Scott Karp on Niche-y News

Scott Karp provides some key insight into the PEJ Social News Report. He focuses on how these sites don’t work well for mass media content, but here’s a nugget that shows how B2B publishers can benefit from using services like Digg, del.icio.us or Reddit:

Digg and Reddit are excellent sites for highly niche communities to share information of common interest.

Niche communities with common interests…. Doesn’t that sound like just about every B2B magazine? And many consumer magazines?

If you’re a magazine publisher, here’s your move: Pick 1 of these services as the "de facto" aggregator for your content (assuming there’s not one your users gravitate toward currently). Let’s suppose it’s del.icio.us. Make it easy for people to upload content on your website to del.icio.us. Use del.icio.us links yourself. Create del.icio.us feeds.

These aggregators work for many niche markets and not just high tech. Looking for chocolate cake? Users have uploaded 1600 different recipes to del.icio.us. Questions about insulin? Del.icio.us users have bookmarked nearly 2000 articles.  

Simply put, choosing an aggregator enables you to focus your content where readers can find it. It’s also absolutely free. And why mention it here? Because you can also use the page-specific permalinks inside the Nxtbook to upload your digital edition content there as well. In fact, traffic to Nxtbooks via del.icio.us has tripled in the past year.