Twitter just published a great blog post promoting #longreads, a hash tag that provides more in-depth context and content than 140 characters can ever provide. By searching #longreads, you’ll find tweeted suggestions of long articles and short stories by studious fans of great journalism and long form writing.

Twitter suggests the following related accounts to consider following if #longreads strikes your fancy:

@longreads: Run by the creator of the hashtag, this account shares the most popular articles and credits whoever surfaced it.
@somethingtoread: Shares select essays and articles that have been saved on @instapaper
@ifyouonly: If you only have time to read one thing…
@longformorg: Shares long-form reads from the past and present.
@sportsfeat: A companion to the account above but devised specifically for sports features.

If you’re a fan of long reads, highly recommend you stay tuned to TNW on the weekends where we run a series of editorial magazine length pieces about particular topics. Some of my personal favorites: WordPress, the free software with the big economy, What is the Technological Singularity?, How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education and The Rise of The Mobile Social Network.

We also suggest you check out LongReads.com, a wonderful site that hands picks some of the finest long reads on the web. It’s also worth noting Instapaper provides a similar service.

Today, a new site called “Most Interesting People in the Room” launches as a new, incentivized way for highly intellectual and curious people to communicate, forum style on the Internet. The site’s founder, serial entrepreneur Colin Wright, explains the inspiration behind his new site:

“I was in Thailand on an island with a group of friends. We had this great night on the beach getting into these semi-drunken discussions. While everyone experiences these kinds of conversations, with certain people those discussions get taken up a notch and life changing ideas are put into your head. It was one of those nights, and I thought, I have a lot of these kinds of nights because I travel and am able to meet people; instead of just having Twitter conversations or Skype calls, I can have a deeper exchange of ideas.

The concept for Most Interesting People in the Room came from trying to take those deeper connections with people and put it on the Internet. Because, unfortunately now on the Internet people dumb down what they want to say; most newspapers are on a 5th grade reading level. We needed a site for trend-setting, future thinking people. A place where people won’t care if you sound too lofty; a place for you to be as intelligent and interesting and forward thinking as possible. Just be prepared to be challenged and don’t be afraid if someone debates with you; they’re targeting your idea not you.”

Wright first launched The Most Interesting People in the Room (MIPitR) in October 2010, but had to put the project on the back-burner while he and his co-founder Andrew Elkins rebuilt it. In order to maintain platform autonomy, Andrew took a template from Software Xenforo, tore out the insides and rebuilt the site to address their particularly payment system needs and better tools for more user interaction.

Here’s how that works:

Anyone can read the blog and the forums for free. They can even make a profile within the forum, they just can’t participate in the discussion.

A paid membership is $10/month, and this allows you to get down and dirty in the trenches, interacting with other users, send messages, award points, etc. Colin says, “It makes you a full citizen of MIPitR, while the non-paying folk are Puerto Rico (able to benefit from the site, but they have no real voice).”

Topics for the blog are determined within the forum, where members can award other members with points for their commentary. Each week, MIPitR looks at the posts and comments with the most points, as well as the new entries in the ‘Blog Proposals’ room, where members can pitch blog ideas directly.

At the end of each month MIPitR tallies up the money that comes in from memberships, and then each week they check out the posts in the forum and the blog pitches (in a forum section made expressly for the purpose) that received the most points. They then choose one of the options presented, and ask an author a week to write a post. The payment for that post will be 10% of the total income from the previous month.

Why it’s smart

In a time when sites are having trouble getting their readers engaged, a reward system a la Foursquare for readers seems to be a good approach, for now. Colin fears that awarding points for Likes and Comments will not be enough, which is where he sees the monetary system literally paying off. The membership fee also creates a desired barrier to entry to keep trolls out. In addition, since the payment system is on a sliding scale, it creates incentive for users to bring more people into the forum. In the future, Colin says they might take on sponsors but for now the idea is to pay to get as much new content created as possible.

The idea is to innovate in the forum layout and Andrew, whom Colin met while playing Ultimate Frisbee in college, happens to build softwares that builds forums. I asked Colin, “Is this the future of forums, perhaps a new kind of journalism?”

To which he responded,

“I don’t think anybody really knows what the future of this discussion is going to be. People are fed up with commenting systems; I very seldom leave comments anymore. MIPitR is an experiment to figure out what we can do to make it easier for people to have these long from conversations on the Internet, to figure out what encourages people to have these conversations. So much of the “conversation” online today is the equivalent of yelling, “FIRST”, and then saying “Hey, good idea!” So, how do we encourage better comments? Is it with badges and trophies? Or do we have to make it financially viable?”

Who knows what the future may hold, but Most Interesting People in the Room is certainly an intriguing and potentially viable experiment in ”unapologetically intellectual discourse” on the Internet. Finally, in case you don’t know much about Colin, we’ve written about him before when his indie publishing platform EBookling sold 1,000 e-books in two weeks.

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Colin (from his introductory blog post on MIPitR):

1. I’m a serial entrepreneur and full-time traveler.
2. I move to a new country every 4 months based on the votes of my readers.
3. While I travel, I run a handful of businesses and projects from my laptop, which is also how I fund my lifestyle.
4. Before I started traveling, I ran a successful branding studio in Los Angeles and lived in a two-story townhouse on the Westside.
5. I own 54 things in the whole world.
6. I write about all kinds of things over at ExileLifestyle.com.
7. I’m passionate about learning and experiencing new things. This is a big part of why I live the way I do.
8. I’m left-handed.
9. I actively try to figure out, evolve and live according to my personal philosophies and ethic code. I’m also shocked at how few people seem to do this.
10. I’ve been offered a TV show 3 times by 3 different studios. All of the ideas sucked.

Colin says: head over to the new site and check out the forum, make yourself a profile, play around a bit. And also, follow @mipitr on Twitter.

According to Business Insider, notable social media pundit and businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as “Gary V” will be joining Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily, hosting a weekly video show called “The Next Wave.”

“His quick wit and unique point of view make him a great fit, and we believe our subscribers will find his insights on the merging worlds of business, technology, and social media useful, as well as entertaining.” -Daily editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo

His show, “The Next Wave” will cover social media, namely Twitter, the importance of 1 on 1 communication and the merchant relationship with customers and those around you, which are topics of his previous books Crush It! and Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion and his latest book The Thank You Economy.

See our recent post on Gary V’s new outdoor ad campaign to promote his latest book.

And if you work in public relations, you’ve probably been either ignored or rudely answered by countless writers.

But aren’t we meant to work together?

David Spinks is a serial entrepreneur living in NYC. He’s the co-founder of u30pro, Scribnia and now BlogDash, a new site that’s dedicated to connecting PR professionals with the appropriate and relevant bloggers they’re trying to reach.

The site, which launches today, is similar to a media database with a filter system that aims to be a huge boon to both press and public relations.

“The site will help bring bloggers more targeted opportunities,” explains Spinks, “And we will help businesses find the exact bloggers they are looking for.”

It’s free for press: bloggers fill out a simple profile, optionally link Facebook and Twitter accounts, then choose their pitch preferences, such as –email, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, “in person” or “never pitch.”

In then asks you 10 specific questions like “Are you open to receiving money for writing a blog?” and less morally concerning questions such as “Are you open to receiving invitations to cover events?” You can even write in little comments like, “Only if there’s booze.”

Once logged in, bloggers can direct companies who pitch them to BlogDash and share their past experiences of working with certain businesses. Businesses can also write up and review bloggers. In addition to signing up, blogger names will be pulled in by partnering with other databases and by manually gathering publicly available information about bloggers like through LinkedIn and Twitter.

To start, BlogDash will offer a simple $99 per month plan (per user) for public relation companies and businesses. The site will also include an email feature in the near future. Bloggers will be able to manage pitches through the site or via email. PR companies will not be allowed to mass message on the site.

BlogDash’s team includes co-founder Mark Duquette, who is based in Montreal, and a remote team of designers and developers in different countries, including a development team in Romania. The New York staff works out of New Work City, a co-working space in SoHo of independent entrepreneurs. Prior to BlogDash, Duquette ran an ad network, Hispano Click. Its sale funded BlogDash in addition to private donations from friends, family and a few small angel investors.

Why create BlogDash? Founder David Spinks is not only an entrepreneur, but a blogger in his own right, who’s hoping to put forth a product that will make the lives of both press and PR less tiresome.

BlogDash is how Spinks will monetize Scribnia, his year and half year old blogging community, an organized way for others to learn about blogger’s biases, backgrounds, and abilities. Scribnia enables readers like yourself to rate writers that they love and those you cannot stand.

If you’re a blogger would you use Scribnia or BlogDash? Tell us why or why not in the comments.

When news made the rounds this morning that three of Gawker Media’s sites were live with a re-design, it took me a few hours of having to deal with actual news to check it out, but when I did… what a pleasant surprise.

i09

My first reaction was one of oooing and aahing when I stumbled upon i09, Gawker’s future blog this morning. The re-design is clever. The stories are actually easier to read. The reader is greeted by a single story, and then a headline index of recent stories in purple with short descriptions in black type.

Not everyone likes it though… but at least John found a headline.

Gawker.TV

Then I visited Gawker.TV and the hipster designer in the flannel shirt who lives in my heart sang out loud. Very cool.

But over on Facebook, Gawker.TV is receiving mediocre reviews. Many users noted that auto-play on videos is jarring and they miss the thumbnails.

Jalopnik

To be honest, I didn’t even know this site existed. But then again I’m not really into cars, unless I am actually inside of them and driving very fast down the PCH with a hot boy at the wheel.

What’s changed?

Gawker’s emphasis on headlines. Gawker’s new site underscores the importance of headlines and emphasizes both quality and clarity, two qualities that are often swept under the rug in the fast-paced online world.

Gawker will only use Facebook to share articles because, as Nick Denton told the Observer, “These sites festooned with social media buttons—they look like primitive tribesmen clutching pathetically onto shiny baubles they believe to the symbols of modernity.” No Twitter share button? Boooo.

The sites are mobile friendly. In fact you could even say they have an “app” like feel. Also the reader no longer has to go back to the front page in order to scroll and find the next item. One fewer click makes reader happy.

Bottom Line? The sites feel lighter and are easy to quickly scan. The new re-design emphasizes big feature stories, which is great both for the reader and writer. It’s not a complete delivery of Denton’s earlier promises; for example I’m not seeing any “convergence of blog, magazine and television.” But it’s clean, slick and clever, and a definite step up from the pithy, up in your face feel of the older sites.

The reaction to their site’s re-design has been about 50/50. Sometimes change is hard to accept at first. Even with our own site, I was a little skeptical, but now I am in love and there’s no turning back. If you’re still grieving over Gawker Media’s new look, you can always switch back to the older version by adding /classic to the end of the URL.

The top-level categories on Digg are now My News, Top News, Upcoming, and Oatmeal. Leaving us wondering, how did Oatmeal pull that off?

Digg pretty much took a two-year hiatus from being awesome when Twitter and Facebook hit the Internet. It’s now back with a site re-design and looks like it’s trying to harness some pop-culture coolness. But even Oatmeal seems to think Digg is pretty crazy too.

And this just in from Victor Barrera, The Village Voice‘s Social Media strategist (sent by @Alex). A joke? Mystery solved? Funny Digg…ha, ha, ha? I guess you did get me to sign back into my account again.

In July of last year, we speculated that the Techmeme team was considering expanding from solely aggregating news articles to also including Twitter’s 140 character messages.

In a recent post, McCarthy writes, that tweets will appear as headlines when people break news on Twitter and tweets that are commentary on stories will show up as part of the discussion section for that story, along with links to related blog posts and coverage from other news outlets. For an example, see this cluster.

I contacted McCarthy regarding the announcement shortly after.

CBM: What led you to this decision?

MM: It seemed like an obvious progression. We include short blog posts and news stories in the way we display news, so it makes sense to include shorter news items sent out on Twitter. You can say a lot in less than 140 characters, and this gives us a way to include those thoughts.

CBM: What do you see coming from it?

MM: I foresee more voices being discovered. I think our readers will like having one place to see reaction about different stories from across different publishing mediums – mainstream news outlets, blog posts, Twitter accounts. I hope people will find Mediagazer to be an invaluable resource that clearly shows the bigger picture about the top media news of the day.

This decision gives Twitter a huge boost of power status. It has now become a full fledged broadcast platform. Techmeme and Mediagazer’s decision to include Tweets as headlines means they’re giving each Twitter user the opportunity to become their very own publisher.

Is today the day that 140 character tweets can officially become news sources? Will bloggers tweet breaking news and then spend more time analyzing it in more thoughtful posts? Will Twitter conversations be contenders for headlines?

The news just got a whole lot faster.

The Social Guardian has been built using The Guardian’s API and while it looks quite plain, it’s actually an brilliant idea. Logging in to the site with your Twitter account, you can see what other Twitter users are reading using the service, refreshed in real-time as they load new articles.

A feed updates the page with the latest content from The Guardian website and it’s easy to see what others are reading. As you read articles, the site offers up personalised recommendations of others you might like.

While the site is an unofficial, experimental project, it shows what newspaper websites of the future could be like. While it’s possible to bolt social recommendation onto content-based sites using Facebook Open Graph, an approach more tailored to a site’s may well be preferable to many publishers.

The site was built during a Guardian Innovation Day event last week by a team of developers including Guardian.co.uk developer advocate Michael Brunton-Spall, Lisa van Gelder and Graham Tackley. “This does not represent any strategic thinking by The Guardian”, Brunton-Spall tells us. ”The Guardian is not providing any time to work on it at the moment (since I have a mountain of real work to get done), but I’m sure we’ll try a few tweaks in our spare time.”

Brunton-Spall says that while the site is still under development, he’s tempted to monetise it in order to pay for a bigger server to keep it running. The Guardian allows developers to profit from apps that use its API on a revenue sharing basis. “It’s liable to forever remain an experiment,” says Brunton-Spall, “although I dare say over the next few weeks it will result in several conversations about what’s good and bad about its approach to social news.”

The Social Guardian is just one of a number of interesting, experimental projects developed using the Guardian’s API. Earlier this year we were impressed by Today’s Guardian, a website that reimagines the newspaper’s content in a tablet friendly, one-article-per-page format.

While you shouldn’t expect The Guardian’s own website to adopt social sharing features like this in the near future, it’s an interesting prototype of the kinds of social features news websites could have in the future.

We recently wrote about Clearspring, an online content sharing network, as one of the “10 D.C. Start-Ups You Need to Know About.” Clearspring’s meal ticket, the “AddThis” button that you’ve undoubtedly seen on numerous blogs and websites, has reached 1 billion global monthly users and is used by everyone from The White House to the Dalai Lama to the British Monarchy.

Publishers like ABC, AOL, Demand Media, MTV, MySpace, NBC use the AddThis button to distribute and track digital content such as links, widgets, videos, and photos to social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, and other web services. This morning they announced a new analytics tool for their AddThis sharing platform that helps online publishers better understand their audience’s interests, so they can make better editorial decisions that drive more users and traffic to their sites. Clearspring will use their new tool to leverage the 1 billion global users and will provide publishers with an audience-based report that can be viewed within their existing analytics dashboard.

The technology underlying their new analytics feature is the “Implicit Interest Graph,” which helps to create a digital map of the connection between people and the things they care about most. Unlike the Interest Graph created by Facebook, interests in the AddThis graph are determined by actual user behavior rather than by a user declaring interest by ‘liking’ something. Moreover, interests are displayed by levels of intensity.

“People’s interests are not binary. We do not just like or dislike something. For example, I don’t just ‘like’ movies about comic books – I love them. That difference is priceless,” says Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar. “Using this new platform, we can understand interests more granularly. It’s like going from a black and white TV set to color.”

For more information, watch this video of today’s announcement.

Clearspring, which launched in 2006, is currently ranked #1 by comScore.

2011 looks set to be the year that Internet-connected TVs become truly mainstream.

There’s a lot more potential here than just downloading movies and watching Hulu on a big screen, though. Just like they changed the way we use our phones, apps could transform how interact with our TVs forever.

One of the benefits of platforms like Google TV and the iOS-powered Apple TV is that they open up the possibility of apps that could allow us to interact with, and even influence the shows we watch in completely new ways. Here are just some of the apps that could potentially emerge in the next couple of years.

Twitter and TV, united at last

When a big TV show is on air, you can be sure that legions of Twitter users are uniting around a hashtag to comment on the action. For TV talent shows and sporting events alike, the ‘Twitter backchannel’ has become an important part of the experience.

Today’s Twitter apps for TV are very basic, allowing you to read tweets and post your own, but there’s no interaction with the show you’re watching. Imagine a Twitter app that knows what you’re watching and only shows current tweets about it. You’d be able to participate yourself directly from the app, tying the ‘online peanut gallery’ idea directly into you viewing.

For people who find the Twitter backchannel as entertaining as the show itself, that would be covered even if you were watching the show at a later date. You’d be able to view the Twitter commentary replayed as it happened at the original time of transmission.

Facebook re-imagined for the living room

With the TV at the heart of many families’ time spent together, it makes sense that the TV could be a place to share the latest news from far-away friends and relatives. Imagine Grandma watching the news in Oklahoma when a notice pops up that you’ve shared photos with her from your trip to Europe. She browses through them on-screen and records a video message to you using her TV’s built it camera, wishing you well for the journey home.

You then receive her message on your mobile phone in the Facebook mobile app that allows you to send text messages, pictures and video to the family TV whenever you choose.

This kind of facility is already available via Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and the like.they’d However, the concept needs streamlining and carefully redesigning to make true sense in the living room. Let’s face it, if anyone’s going to get this right, it will probably be the king of social, Facebook.

What to watch next? Ask your friends

Services like Miso and Get Glue allow you to share what you’re watching on TV with your friends in real time. It’s a great way of getting viewing recommendations based on what other people are watching. However, because these apps aren’t integrated into your TV they’re a pain to use. You have to actively pick up your phone and type in the show that you’re watching.

If you could simply have a Miso-type service running on your TV all day as you watch you’d be able to easily share what you watching and when you’re stuck for what to watch next, just bring up the app for some inspiration from your friends. Perfect!

You can see the beginnings of this in Facebook’s partnership with TV guide website Clicker. When you visit Clicker.com and link up your Facebook account, the site recommends shows to you based on what your friends have ‘Liked’ on Facebook. The more you and your friends click the ‘Like’ button on content around the web related to TV shows, the better the recommendations. Imagine this idea extended from Web pages to your actual TV and you can see how powerful social recommendations could be in helping you choose what to watch next.

‘DVD extras’ for every show

Imagine if TV producers could enhance their shows with the kinds of ‘Extras’ you get on a DVD. A tap of a button while you watch could access Director and cast commentaries, storyboards, pop-up trivia notes and could all be accessible, providing extra value to viewers. Sports events could be enhanced with interactive stats packages, showing how players and teams are performing. The possibilities are endless.

Answer all your burning questions, instantly

We all have those “What’s she been in before?” and “What’s the song in the background?” moments when watching TV. While we can easily look these up online, integrated apps will make things even simpler.

An IMDB app will know exactly what you’re watching so a full cast list with biographies and pictures will instantly be available on screen for you. Meanwhile, if you’re not sure what a song is, there’d be no need to hold your phone up to the screen so that Shazam could analyse it, the Shazam app in your TV would be able to tell you in seconds, with a link to buy and download the song if you choose there and then. At the In The City music conference this year Shazam confirmed that such an idea was in the works.

Novelty apps

Back when Apple’s iPhone App Store first launched, novelty apps were the first to chime with the public at large. Fart apps and ‘Pretend you’re drinking a glass of beer’ apps became overnight hits as people got to grips with a whole new way to think of their phones. Could the same happen with TVs?

Imagine “Turn the current show into a cartoon” filters, a magnifying glass app that gives people on-screen big heads, a ‘Put Homer Simpson into every show’ app… oh, and a ‘Family Guy’ soundboard to play with during the news  - someone’s bound to do that. , the possibilities are endless.

Read more about the future potential of TV apps here and here.