Interview With Shoutwire.com Founder Justin Bunnell
Filed in archive Interviews by Jonathan G. Cohen on December 31, 2005
that represents how many people have previously done so. The most popular articles are then listed on Shoutwire.com's front page.Where did the idea for Shoutwire come from?
We have two other sites, TorrentSpy.com and SpikedHumor.com both of which have news. We focused on weird and odd events with an extremely vibrant community - some posts had more than 500 comments. However, the news systems were completely separate, which was a bit of a pain to manage. We also wanted to get more user input in our news. So we decided to take public upload concept we developed for SpikedHumor.com and extend it to news and links.
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When did it (Shoutwire) launch and to how much fanfare?
We launched in November 2005 to mixed results. The fans of the TorrentSpy news did not like the format change to less editorial and greater user input. Their primary complaint is that they liked the editorials but don't enjoy sifting through the user generated content (some of which is off topic, pointless, or spam). We have addressed most of these concerns in an upcoming update to the system that provides better categorization and preferences for users.
What are your site stats currently? (Registered members, daily hits, how many stories posted daily, other sites that receive Shoutwire feeds, etc.)
Our Alexa rank is around 20,000 which we are really happy with. We have the ShoutWire feed on TorrentSpy of course, but are still in beta. We have expanded the feed to PacketNews.com as well and plan on adding some other sites in the near future.
What is ShoutWire's business plan?
Plan? You are kidding right? The site had pretty humble beginnings, to serve the news for our other sites, and it's scope creeped to doing all sorts of other things. In the long run we just want to make a site people like and visit.
Do you think Shoutwire is an accurate zeitgeist for measuring what the mass public cares about?
I am not sure how much you can read into the stories that are shouted into popularity. I think many sites get a group of people that visit and stay based on the content and dicussions. At TorrentSpy.com we had all sorts of political discussions -- far more than even some dedicated political sites. We encourage the healthy debate of ideas and I hope that ShoutWire is able to attact a following of its own. We also hope to that ShoutWire does not devolve into meaningless fluff. That is why we do editorial articles -- to "load the dice" so to speak -- and try and bring up interesting things for people to talk about.
What is "important news" and can the internet public be relied on to "shout" it?
I am a strong believer in user generated content. However there are two big problems with that; overall quality and self-centered marketing. I believe Shoutwire can address the quality side with the "Shout" process or some future variation of it-- quality stories will be promoted and bad ones will fall aside. The self-centered marketing is basically people spamming the system. However it is a fine line-- Is it OK if some marketing guy at HP does a story to their new product? I think so. However some people made shouts for the "win a free ipod" offers you see everywhere, which i dont really like. However the goal is to make my personal opinion simply one of many in ShoutWire and that the democratic nature of what we are doing will improve the overall quality and remove most of the marketing through the voting (shout) system. It is a work in progress :)
While Shoutwire was programmed from discrete language than Digg, its "shouting" system is similar. What differences can you cite between the two services besides specializing in different subjects for news stories?
That is like asking "how is the LA Times different from the NY Times?" The short answer is that since they both cover "news" they are very similar. The differences arise from their editorial and content focus. You brought up one important difference already, Digg is limited to technology only. ShoutWire has a goal of covering a broader range of topics. I am sure technology will always get strong coverage, but we want to cover Sports, Entertainment, and Health with the same level of empasis and quality.
On a side note, can you talk about the legality of TorrentSpy and what steps, if any, government or media conglomerates have taken to shut it down?
The legality of P2P sites and technology is a huge topic and people have written huge articles and opinions on it. TorrentSpy.com is simply a search engine, not unlike Google or Yahoo, that scours the net looking for torrent files to include in the keyword search results. Without going into too much detail, we take great pains at TorrentSpy to follow the copyright laws of the United States, primarily through the search engine requirments of the DMCA. People who believe that their copyrighted material is included in our search results simply have to email us with the link and it is removed.
Are you working on any new projects?
We are upgrading SpikedHumor.com as well as the next version of Shoutwire. I figure at the end of January we'll be done with that and looking for something new.
Do you think Shoutwire and services like it will change the way news is reported?
People have a tendency to believe that any change to the "old way" is automatically going to revolutionize it. I suppose that is because new things are exciting. I still hear that Blogs will make broadcast and printed news obsolete. I really see ShoutWire as a "news reccomendation engine" and the benefit is the ability for people to find storys, post them, then have others think "that's cool" and promote it. It is really a simple process that has been happening for years and years now. How many times have you seen a movie on a recommendation?
I'd like to thank Justin for taking the time to answer my questions and wish him and all his endeavors success in the future.
We launched in November 2005 to mixed results. The fans of the TorrentSpy news did not like the format change to less editorial and greater user input. Their primary complaint is that they liked the editorials but don't enjoy sifting through the user generated content (some of which is off topic, pointless, or spam). We have addressed most of these concerns in an upcoming update to the system that provides better categorization and preferences for users.
What are your site stats currently? (Registered members, daily hits, how many stories posted daily, other sites that receive Shoutwire feeds, etc.)
Our Alexa rank is around 20,000 which we are really happy with. We have the ShoutWire feed on TorrentSpy of course, but are still in beta. We have expanded the feed to PacketNews.com as well and plan on adding some other sites in the near future.
What is ShoutWire's business plan?
Plan? You are kidding right? The site had pretty humble beginnings, to serve the news for our other sites, and it's scope creeped to doing all sorts of other things. In the long run we just want to make a site people like and visit.
Do you think Shoutwire is an accurate zeitgeist for measuring what the mass public cares about?
I am not sure how much you can read into the stories that are shouted into popularity. I think many sites get a group of people that visit and stay based on the content and dicussions. At TorrentSpy.com we had all sorts of political discussions -- far more than even some dedicated political sites. We encourage the healthy debate of ideas and I hope that ShoutWire is able to attact a following of its own. We also hope to that ShoutWire does not devolve into meaningless fluff. That is why we do editorial articles -- to "load the dice" so to speak -- and try and bring up interesting things for people to talk about.
What is "important news" and can the internet public be relied on to "shout" it?
I am a strong believer in user generated content. However there are two big problems with that; overall quality and self-centered marketing. I believe Shoutwire can address the quality side with the "Shout" process or some future variation of it-- quality stories will be promoted and bad ones will fall aside. The self-centered marketing is basically people spamming the system. However it is a fine line-- Is it OK if some marketing guy at HP does a story to their new product? I think so. However some people made shouts for the "win a free ipod" offers you see everywhere, which i dont really like. However the goal is to make my personal opinion simply one of many in ShoutWire and that the democratic nature of what we are doing will improve the overall quality and remove most of the marketing through the voting (shout) system. It is a work in progress :)
While Shoutwire was programmed from discrete language than Digg, its "shouting" system is similar. What differences can you cite between the two services besides specializing in different subjects for news stories?
That is like asking "how is the LA Times different from the NY Times?" The short answer is that since they both cover "news" they are very similar. The differences arise from their editorial and content focus. You brought up one important difference already, Digg is limited to technology only. ShoutWire has a goal of covering a broader range of topics. I am sure technology will always get strong coverage, but we want to cover Sports, Entertainment, and Health with the same level of empasis and quality.
On a side note, can you talk about the legality of TorrentSpy and what steps, if any, government or media conglomerates have taken to shut it down?
The legality of P2P sites and technology is a huge topic and people have written huge articles and opinions on it. TorrentSpy.com is simply a search engine, not unlike Google or Yahoo, that scours the net looking for torrent files to include in the keyword search results. Without going into too much detail, we take great pains at TorrentSpy to follow the copyright laws of the United States, primarily through the search engine requirments of the DMCA. People who believe that their copyrighted material is included in our search results simply have to email us with the link and it is removed.
Are you working on any new projects?
We are upgrading SpikedHumor.com as well as the next version of Shoutwire. I figure at the end of January we'll be done with that and looking for something new.
Do you think Shoutwire and services like it will change the way news is reported?
People have a tendency to believe that any change to the "old way" is automatically going to revolutionize it. I suppose that is because new things are exciting. I still hear that Blogs will make broadcast and printed news obsolete. I really see ShoutWire as a "news reccomendation engine" and the benefit is the ability for people to find storys, post them, then have others think "that's cool" and promote it. It is really a simple process that has been happening for years and years now. How many times have you seen a movie on a recommendation?
I'd like to thank Justin for taking the time to answer my questions and wish him and all his endeavors success in the future.
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