gregword

I posted a comment over on TechCrunch that sums up a lot of what I’ve saying to people in person or on Twitter the past few weeks about FriendFeed. Several applications have, of late, risen to prominence that have taken the promise given to us by RSS and improved upon it. A few of those focus simply on taking the concept of content and flipping it around to being person-focused; instead of subscribing to a blog, I subscribe to a person. Examples include Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Other applications have gone one step further. They don’t (intially) offer you the ability to create content, but rather to collect (aggregate) your own content and make it discoverable via your identity (rather than a blog/brand). FriendFeed is the best example. This is RSS subscription, but you subscribe to a person, not a feed.

We have, right now, embraced the social applications idea. Blogs became just another form of media, not the personal avatar on the web, as Richard MacManus called them many years ago. The future is systems like Facebook and FriendFeed (Twitter, despite its obscene limitations on content, is building a powerful social network that could destroy FriendFeed in an instant if they chose to move in that direction).

It’s a final recognition that the web is made of people, not content.

Ross is the man; I’ve been loving his weekly posts summarizing the weekly goings-on of the DC tech community. Now he’s taken it one step further: DC Tech Events Weekly, a site dedicated to summarizing the next 7 days of what’s happening in DC tech stuff. Simply awesome.

And check this, Ross goes into a bit more detail on the inner-workings of DC Tech Events:

In January I posted about an idea I called the “Editorial Calendar Aggregator“, but I hadn’t really connected it to any particular task I needed such a tool to accomplish….Things started to fall into place after I set up a database and a thin web interface to edit events with. Now I find myself almost there– The system currently pulls in event data from 21 different groups automatically, and I can annotate the events that come in as I see fit. I want to support a few more calendar formats, add an approval queue (so I can subscribe to more general event streams, like searches from Upcoming.org and Eventful, without accepting every event), and publish in one or more forms of output that are actually reusable, but none of those things are much of a leap from what I have now.

For all you loyal readers of my blog, waiting anxiously for my pearls of wisdom…I’m hoping to start blogging again here soon, but I’ve been incredibly busy with various projects. In the mean time, Loren Baker has been gracious enough to allow me to post over on Search Engine Journal, one of the leading search engine blogs. I’m going to focus on blogs, blog search, any anything else related to blogging. My first post, about Google’s new PPA program, is up on Search Engine Journal today. UPDATE: My post is now on digg’s homepage.  Not bad for a first go. ;)

So head on over and check me out. If all goes well, I’ll pick things up here soon-ish.

Oh, and if you’re looking for something to read, check out this article in ComputerWorld about how having an online identity can help in landing a job (they were kind enough to mention Blogdigger, so they get a link). Of course, the opposite is true as well, even more so in many cases. Probably the #1 support request we get at Blogdigger is from folks perplexed as to why their real name is showing up in our search results associating them with a blog that has nothing to do with their professional identities. Almost 100% of the time, these folks are coming from a specific blog host (Typepad), and have neglected to change the default setting, which is to include their real name in their syndicated feeds.

LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise posts: Google Blog Search surpasses Technorati.

While Michael Arrington casts some doubt on the numbers (and we know this stuff is murky waters to begin with), I don’t think Hitwise’s claim really has any significance. All it really says is that Google can dramatically increase a site’s visibility by more directly incorporating it into their existing ecosystem, which should be a no-brainer. Keep in mind, the Hitwise blog exists to showcase their services, so the more sensational they can make their examples, the better for them.

As I commented over on Data Mining, the real issue to look at here is users. Of course more people are going to use Google Blog Search once it’s hooked up to Google’s search results page (the single most popular page on the Internet, I would guess) and Google News. But this really says nothing about how the two sites are competing. It’s most likely that the increased usership of Google Blog Search did not visit directly, rather they got there via a link from elsewhere on Google. But are users of Technorati switching to GBS? Are other blog search services losing users? How many folks who visited GBS also visited Technorati or other services? Are folks who discover blog search via Google/GBS looking for more information, and discover alternative services that provide richer functionality? None of these questions are addressed, and they would seem to be extremely relevant.

I’m also confused as to why Hitwise chose to use just Sphere as an example of an also-ran. I can think of at least four other blog search engines that probably get as much, if not more, traffic/visitors/users. Nothing against the Sphere folks, I just can’t abide the general myopia to anything outside of a few blocks in San Francisco. If I get some time, I’m going to post about the various services, strengths/weaknesses (in my opinion); I’ve kept away from this kind of stuff in the past, but I think it’s important.

I’ve got to think that JK Rowling checked Google before naming her final installment of the Harry Potter series. A search for “deathly hallows” on all the major search engines turns up nothing (I wrote this yesterday, however, as of now, both Yahoo and MSN have results; Google and Ask still yield nothing) . It will be very interesting to watch the spread of this meme, and how quickly and in what fashion it makes it’s way into search engines, both major and minor (the best place to go for info right now, of course, is your favorite blog search engine). Tracking a brand new phrase, especially one as ubiquitous as a this one, provides tremendous insight into the inner workings of a search engine and how it ranks and digests new content. In addition, domain names are already being snatched up (I imagine that the obvious ones were grabbed by the publisher’s even before the announcement was made; I tried to register deathlyhallows.com, but it and all other variants were gone) and advertisers are already bidding on keywords.

A couple of reference links:

• Yahoo search for “deathly hallows”
• Google search for “deathly hallows”
• MSN search for “deathly hallows”
• Ask search for “deathly hallows”
• Technorati search for “deathly hallows”
• Blogdigger search for “deathly hallows”

Also, Wikipedia was updated almost instantly.

The Guardian thinks that some search engine optimizers are starting to employ people in developing countries to post comment-spam. Their evidence: they have a CAPTCHA, and they are still getting spam. Ergo, the spam must have been entered by a human (the premise is a CAPTCHA can’t be comprimised by a non-human).

It’s even worse than it appears: at PubCon, I spoke to many, many folks who employ various forms of blog spamming (this is one of the things that was so cool about PubCon. Most of these folks asked if they could get their blogs listed in Blogdigger. I told them to go ahead and try ;) ); one group of folks I spoke to, when I asked if they used blogs, responded, “Yes, we have a few…thousand.” When I asked where they host them - on their own site, as subdomains, etc. - they said, “All over: Blogspot, Wordpress, Typepad…” Many of these guys told me that the CAPTCHA systems in place are pretty much useless; software exists and is readily available that cleans up the image (all that flaky, static-like stuff is meant to confuse an automated program) and is able to get past a CAPTCHA without human assistance.

A few weeks back, the Social Media Club came to town, and a good discussion was had on the nature of social media. I love these kinds of discussions, mostly because I enjoy how my opinion changes as the conversation progresses (a sure sign I’m learning something). Towards the end of the night, I think I got what the phrase social media means (or, should mean, in contradistinction to other terms).

Many like to conflate social media with amateur media; because when we think of social media we think of blogs and YouTube, the inclination is to associate social media with media that is produced by non-established entities. I don’t think the origin of the media has anything to do with its social status. The social component of social media is in how the media is distributed and shared, not in how it is created. As an example, I can share a professionally produced, fully copyrighted video clip from The Daily Show on YouTube, or post a link to an O.A.R. single on my blog (I say I “can” do these things, to which I mean I can do them technically, not legally). If I were to buy this media as a CD or DVD, they wouldn’t be considered social media, but by posting them online, I’ve changed how I share them with others. People who find that content will be doing so outside of the traditional structures of media promotion (i.e. - they won’t be getting the content from a major network or radio station).

This has important ramifications to how we view social media. Social media is not an innovation in technology, although technology certainly facilitates it’s expedience. Instead, social media is a change in the areas of marketing and distribution. The reason why blogs, online video sharing and others are considered social media is not because the content is produced by amateurs, but because we become aware of what content is important and worth paying attention to in a social fashion. Despite the fact that we consider it an innovation, social media could be viewed as a technical formalization of much of what has been taking place in the word-of-mouth marketing and PR camps over the past several years (hence the overwhelming concentration of PR people at the Social Media Club), and on an even more basic level, the act of sharing something you like with a friend.

What reminded me to write this was Scott Karp’s recent post entitled “A Lot of User-Generated Content is Really User-Appropriated Content.” I think the term “user-generated content”, besides giving me a headache, has been misappropriated as the reason for the success of sites like YouTube. Never mind the fact that the professionally generated content created most of the draw, but the other aspect that made YouTube take off was the social nature of the content, the fact that it was shared and the members of the site helped determine what was worth paying attention to, not the marketing or PR departments.

Got back from PubCon on Friday. Overall, it was a really good conference. I’ve been focused so much on blogs and social media over the past few years, in some ways I forgot that there is a whole other part of the web that doesn’t care about buzz words or hip technology, but about dollars and cents. It’s been really interesting talking to people who run their own businesses online and hear some of the issues they deal with in making real money online.

The Sessions:

A typical pattern for me at conferences: I begin by going to lots of sessions, then taper off and spend most of my time in the hallways talking to people, and towards the end go back to the sessions. I was a bit disappointed by the sessions at PubCon, I really didn’t find that they were giving me any information I didn’t already know (this includes sessions on topics I know really little about, like things like PPC and SEO). A few of the sessions I attended and my thoughts:

Feeds, Blogs, News and Search: This session was pretty good. Niall Kennedy gave a good overview of some of the technical details behind syndication formats. Rick Klau gave a good overview of some of the applications that consume feeds beyond basic aggregators. Owen Byrne gave an overview of digg, including an interesting tidbit about how many servers they have (about 90, not all for production. I always find it interesting to find out how many servers services are using, as well as their architechture, ‘cuz I think about scalability quite a lot, and love getting hints at how much iron it takes to serve various levels of traffic. We’re doing about 500K searches a day on 3 servers). Chris Tolles gave an overview of Topix. I would have liked to have had more discussion on the basics of syndication, aggregators, etc. I also think it would have been helpful to discuss the role that blogs and feeds play in helping with rankings in the major search engines (like it or not, 90% of your traffic is going to come from Google, not from feed-consuming applications). There’s been a lot of rumors and misinformation about how Google handles feeds, and if they help in optimizing search rankings. Also, based on comments from the folks from the major search engines, a blog sounds like the ideal type of site for getting ranked. Some discussion of this would have been helpful to convey the value of having a blog or feed.

Podcasting and Net Radio 101: A good session. While the session provided some good information, I thought it focused too much on podcasting from a business perspective, overlooking podcasting as content. I’m going to post more about podcasting in the future based on some of my experiences over the last two months, but I will say that, from my experience, promoting a podcast is completely different from promoting a web site. There wasn’t much discussion of iTunes or other community building techniques that work very well for podcasts.

Interactive Site Reivews and SERP Quality Control Forum: This was really cool. The panel included folks from the major search engines (Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from Yahoo) as well as Danny Sullivan and other search experts. Basically, people from the audience submit their sites to the panel for review, and the panelists tear them a new one (not in a bad way…they are really helpful). It was really informative, and amazing to me how many of these sites were suffering from so many problems that a decent content management system such as Wordpress could take care of in a snap (it’s not just for blogs). Most of the panelists stressed the importance of unique content (this is a big deal for e-commerce sites that post just snippets from databases, and all the sites use the same database), and offered starting a blog as a good way to build unique content. Many other really good tips, some obvious, some based on inside information from Google or Yahoo. Very informative.

All in all, it was a good conference, and I learned a lot, and had a good time (oh, and the Yahoo party, that was fun). If you’re looking for more coverage, check out Search Engine Roundtable for a good summary of the sessions. As for a general overview of the conference, and why I went, Chris Tolles said it best.

Chris Heuer and the Social Media Club are coming to DC on Monday October 30th. Register here (it’s free), and there’s a blogger dinner afterwards as well.

One important topic the Social Media Club has been tackling lately is the issue of disclosure in the blogosphere.

See you there.

Note to all DC/Baltimore Social Media People (or anyone who loves the web): as much as we love Chris, we don’t need to wait until he comes to town to get together. We need to do these things monthly at the very least.

I’m hoping to have some time to play around with the Netflix recommendation data, time permitting. The terms stipulate that one can’t use proprietary thrid-party information, which I’m hoping just means that you can’t attempt to force Netflix to buy something you’re selling to work your solution.

To me, the biggest problem with Netflix recommendations (and I’m quite obsessive about filling them out) is that they will often include a lot of stuff that is related to a movie I rated, but not really related to why I liked the movie. So, if I say I like Caddyshack, the presumption is that I like the original goofball comedies, when really I just like Bill Murray. This is where having access to my blog (or blogs) would come in extremely handy, because I’ve probably said as much at one point or another in some old post that would really help narrow down the recommendation and pinpoint what aspects of a flick I find interesting.

I did think of alternative recommendation solution that I think would pretty much work regardless of the user. Here’s how it works:

1. User rates any movie.
2. Netflix asks: “OK, have you seen The Shawshank Redemption?”

Some good (and informed) discussion going on over at Greg Linden’s blog.