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Techrunch is reporting that magazine publisher Condé Nast has purchased the social news site Reddit. Condé Nast is the owner of a number of popular magazines suchs as Wired, Vogue, GQ, Glamour, Bon Appétit and the New Yorker.

I think this is a fascinating and smart acquisition by Condé Nast. We’ve already seen Reddit partner with media companies like Slate to create “Reddit” views of their data. The Slate experiment just sort of scratched at the surface of what might be possible if traditional publishers embrace social technologies.

For a publisher like Condé Nast the potential uses of Reddit technology are staggering. The publisher could create a single destination site where all the articles from its various publications are aggregated and voted on using Reddit technologies. Alternatively, Condé Nast could add Reddit views to the websites of all the magazines they own in order to provide a “social” view of the magazine’s content in addition to an “editor” controlled view.

I think this is a great move by Condé Nast. Look for Wired.com to serve as the testing ground for how the publishing giant incorporates Reddit into their other offerings.

Update: Check out the links below for more on this:

• Wired Acquires Reddit (instead of just white labeling it) – Read/Write Web
• Reddit Acquired: Interiew with Founders – Talkcrunch
• Wired Digital Acquires Reddit – Wired

The Best of the Blogs (the BOBs) awards program has narrowed its 5,500 nominees down to 150 finalists in fifteen categories. As the result of some sort of oversight, our blog, The Bivings Report, is a finalist in the Best Corporate Blog category.

The BOBs gives out two different kinds of awards:

(1) The User Prize for each category is determined by user voting. You can vote here. Voting is open until November 11th and by voting you’ll be entered in a drawing to win an iPod.

(2) The Jury Prizes will be voted on by a panel of respected journalists and bloggers, including Lisa Stone of Blogher and Mark Glaser of Mediashift.

Anyway, I’d encourage you to check out the nominees and vote for your favorites (by favorites, I mean The Bivings Report). And while you’re at it, vote for Ze Frank in the Best Podcast category too.

Those interested in the newspaper/media business will do well to read a story published in the New York Times yesterday about the Rivals sports network.

Rivals maintains a website for every large college in the country and has 1-4 reporters dedicated to covering each school’s athletic department in depth (many of the reporters are part timers who have other jobs). There is no print product. These team sites provide insider news as well as in deptch football, baseball and basketball recruiting news. This kind of reporting isn’t really done by the mainstream media. In addition to the news, as a subscriber you also get access to a private, team-specific bulletin board where the reporters interact with the subscribers.

Rivals charges $9.95 per month for access to the website for a single team (such as the University of Texas). According to the Times article, Rivals has 160,000 paying subscribers. Assuming each user is paying an average of $9.95 per month, that would mean Rivals is clearing a little over $19 million a year just on subscriptions. (more…)

Xeni Jardin filed a report with Wired magazine to describe the new pressure placed on military bloggers, or "milbloggers" by the Department of Defense. Milblogs are written by active duty military personnel, with some directly reporting from the frontlines. Jardin notes that with the number of reporters in Iraq decreasing, milblogs are possibly the only way to get a firsthand account of ground operations in Iraq.

The controversy over blogging is thought to be representative of a culture clash between  Internet generation recruits and seasoned military personnel who are used to controlling information released to the public.

Currently, all milblogs are being reviewed by the Virginia National Guard for information thought to put military operations at greater risk. 

Currently, there are more than 1,500 active milbloggers. An annual convention (not affiliated with the DoD) is held in Washington, DC, to bring together military bloggers and explore blogging and compliance issues.

Check out Xeni's article here.

Just got an email from the Republican National Committe (I'm on every political mailing list known to man) inviting me to join GOP Mobile, their brand spanking new text messaging network.  According to the email, the RNC intends to use the service over the next week to send out election-related breaking news and action alerts to people who sign up.

Good stuff.  Anyone know if the Democratic National Committe has a similar program? Or of any similar programs abroad?

The Center for Citizen Media is currently collecting bloggers' questions in order to publish a comprehensive legal guide to blogging election day. Student Fellows from Stanford Law's Center for the Internet and Society will be tasked with answering those questions, ensuring that those planning on covering the elections will understand state laws that would affect how bloggers can report on November 7th.

The site provides a few examples on what bloggers can't do when covering the polls:

• In Delaware, bloggers can't hang around the voting area unless they are specifically there to vote.
• In Rhode Island, bloggers can't ask a voter how they voted if they are within 50 ft. of the polling area.  
• Bloggers in California can't record voters entering or exiting the polling areas. That means no snapping pics with the cameraphone or taking video footage to upload on YouTube.

You can submit your questions on legal blogging behavior on Election Day here.

So Hotsoup, the much hyped political social networking site, launched quietly a few days back.  I hope for the sake of founders Mark McKinnon, Joe Lockhart  Matthew Dowd and Carter Eskew that this is an alpha release or something because it is a mess. 

I've been working in web development for ten years now and after wasting spending thirty minutes going through Hotsoup I still don't really understand what they are trying to accomplish here.  The site just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Here are a few of the more glaring problems I saw: (more…)

There has been a lot of buzz about using Google Bombs to disseminate negative articles in political races (such as this recent article on MSNBC’s site and this one on the New York Times site), and we even wrote about it briefly here yesterday. While I agree with my colleague, Todd Zeigler, that the overall impact of such efforts is probably minimal, I do think that it can work from an execution standpoint, although I question its efficacy in making an impact on the actual results of the election.

Given that the election is now less than two weeks away, Google Bombing plans have been criticized for being too late because Google can take up to 30 days to index a website.  While it is true that Google can take up to that long, it does not always require that much time and it can work within a matter of days – if the correct set of conditions are met. From experience and reading various articles, I have learned that if an established website or blog (that has already been included within Google’s index), which receives a lot of links from other sites and is updated frequently, posts a given piece of information, it will begin appearing within the search results fairly quickly and relatively high within the rankings for relevant terms.  On the other hand, if something is posted on a site that is new, that has few links from other sites, that has not been included within the search index previously, and/or does not produce new content on a regular basis, it can take weeks to begin appearing and it will likely not appear as high within the results.

Why does this happen?  Because Google’s algorithm skews towards re-indexing sites that have been established as ‘quality sites’ (i.e. it has a lot of links from other ‘good sources’ on the same subject) on a more frequent basis than those that have not.  It also re-indexes sites that have a track record of continuously adding new content.  This clearly makes sense from an efficiency standpoint for Google as it attempts to cover the vast amount of data that makes up the Web.  It also seems to be a boon to bloggers, as blogs tend to be both link-rich and frequently updated.

In short, a campaign or politically active organization could very well manipulate the system to show negative content pieces higher within Google’s results, if they employ a popular, frequently updated, established site/blog.  It probably would not work if a new / less popular site/blog were used as the central dissemination point (a less popular site would also generate less pick-ups from the blogosphere).  Whether or not paid search placements would have a significant effect is hard to say.  Officially, Google contends that it does not give preference to advertisers within its organic search results.  That said, obviously a site that is seen and visited more frequently because of the ads will likely do better within the regular search results.