So I loves my news aggregators, and I loves my social news sites. You may have also heard of a new breed of such sites, which aggregate shared bookmarks via Google Reader (and more), such as readburner, linkriver, and rssmeme.

Anywhoo, I was about to wax poetic about how useful these new services are, when, upon closer examination, I realized that much of the stuff that was bookmarked and shared was quite similar … even the same, really.

Oh, sure. Smaller stories are different. Each community has its own idiosyncracies. But the big (and even medium sized) stories? All the same.

Right now I’m battling what seems like an evolving cold, so I’m not going to do any heavy lifting with respect to numbers, charts, graphs, and all manner of social geekery (but if you feel so inclined, please do so and then let me know) — but its just an observation.

I wonder, as all the field of social information-aggregating services mature, particularly in areas where this kind of thing started (tech / geek interests), if what we’re seeing in late 2007 and well into 2008 is the evolution and commodification of popular content.

That’s not to say that the information or content itself is a commodity, specifically, but that the sites themselves might begin to be.

Or, put another way, the stuff that is popular, and that is shared, gets shared so quickly between the various and sundry sites, it doesn’t really matter which site you go to. Unless your level of geekdom is extreme, and it matters to you how quickly you see stuff (in the order of minutes or hours), for the lay-geek — you know, who has a job, who goes to work, who has a family, and who can’t monitor this stuff as obsessively as they would like — I don’t think it *really* matters.

If I’m looking for old-ish kind of news (like 12-24h old — man, I can’t believe I just called news that was 12h old “old”), I can look to Blogrunner, Techmeme, Digg, Propeller, and one of those shared-bookmarking sites above, and you can bet the big stories will all be up there.

The implications?

That its tough for new sites to break into this ecosystem of shared / social news, as there is already a huge contingent of players looking for news (social news sites), or automated bots which are similarly crawling for said news (news aggregators), or scripts that are looking for people to share such information (social / shared bookmarking tools) — all of which, when they find something newsworthy, is thrown up on all of these sites in a variety of ways, overlapping each other within minutes or hours of each other.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds for Social News, but on a cold blustery Friday evening, I’m wondering if we’re at a stage where we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with few services really providing a breakthrough in this experience.

Allen Stern at CenterNetworks queries how good Propeller (previously “Netscape.com”) is and will be, and crunches some publicly available traffic data to suggest, perhaps, in time it will be a legitimate #2 to Digg as the social news king.

I have to admit that I don’t follow Digg and its clones other social news brethren all that closely; neither do I know if Propeller has anything in particular “cooking”, as it were behind the scenes.

However, what I think _is_ clear to me is that Propeller needs to continue growing.  Depending on the graph you look at, they’re either plateauing or growing; I’d like to think that they’re doing a little of the latter.

However, they need to continue doing this in spades if they are going to play “second fiddle” to *anyone* (keeping in mind that Propeller is probably trying to be the best Propeller it can be ;) — and that means, not just resting on the strength of its community, or the strength of its anchors, or propeller-heads, or what have you.

Its clear that to grow, they’ll need to pull out some strategic and tactical marketing maneuvers to continue to win over new and older fans of social news, whether it means contests, free swag, off-line advertising, or joint ventures with AOL’s partners  or cross-marketing across the variety of AOL properties.

I mean, in some ways, Propeller is excellently positioned for the latter of those two options given how deep AOL’s roots *do* go.

I suppose the question is if in 2008 we’ll continue to think of Propeller as a “formerly of Netscape” and “that place where people are paid to moderate”, or if it will, in the immortal words of Paula Abdul, take that piece and “really make it your own!”

About a month ago, I wrote about how Netscape dumped its social news component into its own site, Propeller.com and wondered rhetorically how it would turn out — with the subtext being, perhaps, how *Netscape* would really fare now that its social news component was on its own.

Well, a month has come and gone, and I think that if Alexa is any indication (and yes, it certainly has its problems), the answer might be “substantial”.

Now, granted, the people who use Alexa are probably the same folks who have Alexa tool bars installed on their browsers; also, the people who like the traditional 1999-style traditional site that is up on Netscape are folks who probably *don’t*.

Having said that, I think it does provide a good idea, all other things being equal, of what kind of percentage of people who *are* social news buffs out of the “old” Netscape site … who are now, of course, propeller-fans/heads/geeks.

But it certainly does give a picture that the move to break off the social news site into its own URL was probably *good* for Propeller, it certainly looks like it wasn’t a good move for Netscape — at least amongst folks who like to install Alexa toolbars.

And at least it validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.

As a footnote, if, all things are equal, what’s kind of interesting is that the traffic for *both* sites are also trending downward over the past month. Now, this may be evidence of a more general “September dip” that many sites are experiencing as folks head back to school. If anyone questions this, just ask Facebook, as I do believe this is a genuine phenomenon, and not, for example, “stupid”. :)