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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.

In checking out the other sponsors for Thursday’s TECH Cocktail DC, I was introduced to Wine Library TV. I’m not a huge wine drinker (I’m more of a scotch guy), but I find myself very intrigued by the show, which is done extremely well; the host, Gary Vaynerchuck, shows great enthusiasm and really makes a topic I wouldn’t normally be interested in compelling. There’s even a whole episode devoted to kosher wines!

And today I noticed that Cork’d, a niche social network for wine-lovers, was acquired by Wine Library TV. The combination of original content, user-generated content, social networking and, most importantly, high-end products that cater to high-income demographics, seems like a good combination. I’d bet that something like this would work for scotch, cigars, maybe even beer (putting aside the issues with selling this stuff online, which can be tricky). It’s nice to see a business model that doesn’t rely on advertising.

A few weeks back I was meandering around the Baltimore Craigslist gigs board and came across a posting for a Ruby on Rails position for “a newly funded startup in the Audio/Video Podcasting Arena,” which piqued my interest. The ad states that the startup “will be acquiring a very large presence in the Audio Podcasting space,” and many of the details seemed to point to Odeo, so I was suspicious that Odeo had found a new home. After reading today’s announcement of Odeo’s sale to SonicMountain, it was confirmed.

As for the future plans for Odeo, the ad mentions:

We are going to be enhancing the site with video podcasting and podcast hosting features as well as a patent-pending search system for audio, video and podcast content. The search development is being performed by a company under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and we have used offshore development for the video conversion engine (.mp3, .mp4, .mov, etc) into Flash (.flv), a custom flash player and the CC billing module for hosting and the podcast hosting / management engine.

Sounds interesting; I think there’s definitely room for a more complete solution for podcast hosting and metrics; I currently use a combination of Ourmedia.org, FeedBurner, Podtrac and Performancing Metrics; if there were a way to tie some or all of that together, it would be very interesting.

And very interesting to me is that the contact listed on the ad is based in Baltimore; the question is: Is Odeo coming to Maryland?

Meanwhile, Odeo itself has been stagnating for a while; I use their podcast player widget for a podcast I do with my wife, and despite my best efforts (pinging, etc.), Odeo hasn’t updated in about two months. Hopefully the new owners can revive the site.

PC World has a really great article entitled Search Engine Shoot-Out. The article asks the question, “Does Google deserve all that traffic, or is it living off its reputation? Are people using it because they’re not aware of other, potentially better search engines?” What follows is some fairly comprehensive test of search engines across several verticals: web, videos, images, news, blogs, and local info.

I’m very happy and proud to report that Blogdigger finished third in the blog search category; of couse, I’d love to do better, but the fact that we finished where we did, to me, says a lot about what Mike and I have been working towards. I’ve written more of my thoughts on the Blogdigger blog, so hop on over and check it out.

The main take-away from the article is, of course: Google is king of search. Their web search results are probably the most frequently viewed single page on the web, and they have strong entries in all the other major categories as well. It would appear to be almost a fools-errand to even consider taking them on. On the other hand, as the article points out, only a few years ago Google didn’t exist and Alta Vista was the king of web search. And as YouTube has shown, it’s entirely possible to enter a market and create a community that can rival even Google’s offerings, and Wikipedia has, for many, replaced Google as the go-to resource for factual information. And remember, Google wouldn’t have a blog search if it weren’t for the fact that many of us showed how useful it could be.

Alex Krupp: Is Social Networking Dead? Nope. Read his post, it’s right on the money.

I’ve often used, as an example of this, a site that was a social network before everyone was talking about social networks. The site is called OnlySimchas.com, it’s the king of the Jewish web world, 2.0 or otherwise. It’s a site that lets people share an announcement of a happy occasion, such as an engagement, wedding, bar mitzvah, new baby, by posting photos and leaving comments. It’s become an obsession and a part of life of the Jewish world, to the point where many people now hear about engagements of close friends and even family via the site.Â

Why does it work? It works, not because it’s focused on a niche, which it is, but because it pays attention to a very specific social interaction common to that niche (namely, the age-old Jewish tradition to shep nachas, or, in other words, to share the joy of a happy occasion), and augments with the capabilities of the medium of the web. Just creating “Facebook for Jews” (which others have tried) hasn’t and won’t yield the same results. If all you’re doing is recreating an existing social network with an added feature, or doing a niche-clone, there’s plenty of open source or commercial projects you can use, and you shouldn’t need to raise venture capital for something like that.

The confluence of two events: the deprecation of the Google Search SOAP API and the release of the del.icio.us JSON API, both point to the fact that the vision of the web as a platform is dying. Instead, the success of online advertising, and it’s corallary, the page view, is dominating. So Google limits their search API to only be used on the web, and allows for greater control over how their data is used (and, doesn’t expose data as before). del.icio.us passes over traditional standards for a format which provides functionality that helps drive traffic back to their property while at the same time doesn’t open/expose their platform too much. The paradigm is widgets, which function to promote the host site, rather than allowing data to roam free and find itself reconstituted in new ways.
On the one hand, it makes sense from a business perspective; why should companies freely open up their valuable data stores if they get no benefit from it (an issue we’ve been dealing with for years, since we made all searches on Blogdigger subscribe-able as RSS feeds, and in terms of monetization, it’s been very tricky)? On the other hand, locking up and restricting data to self-promotion vehicles hinders innovation.

In the page view/advertising world, it makes sense it has come to this. But is it a good thing?

Om Malik writes about the pitfalls of putting too much stake in Alexa. I’ve been meaning to write a post about Alexa for some time, as I’ve been collecting tidbits of data that point to the relative inaccuracies in Alexa rankings. I don’t have so much of an issue with their uptime, other than not being able to get my Alexa-fix (despite my skepticism in the accuracy of their rankings, I’m still an Alexaholic); it’s entirely possible that although the website is down, there are seperate servers to collect the toolbar data. My issue is with the lack of a correlation between rankings and site traffic and the ease of gaming your ranking.

Evidence and Data Points

A data point: Blogdigger, a site which I own and operate, currently has a three-month Alexa ranking of 16,801. If you check our graphs, you’ll see that this number fluctuates on daily basis, sometimes by up to 10K places (in both directions). I can tell you that we get around 100K page views a day. From what I have seen, there is ZERO correlation between a good day in terms of our traffic and a good day according to Alexa. Further proof of this comes from Otis Gospodnetic’s post comparing the Alexa stats to the Sitemeter stats for Lifehacker and Techcrunch, showing that there is little correlation between actual site traffic and Alexa rankings.

Otis’ post brought to my attention another astounding data point. Blogdigger gets more page views per day than TechCrunch. I’m not going to claim that we’re more popular or influential, but the fact of the matter is, in terms of raw numbers, we have more traffic, or, at least, similar levels of traffic. Yet the difference in Alexa stats is astounding: TechCrunch’s three-month average stands at 605. Now, I realize that Alexa traffic is more than just raw page views, it includes data about number of users and number of page views (although TechCrunch’s average page views per user is consistently lower than ours as well). What this points to is a severe skew in terms of the distribution of the Alexa toolbar, or possible signs of gaming (I don’t mean to suggest that the TechCrunch folks are gaming Alexa, I’m sure they have better things to do, but it is possible that there are automated nets of Alexa gaming bots that end up at TechCrunch more often than not because they are a highly linked-to site). This also shows that the relative difference between 16,000 and 600 is not that much, whereas the difference between position 600 and position 6 is logaritmically greater.

There’s many examples of this, too many to go into here, but, suffice it to say, one needs to consider other information beyond the Alexa rankings.

Alternatives

So what are our alternatives? There’s a new site called Compete.com, which takes a similar toolbar approach. While their stats seem to make sense in a lot of places, in many others they just don’t, and ultimately, if Compete.com becomes popular, it will suffer from the same pitfalls as Alexa does. There are other companies, like Hitwise and comScore, which take a Nielson-like approach (which is better than letting the userbase that you cull data from self-select itself by installing a toolbar), but, just as the Nielsen ratings need to be taken with a grain of salt (when Nielsen tells you 14 million people watched Heroes last Monday, they are extrapolating this number from, as far as I know, less than 5000 individual households, and sometimes even less than that), so do these approaches. They are also not publicly available, and cost quite a bit of money for a subscription.

Om suggests the big toolbar players, such as Yahoo and Google, begin to collect this information. Combined with other information these companies have (such as search results page click-thrus, stats-tracking applications and advertising information), they would have a better, more complete picture of web traffic (since the user base is broader). Even better, and I realize the tremendous privacy concerns here, so keep in mind that this is a theoretical proposition, would be to have the browsers themselves cull this information on an anonymous, aggregate basis. It’s unrealistic to ask the site operators to contribute this information, and would create the potential for fraud.

One last note, there’s a few hack you can use to estimate a site’s traffic when no information other than Alexa is available. Obviously you should look for a stats tracking link, such as Sitemeter; if it’s publicly accessible, it can provide good information. Another way is to visit the site, and see what kinds of third-party advertising they are using. If they use something like AdSense or AdBrite, finding the pages to signup for advertising on their sites may provide details on their traffic. This information can provide additional information for estimating a sites overall traffic.

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.