We’ve already seen apps like Feedly, Pulse, and NewsBlur gain a whole bunch of new followers as a result of the news, but there’s still one more app we’ll be waiting to try before picking what RSS camp to join in July: Digg’s news reader, scheduled to launch in late June. Digg executives haven’t said a lot about the product, but they shared a few details with me in a recent interview.

While Digg went into a steep decline in recent years that was evident as early as 2009, the NYC-based incubator Betaworks has brought the site back to life in recent months since acquiring the site last July. Digg announced just after the Google Reader announcement that it too would be launching a competitive service, and considering the team’s success in taking the previously defunct social news site and making it relevant again, there’s a good chance that its RSS reader could be a win as well.

I recently sat down in the large, airy Betaworks office in the heart of the Meatpacking District in New York, where the walls are covered in paper lists and small groups were holding brainstorm sessions all over the high-ceilinged space. Programmers and designers sat around the three rooms at different tables, which were organized by company, from Digg to Dots to Instapaper (some of which were just a few people.) When I visited, CEO John Borthwick was busy explaining what Betaworks is all about to a group of visitors through the Open.Co visitor program, and there was Chinese food on the counter from a group lunch. It felt like a more energetic, collaborative version of any co-working space I’ve visited in San Francisco.

I sat down with Jake Levine, formerly of News.me and now the general manager for Digg, and Andrew McLaughlin, the SVP of Betaworks and CEO of Digg, who was formerly a VP at Tumblr, Deputy CTO of the United States, and Director of Global Public Policy for Google. Levine and McLaughlin talked about the evolution of their thinking toward social news, and how the new Digg RSS reader project was a long-planned feature that is essential to Digg’s goal of creating the best social news experience on the web.

The re-birth of Digg

Digg has been around for a while — younger users, like myself, might not remember it from its heyday, when it practically introduced the idea of social news.

Founder Kevin Rose (now a partner at Google Ventures), was the subject of a now-infamous cover of Businessweek in the summer of 2006. Though the company later spiraled downward, caught between the rise of Facebook and Twitter, as Om wrote, it had a lasting impact on modern media.

Parts of the company were sold off to different companies like The Washington Post and LinkedIn, but it was Betaworks that bought the consumer-facing site and reader base for reportedly just under $500,000 dollars in July 2012.

“If there’s any company that understands the real-time nature of the web, it’ll be the people that brought us all these really cool things like bit.ly and Chartbeat,” Rose said when he reflected on the sale.

Re-imagining Digg from lessons learned with News.Me

Betaworks advises and invests in companies that are associated with the concept of social news. Some of its brainchildren, acquisitions and investments include Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Instapaper, SocialFlow, Dots, and Tumblr, just to name a few. CEO John Borthwick, who most recently spoke at our paidContent Live conference in April, has talked about the group’s unique approach to fostering startups, which is to launch them quickly in their early form, then killing the ones that don’t catch hold and putting people, servers and data insights behind the ones that do.

So when Betaworks acquired Digg, the timing couldn’t have been better. The group was getting ready to shutter News.Me in October 2012, in part because of Twitter’s API restrictions that were becoming a burden. But the app, which provided users with the top five tweeted articles among the people they follow on Twitter, had already given Betaworks useful data from news geeks and early adopters that could help the group create consumer-facing news site for a wider audience.

Levine explained that News.Me was an excellent product for the Twitter power users, and while it didn’t ultimately scale into a project that worked for everyone, the data, when combined with the stats from Chartbeat (measuring real-time publishing analytics) and Bit.ly (measuring analytics for links shared across the web), provided some interesting insights.

“We realized that the vast majority of people don’t have access to that kind of news,” Levine said. “But we had the parallel realization that we’d accumulated Twitter data from the 100,000 or so early adopting power users: what they were sharing, and what was shared in their networks. We realized could build an awesome network based on those people who were on Twitter for the people who weren’t.”

So the team quickly put together the new Digg in a matter of a few weeks, stripping down the design to a basic grid of stories that are selected both by algorithms and human editors, and letting users perform a few basic functions like sharing and saving. It was a quick start to putting Digg back on track, but the team’s plans didn’t end there.

How RSS fits into the ultimate plan

While adding an RSS reader might seem like an odd choice for the group re-inventing social news — after all, there wasn’t much in terms of social features on the old Google Reader (Google killed the one social feature the thing had) — McLaughlin and Levine explained that in reality, adding an RSS feed was always part of the plan for Digg. Google’s announcement just accelerated it.

“It was on the roadmap and we knew we wanted to eventually have a more comprehensive way to consume,” McLaughlin said. “We just jacked it up to do that now.”

While the two couldn’t yet reveal what Digg’s reader will look like exactly, and said it’s still in the works, slated for a June launch, they described it as two different parts to one Digg site: one part being the current homepage of socially-driven stories generated by algorithms and editors, and the other being an RSS reader of a user’s feeds, with updated features that someone following blogs in 2013 would want (save to Instapaper options, etc.) The two sections will be unified by a common design.

“For now, it’s aimed at power users and we’ll see if we can nail that. It’s going to be super clean and very uncluttered. Very fast,” McLaughlin said.

Users who don’t want the RSS feature and don’t create logins will still be able to visit Digg.com, so that experience won’t change for people who are happy with it. But ideally, people who care about following particular blogs and news sources will be able to get that kind of news from Digg as well.

“What we’re working on in the Digg reader, and what we think is now the integral part of a good reader, is speedy management,” McLaughlin said. “We’re trying to make it very easy to sort and just distill all of your items, or any feed down to the most popular items or the most popular in your social circles.”

Reading a business?

They said they’re extremely optimistic that a quality news reader could actually make money and create a sustainable business. While Digg’s  reader likely won’t be a paid product at first, they said they could see subscriptions or download fees as a way to make money in the future when the product is more solidified. As of early April, about 40 percent of survey respondants said that they’d be willing to pay for the product — a remarkable number, even if only half of them are telling the truth.

“Our goal is not to make everyone a power user. There are users who want that highly personalized reader experience. But the next year for us is exploring all of the options in that space,” Levine said. “There are plenty of products for power users. Our mission of making the social web more accessible for news discovery is something that transcends just this product.”

For those of us who obsessively check Twitter every day to find and re-tweet the latest news, it might be hard to understand the problem that Digg is trying to solve. But while we may think we have social news figured out, it’s time for a reality check: as of December 2012, only 16 percent of online adults were using Twitter, and far fewer are actually tweeting. If Digg succeeds, it could both attract the power users who care about RSS feeds and power the types of products like Google Reader, and then take that news data derived from those users to create a smarter general news site for everyone else.

Pre-Twitter Digg, say hello to post-Twitter Digg.

“Obama’s Way” by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair came first followed by “The Busy Trap” in the New York Times and a series of techy-articles on topics like hacking and Apple. On the video front, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” — of course — led the way followed by an eclectic mix of clips about investing, body language and activism. You can see both top ten lists here.

While view-it-later services are undeniably popular, Pocket’s report raises two questions. First, how many people actually read that Michael Lewis article later rather than read-it-never? In my case, I put several items a week into my Instapaper folder but rarely get around to retrieving them (unless they’re for research). Pocket offers a graphic that suggests many people do in fact open the stuff they store but the chart doesn’t take account of multiple opens by the same person:

The other question about Pocket’s findings turns on the tech-heavy subjects of the top 10-list. While pieces like “The inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (#6, Chris Ziegler of The Verge) are popular among techies, such fare is too esoteric for most folks. My family and friends don’t read articles like that but prefer instead more universal subjects like food, travel, philosophy or sports. Does this mean Pocket’s growth will be mostly limited to computer types?

Probably not. These type of services are so useful that they are likely to enjoy widespread adoption soon. Meanwhile, publishers like BuzzFeed are making them even easier to use by adding “read it later” buttons right on their stories:

Finally, the popularity of “view-it-later” tools will continue to grow as products like Amazon’s Kindle add buttons of their own. For an easy-to-read overview of to use these Pocket and similar products, see my colleague Laura Owen’s helpful explanation here.

(Image by CREATISTA via Shutterstock)

One approach that has gotten a lot of attention, in part because it comes from former Tumblr designer and Instapaper founder Marco Arment, is an online and mobile magazine called simply The Magazine, which launched earlier this month. The simplicity of the name is reflected in the platform itself: Arment’s digital magazine, which is focused on long-form essays about technology and culture, has virtually none of the elements that we’ve come to associate with online or virtual magazines — it has no masthead or sidebars or boxes with interactive ads, no table of contents or sharing buttons or drop-down menus. In fact, it has virtually nothing but words and links (and some cool hyperlinked footnotes).

One of the reasons why The Magazine is able to strip down its reading experience so much is that it has no advertising of any kind: the content is subsidized solely by subscriptions, and Arment said recently that it is already financially sustainable — since it is being produced almost single-handedly, and therefore has an extremely low cost structure compared to traditional publishing. In that sense, it approaches what some have called “artisanal” publishing, and there is some good discussion of the pros and cons of that model in a Branch discussion that includes designer Jon Lax and NYT staffer Jeremy Zilar.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

From a design perspective, however, the simplicity of the app is its most interesting feature, in part because Arment seems to have approached it in a way that is the complete antithesis of traditional publishers: as he has described in his posts about the genesis of the project, he started it by thinking about what elements he really needed, and left everything else out. By contrast, most magazines and newspapers seem to ask themselves “How can we take all the stuff we already have and the things we already do, and squeeze them into this new container?” This process is fundamentally broken.

Designer Craig Mod looked at The Magazine and its design philosophy in a perceptive essay entitled “Subcompact publishing,” in which he compares what Arment did to the way that Honda disrupted the automotive business in North America, by providing something that fit the minimum needs of a large group of consumers. In a similar way, Mod argues, publishers need to stop thinking about all the things they can cram into a design on the web or a mobile device and start thinking about what developers and entrepreneurs call a “minimum viable product.”

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

There are already some great examples of content experiences that are trying for a “minimum viable product.” The Magazine is one, but so are lesser-known or more experimental features such as Evening Edition, which was created by designer Mike Monteiro and provides a heavily-curated selection of news and features designed to give readers an overview of the world in the same way a newspaper front page does (or used to). Another more recent entrant is a news site called TL;DR — internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” — which summarizes top stories in a more approachable way than traditional portals.

Let the content fit the experience, not the other way around

Other similar experiments include Summ.ly, a startup launched by a 16-year-old entrepreneur, which Om wrote about recently. It is also designed in as simple a way as possible, to take advantage of the limited time and screen real estate that mobile users often have when it comes to content consumption — something that is also a driving force behind Circa, the mobile news-aggregation app launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Matt Galligan and funded by Cheezburger empire CEO Ben Huh. And then there is the short-form, mobile reading experience offered by Tapestry, which was recently launched by New York-based incubator Betaworks based on a model pioneered by author Robin Sloan.

It’s worth noting that Twitter is a great example of the “minimum viable product” approach, both as a company and as a way of publishing content: not only is the restriction to 140 characters something that keeps Twitter from becoming cluttered with too much verbiage — the way other formats such as blogs can be — but the whole nature of the service itself was so simplified that in the beginning it wasn’t even clear to many people what it should be used for. That didn’t start to become obvious (even to the company’s founders, I would argue) until millions of people were using it, and even then many of the uses that the tool was put to came as a surprise.

This is part of the reason why some Twitter users are so concerned about the future of the platform, as it adds more content through features like its expandable “Cards” and seems determined to layer more and more functionality on top of the service. With any kind of publishing, there seems to be an almost irresistable temptation to continue adding more features and content and doo-dads until the original simplicity of the experience is lost, or at least significantly diluted.

Why aren’t more traditional publishers experimenting with features or services that are similar to Arment’s magazine, or Tapestry’s mobile approach, or a stripped-down experience like that offered by TL;DR or Circa? It’s not because they can’t — obviously they could if they wanted to. But as Craig Mod suggests in his essay, with reference to disruptive economics guru Clay Christensen, they don’t do this for the same reason North American auto-makers didn’t compete with Honda: they simply didn’t see it as a competitor until it was almost too late, because they had defined their business in the wrong way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

The massive growth of a site like Tumblr, which is now bigger than Wikipedia with more than 20 billion pageviews a month (something I have argued should make Facebook more than a little nervous) is even more spectacular when you consider the fact that David Karp — who designed a prototype of the service when he was just 19 — didn’t have any intention of creating a gigantic web company that would one day be valued at close to $1 billion and have over 160 million users.

Create something you want or need

As the Tumblr founder said in our interview, all he really wanted was a tool that he could use to post images and thoughts online. There were image-hosting services like Flickr and micro-blogging networks like Twitter and full-fledged blog platforms like WordPress, but nothing that fit what Karp was looking for or was as easy to use as he wanted. So he built it. A number of other founders at RoadMap echoed that sentiment: build something to fill a need that you have, and if you are lucky then lots of other people will have a similar need, and you will have a useful service.

So what is the takeaway for media companies? It’s fine to say that an entrepreneur should focus on filling a need that they have themselves, but where does that leave a traditional media player? You can’t just redesign a newspaper or a newspaper company from scratch (although people like John Paton of Digital First Media and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger are certainly trying hard to do so anyway).

What I think you can do, however, is to think about who your user is and what they want, both when it comes to your traditional product (i.e. a newspaper or magazine) and your digital services or products. This isn’t something most media companies are particularly adept at, just as thinking like a startup and focusing on innovation is a struggle for many — in the past, media companies just pumped out content and more or less relied on captive audiences to subscribe to or consume that content, without thinking a lot about what they wanted from it or how they wanted to consume it.

That’s the kind of thinking that results in me-too digital apps that repackage print content with a few digital bells-and-whistles, rather than really trying to understand what users want when it comes to news or other forms of content on a mobile device. And one of my criticisms of the rush to paywalls is that they don’t allow newspapers to really get to know their readers likes and dislikes.

Who are your users and what do they want?

For an example of the opposite, all you have to do is look at what Marco Arment — a designer who used to work at Tumblr and also runs a service called Instapaper — has done with The Magazine, a digital-only and mobile-only editorial product that he launched recently. There are virtually none of the trappings of a digital magazine that has been ported over from the print world, for the simple reason that Arment created it to be digital-native. And it is almost an artisanal approach to editorial content, since he picks the writers and edits it himself, to fill a need that he felt existed in the market.

Another good example of thinking outside the usual boxes is Circa, which Matt Galligan and Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh (who was trained as a journalist before he got into the web-humor business) started as a way to provide news in a different format that works better on mobile — as a series of edited summaries of stories rather than the usual repurposed print or web content. Whether users respond to this idea or not remains to be seen, but at least it is trying to reimagine how we interact with content in a mobile age, and it is looking carefully at what users actually do with it.

Most traditional media companies are happy doing surveys of readers so they can target them better for advertising, but how often do they actually think about — or ask — what those readers really want when it comes to their product? Have they thought as hard about the features as David Karp did when he decided to replace comments with the reblog button? Or are they just pumping out the same kind of content and putting it in slightly different packages and hoping that it works?

Getting to know their readers (or users) better, and understanding exactly what they want and don’t want, isn’t just something that would be helpful for media companies to figure out — it could be the only thing that is standing between them and extinction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Zert Sonstige

You can download the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, it sends “news articles, blog posts and other web content” to Kindle, removing advertising and other distractions. You can also preview text before you send it or send only selected text on a page.

I tested “Send to Kindle” versus Pocket on my Kindle Touch and iPad. I sent this Pinterest iPad app article by my colleague Eliza Kern and this YouTube video about a cat and a tortoise to both.

Send to Kindle on iPad

Send to Kindle

On Kindle Touch: The Pinterest article arrived on Kindle Touch within a minute. The formatting looks good, with pictures obviously rendered in black-and-white. Links are intact and work in Kindle Touch’s experimental web browser.

The video does not work on Kindle Touch. It pulls all the text and still photos from the YouTube page.

On Kindle for iPad: Pictures in an article render in color and break up the flow of the text. (See screenshot, right.) This is also a problem in Pocket, but the design’s a little better.

Pocket on iPad

Pocket

On Kindle Touch: The process for getting Pocket articles onto a Kindle e-reader is not super-easy. You have to download your reading list into free ebook management tool Calibre. Then you can send the file wirelessly to Kindle using Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop version or email it to your Kindle email address.

Once you’ve done this, though, the reading process is great: Calibre compiles all of the articles into a magazine-like format that is easy to read on your Kindle. (If you use Instapaper, the process is easier — learn how to do it here.) So you can keep all of your articles in one “magazine” instead individually downloading them and storing them as separate files on your Kindle, the way you do with Send to Kindle.

Pocket supports the saving of videos, but you won’t be able to watch them on a Kindle Touch.

On Pocket for iPad: Easy and looks great when you have the Pocket iPad app installed. You can save all kinds of content, not just text. So I can watch my cat and tortoise video just fine.

Which one should you use?

The Send to Kindle Chrome browser extension is a good way to send text and articles to your Kindle e-reader quickly. If you want to get a single long article onto your Kindle, I’d go with the Chrome extension. But if you want to read many articles together in a magazine-like format, I really like Pocket, and I wish Kindle would  let you send a whole reading list, not just a single article.

If you primarily use Kindle for iPad, you shouldn’t use the Send to Kindle extension. Use a read-it-later service like Pocket or Instapaper instead. They render text and graphics better, and Pocket lets you save video, not just text.

Udini provides access to 150 million articles from 12,000 publications — including magazines, newspapers, trade journals, scholarly journals and wire feeds. Participating publishers include Springer, Nature Publishing Group, the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, World Health Organization and Cambridge University Press. Users can also access ProQuest’s dissertation archive.

“Research libraries play a critical role in our knowledge economy, but not everyone who needs serious content is connected to a scholarly library. Research for these unaffiliated users is confusing and inefficient unless they know exactly what they’re looking for,” ProQuest SVP and GM Rich LaFauci said. “Premium information — when it’s accessible at all — is distributed behind many different paywalls all over the web. Udini curates and licenses high-quality content and makes it incredibly easy to discover, acquire and use.”

Most individual articles cost $0 to $3.99, with some “specialty materials” like books and dissertations $4.99 and up. Users can pay as they go or choose a “project pass,” $30 for 14 days with unlimited standard articles included and specialty articles 20 percent off, or a subscription for $30 a month.

Influenced by Evernote and Instapaper

As with Evernote, users can store articles and projects in Udini for free in a cloud-based personal, searachable library. They can store their own PDFs and other documents there along with any articles they buy from Udini. Taking a cue from services like Read It Later and Instapaper, Udini strips ads and banners from stored content to provide a “distraction-free” reading experience.

Updated: There’s been a minor furore brewing in the digital-content sphere over the past few days involving Readability, an app and web service that allows readers to save content from any website and read it later — without any of the advertising that most sites rely on for revenue. Not surprisingly, this idea doesn’t appeal to a lot of publishers, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball re-ignited the current firestorm of criticism with some comments about how the team behind Readability are “scumbags.” Whatever you think of Readability’s model, however, it is far from the only one providing this kind of service, and there is an argument to be made that its approach is actually better than some others. The bottom line for content creators is that users want to do this, and you need to figure out how to let them.

The latest wave of negative attention for Readability was triggered by AppAdvice, which noticed that when users shared an article that they had saved for later by posting it to Twitter or Facebook from the mobile app, the link included by Readability was to the saved version — the one stripped of all the ads and images and other content — instead of to the original at the publisher’s site. After AppAdvice flagged this issue and before Gruber made his “scumbags” comment, Readability then responded by changing the way it handles links in the mobile app, and admitted that its initial approach wasn’t fair to content creators (the web browser version includes a Readability bar that shows the original article in a frame, and allows users to click and see the stripped-down version).

Is collecting money for publishers a favor, or extortion?

Even after this change, however, the comments made by Gruber seemed to reverberate through the blogosphere, in part because they focused on another controversial aspect of Readability’s model: unlike other services such as Instapaper, which simply charges a standard fee for its service, Readability allows readers to donate money that is held for the creators of the content. Publishers can sign up and collect their share of this revenue (70 percent goes to publishers and Readability keeps 30 percent), but if they don’t sign up or register, then Readability just keeps the money. This model has drawn a lot of criticism from those who argue that it is effectively extortion:

@anildash When somebody collects money in your name w/out your consent (with a cut), it's called something else in many boroughs of NYC.

—
Kontra (@counternotions) November 18, 2011

Readability has its defenders, including Anil Dash — who is an advisor to the company, and argued in a blog post that the startup is trying to do what plenty of other services are trying to do: namely, to figure out a way for publishers and content creators to monetize their content in other ways apart from just lathering as many ads and other gimmicks onto their pages as possible. The fact that many users decide to strip out those ads and read articles through Readability or Instapaper, he says, shows that many publishers are actually shooting themselves in the foot by making their websites unreadable in an attempt to generate revenue (Readability’s own defence of its model is here).

The issue over Readability’s model is complicated somewhat by the tangled relationship between it and Instapaper, which was founded by former Tumblr developer Marco Arment. In 2010, the two companies formed a partnership in which Arment created a white-label version of Instapaper that Readability could use inside their iPhone app — but just as it was about to be released, Apple introduced its in-app subscription rules, which would have forced Readability to hand over 30 percent of any revenue they collected. The app was shelved, and Readability then went on to develop its own Instapaper-style app without Arment’s help, which caused some tension between the two — and between supporters of the two companies such as Dash and Gruber.

Readers want to do this — publishers need to figure out how

As Mike Davidson of Newsvine notes in a post on the issue, the bottom line is that services like Instapaper and Readability — and other similar apps such as Read It Later, or even Apple’s Safari browser, which has a “Reader” feature that strips out everything but text — are likely perfectly legal under current copyright laws, because users are saving copies of the content for their personal use (the news-aggregation app Zite got a cease-and-desist letter from some major content companies for a similar feature). Not only that, but Davidson makes a pretty persuasive argument that there is nothing wrong with Readability’s revenue model of keeping money for publishers.

The anger about the financial side of Readability seems to come from the opinion that the company is “keeping publishers’ money” unless they sign up, but I guess I look at it differently: I don’t think it is the publishers’ money. I think it is Readability’s money. Readability invests the time and resources into developing their service and they are the ones who physically get users to pay a subscription fee.

I think Davidson makes a good point — although it’s not one that most publishers are likely going to be that sympathetic to. But why is Readability’s model any worse than Instapaper’s or any other similar ad-stripping service? Marco Arment charges money for his apps and service, which take a publisher’s content and remove all of that advertising just the same way Readability does, and he keeps that revenue. Readability’s approach may feel like extortion to publishers who don’t like the idea of people altering their content or consuming it in other ways — but the reality is that this is happening all the time, whether the media industry likes it or not. It might be the Huffington Post aggregating your stories, or it might be Flipboard or Zite giving people a different way of seeing it, or it might be Instapaper.

At least Readability is trying to help publishers monetize that content in some way, by giving them a revenue share when they register with the service, as Clay Johnson points out. Is that an incentive to sign up? Sure it is. But at a time when content companies are trying everything they can to figure out how to monetize what they produce — whether it’s paywalls or apps or other subscription models — why not take advantage of a service that at least some readers have already shown they want, and are willing to pay for? Either that, or come up with your own version of Readability and compete.

Update: John Gruber has clarified his position in a new post, saying he doesn’t like the fact that Readability says 70 percent of a user’s monthly contribution goes to the content creators, since not all of that money is paid out — because the company only pays publishers who have registered. Gruber says the service should either make it clear not all of the money is paid to content owners, or it should split whatever it has among those who have registered. The way the company is doing it now “is misleading at best, and arguably dishonest,” he says.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zert Sonstige and Denise Chan

My reading selection process for long articles (say above 2500 words) goes like this. It starts with installing the Read Later bookmarklet, developed by Instapaper, on all my internet browsers. When I stumble on something I have no time to dive into, I hit the ReadLater tab in the by browser’s bookmarks bar (below):

This causes the piece to be stored in the cloud. (There is another service/app of the same kind called Read it Later. I just got it this weekend and haven’t had much time to use it yet.)

Then, I loaded the Instapaper app on my iPhone and my iPad, it works just fine. The stories I don’t have time to read at work are now available on my two nomad devices for my daily commute, my chronic insomnia, after-dinner relaxation or long flights. Unsurprisingly, topics center around business stories, medias, tech; but they also extend to neurosciences, and in-depth profiles of creative people in a wide range of fields. In doing so, I have re-created my own serendipitous environment; as I open the app, I always find something interesting I put aside a couple of weeks earlier.

My second source of good stories is the Editor’s Pick on three long forms curation sites. Instapaper has it own Browse section and my two favorites are Longreads and Longform. There are two other such sites I use less often: The Browser and Give Me Something to Read. They’re all built on the same idea: a self-organized community of thousands people (see graph below) who pick up articles they like and put them on Twitter (and also on Facebook and Tumblr); the feeds are then re-aggregated and curated by the sites’ editors. The process looks like this :

This system combines the best of Twitter (gathering a community that selects relevant contents) with the final responsibility of human editors. Just as important, Read Later and Read It Later rely on hundreds of third party applications that use their APIs (a piece of code that allows apps to talk to each other).

Then two questions arise :
– Does this model benefit publishers ?
– What kind of business models can the aggregators hope for ?

To the first question, the answer is yes and no. From their respective sites, these companies play a referrer role as they send traffic back to the original publishers. But when it comes to apps for smartphones or mobiles, these services become value killers: their content is displayed in the apps without advertising. See screenshots from the iPhone Instapaper app below:

As for Read it Later application, it proposes (below) a web view and a reformatted text-view. No need to be a certified ergonomist to guess which one will be used the most:

For good measure, let’s say Apple is not the last entity to add features that kill value by removing ads; below the same NYT web page in normal and “Reader” mode:

For now, publishers don’t seem to care much about this type of value hijacking. The rationale is such apps are still limited to early adopters. In a study released last week, Read it Later said it recorded a total of 47 million “saves” between May and October 2011 (and 36 percent growth between the first and the last month.) Weirdly enough, most of the “saves” recorded involve tech-related stories from blogs such as LifeHacker, Gizmodo (both are part of Gawker Media) or TechCrunch. Long form journalism appears too small to be accounted for. Equally weird, when Read it Later gives a closer look at data coming from the New York Times, we see this:

Great writers indeed, but hardly long form journalism. We would have expected a predominance of long feature stories, we get columnists and tech writers instead.

Similarly, Longreads.com gets about 100,000 unique visitors a month, founder Mark Armstrong told me. For this last week, publishers altogether got 21,230 referrals form Longreads’ curated picks. Despite this modest volume, Longreads’ 40,000+ community of referrers is growing rapidly at the rate of a thousand every two weeks or so.

Let’s talk business model. The Longreads team includes former McCann Erickson creative director Joyce King Thomas (story in AdAge here). She seems more interested in good journalism rather than in loading the elegant Longreads with a Christmas tree of ads. In short, Longreads’ business future lies more in a membership system than in anything else – maybe some sponsorship, Armstrong acknowledges. The contents Longreads promotes through its links addresses a solvent audience, one that knows great journalism comes with a price and so do good tools to mine it. It shouldn’t be a problem to extract €10 or $20 a year, directly or via an app.

Having said that, I remain a bit skeptical of Longreads’ avoidance (for now) of the classic startup venture capital mechanism. Because barriers to entry into its type of business are low, Longreads ought to quickly build on its momentum and on the undisputed quality of its product. This means promotion and also technology to extend the reach of the service and to secure control of the distribution channel–and to make it more mainstream.

Based in Paris, Frédéric Filloux is the GM of the French ePresse consortium. He also edits the Monday Note, where this was first published. It is posted here with his permission.

This article originally appeared in The Guardian.

Instapaper is a combination of a bookmark for Web browsers that allows you to save articles discovered on the Web to a central repository and mobile applications that can retrieve those articles for later reading. It’s one of many mobile applications that is trying to blend online news discovery with offline reading on a mobile device.

With the new release, Arment made the reading interface more suitable for the screen real estate afforded by the iPad, he said in a blog post. In addition to the aforementioned Wikipedia links, Instapaper also now syncs directly with the folks behind Give Me Something To Read, providing a selection of new content curated by editors beyond articles you’ve saved yourself and articles discovered through social feeds linked to Instapaper.

The app costs $4.99, and separate iPhone and iPad apps are available.

In addition to Instapaper, the raid took down sites owned by Curbed Network, a New York digital publisher, according to a report in the NYT. Also down was Pinboard, a bookmarking service, although most Pinboard services are now back up.

The owner of DigitalOne, the web-hosting company that owned the servers, told the NYT that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of his clients but took servers used by “tens of clients.”

He’s not the only one complaining, either.

“So the FBI now has illegal possession of nearly all of Instapaper’s data and a moderate portion of its codebase, and as far as I know, this is completely out of my control,” wrote Instapaper founder Marco Arment in a blog post published today. “Due to the police culture in the United States, especially at the federal level, I don’t expect to ever get an explanation for this, have the server or its data returned, or be reimbursed for the damage they have illegally caused.”

For those concerned about online privacy, the potentially disturbing part is that the FBI now has an unencrypted copy of Instapaper’s complete list of users and their bookmarks. (User passwords were also on the server, but were encrypted.) It’s a sobering reminder that data stored in the cloud can quickly end up in places one doesn’t expect it to.

The stated goal of the raid was to knock out purveyors of “scareware,” a type of virus that infects consumers’ computers and continually sends out warnings that they’ve been infected with a virus. It only goes away when the victims pay up to $129 for fake “anti-virus” software. More than 960,000 users were hit by the scareware. In addition to the raids, indictments were issued against two Latvian nationals, and Latvian authorities seized five different bank accounts used to funnel profits from the scheme.