of how elaborate social networks develop spontaneously around the news, with people sharing news, evidence and analysis.

“In the case of blogs and feeds, your social network may do more than simply refer content to you; they may annotate it with their own analysis and commentary,” said Buzzhit’s Gentile. “This combination of social networking, blogging, referral and annotation is at the heart of service likes Rojo.”

Similarly, wikis such as Wikipedia and open source software development, like Linux or Firefox, draw together a network of disparate individuals into a shared goal.

Again, all this is old news, but now companies want to develop ever more elaborate social networking components into their software and services. The Netflix and planned Delicious Library tools are significant advances on Amazon’s ratings, for example.

So far, most newspapers have done little to develop the tools required to enable interesting, broad networks needed to foster ongoing relationships with their readers. Most newspaper innovation stopped with ‘e-mail this story’ and subscription models. Even less exists for deep networks.

“I know of very few major U.S. newspaper sites that allow readers to comment on articles. Most channel interaction is through ‘Letter to the Editor’ from posts or e-mail addresses,” said Buzzhit’s Gentile. “And that’s a big issue. Providing the tools is the easy part. Encouraging usage, that is, building community, starting a conversation, is far harder. So, yes, newspapers need to provide the tools … but fundamentally, they must reinvent their relationship with their readers.”

But now some newspapers, too, are beginning to deploy social networking tools and components into their core services. The tribe.net experiment by The Washington Post and Knight-Ridder is an attempt to shore up the rapidly disappearing newspaper classified market and to engage more meaningfully with readers.

In the UK, Silicon.com, like other news sites, encourages reader comments on every story. Those comments sometimes generate stories in their own right. The UK’s Guardian uses discussion groups and regularly invites readers to chat and pose questions to newsmakers and journalists on its live talk section. Additionally, it has a lively set of message boards where readers can exchange views.

Salon.com offers its own blogging service. In citizen journalism, sites like the Northwest Voice develop networks around local news, combining aspects of a blog and a wiki. Across Netspace newspapers are beginning to deploy social networking tools that connect readers more directly to the paper and each other.

At Yahoo News, for example, the ‘Most Popular’ section gets the greatest number of visitors. Yahoo doesn’t break down the numbers to the ‘most popular’ page, but the News site overall received 23 million visitors in January.

“We have three flavours of ‘most popular’: most e-mailed, most viewed and highest rated, and also we’re looking at ‘most searched,’ and we may find ways to start using that data on the site as well,” said Neil Budde, Yahoo’s Director of News. “With over 20 million visitors each month it provides information about what’s interesting to a wide swath of people.”

Right now Budde wants to look at ways social networking could enhance traffic data and reader experience.

“What we would look for down the road is ordering stories more dynamically, based on not just an editor’s view or a mass view, but maybe take social networking, like ordering stories based on a reader’s group of friends, or on people who have similar interests to your own,” he said. He thinks similar tools could be developed around readers’ comments.

But are social networking tools worth all the fuss? Will it have an impact?

“Are you asking me if there’s a way to make money off of a cost-effectively, virally acquired audience of above-average participatory users who produce metadata based on their activities? I think the answer is clear ,” said Buzzhit’s Gentile. “… (Benefits are) audience growth, participation and metadata. All of which should ultimately improve monetization.”

That’s worth pondering. In January the New York Times carried a story by Eric Dash about how the Dow Jones’ purchase of CBS Market Watch was prompted by concerns over growing ad revenues: The online WSJ was running out of space for the ads. Even though the WSJ can add an infinite number of pages to its site, advertisers only like the popular ones. The thriving connection with readers outlined by Gentile is one way of maximizing the value of the pages newspapers already have.

Still, not all are convinced that news is an exciting proposition for social networking.

“The question is … is it already too late? Content distribution is gravitating toward feeds, and feed readers are integrating social networking. Newspaper sites might be able to integrate SN via FOAF, or similar open frameworks, but the likelihood of a consumer inviting 30 friends to a newspaper site seems … remote,” said Gentile.

Right now, I have a feeling Gentile is right. ‘People who read this story also read … ‘. It doesn’t work for me. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

Every subject under the sun has a history; likewise every subject under the sun has news. For dating, it’s the hot new singles bar; for cinema, it’s the latest releases and their reviews. Can’t newspapers develop as a node that taps into people’s desire to network, by sharing interests and information across all topics? Can newspapers open their pages to readers and seed the conversation with content they already produce? (see sidebar, some imaginative speculation).

Whether newspapers can effectively deploy social network technologies, and what effect they may have, are moot points. But according to Yahoo News’ Budde, one thing is sure:

“Social networks are going to continue to evolve, and all the media need to pay attention to it.”