everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Social News

    Social News

    The Social Media Club gathered at the KQED studios in San Francisco to discuss “social news aggregators.” It was a panel discussion so unfortunately there was not a lot of time for interaction with the audience but with Digg, Reddit, and Topix represented on the panel, there was plenty to learn. Pictured above, the panel included:

    From my notes,

    Story to Comment Ratio. In response to a question from Daniela. Out of about 40k stories/day Digg figures they get about 8k comments. The story/comment ratio is an important metric for measuring the health of a community but we need to keep in mind that Digg stories are usually not much more than a line or two summary of what they’re pointing to.

    Copyright. For mainstream media, copyright often extends to headlines. Topix had to negotiate the right to republish headlines. Wired re-writes them. The Digg users often re-write Wired News headlines. Evan complimented the Digg community for sometimes coming up with better headlines than their own.

    Where’s the Story? – In response to a comment from Tom Foremski Evan said that professional newspaper journalists have been sitting in a happy medium between the trade journals and the public. The trade journalists are doing all the heavy lifting, staying close to their sources and sniffing out the stories because of their deep understanding of the industry. Once the trades publish a story, the mainstream journalists would pretty up a technical article, make a few calls to verify facts, and publish it for the mainstream audience.

    This game is now being played on the general news organizations. Online aggregators are picking up the general news and re-purposing it for their audiences. The social tools that overlay the aggregated news feed is a “crowdsourced” version of the newsroom.

    Traffic Sources: Evan mentioned that 90% of their traffic comes via the sidedoor (RSS feeds, clicks from aggregators such as Digg). Yet, even with just 10% of the traffic, it is important for them to spend time on their front door because that represents their brand.

    Advertising: Chris had a great observation on the shift to online and what that means for existing business models of the large media companies. A member of the audience mentioned that large media companies are resisting the shift to online because they have a large infrastructure and revenue stream to protect. To this, Chris further added that as the management of these companies look at their net yield/user, it’s a fraction of what they would make from them via advertising on the traditional print or broadcast video channels.

    As readers come online and shut off their TVs or cancel their newspaper subscriptions, it’s not like the receivers of the attention are gaining the same amount of revenue that the large media company has just lost. It’s not zero-sum, value is being lost and will be captured elsewhere. Advertising models are going to have to change, it’s not about net impressions, it’s going to be something else. We’re currently stuck in a new world with measurement tools based on the old business model. Until that gets changed and we learn to measure and value something like engagement, it will always appear as if value is being “destroyed.”

  • Closed Social Networks as a Gilded Cage

    There’s been a lot of talk about the limitations of closed social networks. Jason Kottke kicked it off when he described Facebook as a more updated version of the AOL walled garden and others such as Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble calling it a black hole because all your data goes in but there’s no RSS out.

    I totally see where they’re coming from. Heck, I just spent the greater part of a day pulling all my data out of various blogging systems in order to bring them all together here on this new domain. I’m happy to say the text of the posts was not the issue, that’s portable. It’s the meta-data associated with the images that is causing me problems and I’ve resorted to a manual pull of everything in order to make sure things look just right.

    The next step is resetting all my pointers. It seems that every web 2.0 beta that you sign up for has a place in its profile for your blog URL. What happens when you change to a new domain? You need to go back to each one and update it. Your blog URL is an updated version of your email address, an important part of your address card. Feedburner saw the writing on the wall and effectively serves as a .forward file for your RSS feed, maybe MyBlogLog can step in and solve the other part of the equation which is your static URL.

    But step back a minute. As often happens in the Valley, we, the hyper-connected few are the vast minority. How many actually would use a Facebook RSS feed if it was available to them? How many people really need a service that points them to their latest blog URL? How many even know of services such as pobox.com that can forward your email address to your most recent address?

    Sure it’s hard to get your images off of TypePad and it’s impossible to pull your mini-feed out of Facebook but do the vast majority of people really care? What’s more important is that the system they use works in an integrated way and they don’t have to fiddle with it to get results. iTunes/iPod, Microsoft Windows/Office, and Quicken/TurboTax pairings all work together in tightly bound ecosystems because to do so allows them to guarantee a level of stability for their customers. As much as they might want to be open, Facebook limits what you can do using proprietary subsets of HTML and SQL in order to lock things down and keep things neat. It doesn’t hurt that it results in user lock-in but their challenge is to provide maximum flexibility within the constraints that they lay down.

    There are several noble attempts to build outside the box. People Aggregator, Ning, and Profile Builder come to mind. Yet the problem here is flow. The flow of readers across a profile out in the wild is so hard to build up. If you update something in Twitter or Facebook the closed network will channel that flow strong and fast so you’re bound to get a response. As anyone who has hosted their own blog can tell you, it takes a long time to gather an audience of regular subscribers – post something pithy in a closed network like Vox and you’re bound to get a reaction – their broadcast signals are much stronger.

    So the challenge to anyone building an open social network, one that overlays the existing networks, is to locate and connect people of like interests and maintain a quality of decorum so it continues to be worthy of their attention. A fair bit of community editorial is required because anything totally open is going to be overrun by spammers if no one tends the garden. On top of that, it needs to be dead easy to understand, can’t break, and be immediately valuable to the casual browser just poking around. Think Soccer Mom. What’s going to compel her to create a universal profile? What’s she going to get out of it? What problem are you going to solve?

    I don’t have all the answers, I’m still thinking them through. I think there’s a need for a service that connects you to the people and sites that are important to you in an interactive way. People search engines such as Spock only get us halfway there. They just crawl what’s out there but don’t really have a sense of the user doing the searching. The right answer for what you’re looking for depends entirely on who you are. I’m looking for a service that will take what I invest into it, not just the one -time editing of my profile but my ongoing interaction with it, either directly or via an API, and pay me back in spades when I turn around and ask the service for guidance, again, either directly or via my UI of choice.

    As Dave Winer so aptly put it last week:

    It’s the basic trust proposition of the Internet. People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they’ll want to come back if you send them to cool places. It’s why people like Facebook today, and why they’ll be tired of it tomorrow, if it only sends you to places within the Facebook silo.

    What do you think? Would you find such a service useful? Would the Soccer Mom?

  • Fake Steve Jobs is Unmasked

    Turns out Forbes columnist, Daniel Lyons, was the one behind Fake Steve Jobs’ blog. Brilliant timing too (heh), his satirical novel written in the voice of Mr. Jobs is due to hit the shelves in October. He was outed by a reporter at the New York Times who received an advance copy of the book for review.

  • For the Prankster’s Toolkit

    How would you like to edit any web page as if it were a wiki?

    Here’s a little Javascript trick that has helped me mock up prototypes as well as spice up the odd presentation with improbable news headlines for dramatic effect.

    Copy and paste the following line into the address bar of your browser,

    javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

    hit <enter> and edit away. Yet another reason not to believe everything you read online.

    <thanks to Lady Banana for the tip>

  • Eric leaving MyBlogLog

    I’m really sorry to see Eric go. Being the "Tom of MyBlogLog" he was not only your first friend after signing up for MyBlogLog, his personality defined the community as only a co-founder can. I’ve only worked with Eric for a couple of months but it’s been a blast. Some things I’ll miss:

    • whiteboard sessions, the man can’t think without a marker in his hand
    • pointers to some internet meme that you’d never heard of (I’ll never be able to listen to Fallout Boy without laughing)
    • random interjections of "dude" and "rock on" just to keep the serious types on their toes
    • shorts & combat boots in the office, why not?
    • that aging orange and black "They Might Be Giants" t-shirt

    Robyn’s stepping into the "First Friend" role and while she’s a bit nervous, I know she’s going to do just fine. I’ll be posting more as the voice of the product along with Todd. I’m not Eric but hopefully I can keep things just as interesting in my own way.

    UPDATE: Eric’s blogging over at www.marcoullier.com

  • Do you like working fast & furious?

    We’re running pretty fast and have a whole slew of new features at MyBlogLog we are chomping at the bit to get out the door. We’re also about the quick and dirty, especially if it seems innovative and fresh. The video job posting above is part of that. It’s pretty obvious when you see this that we didn’t plan any of this and basically had these folks come in, grab what footage they could while we worked and then splice it all together into something decent.

    I think it works. See the posting on standoutjobs.com for details.

  • First Post

    Did my first post over on the MyBlogLog blog (that’s a mouthful!). I’ll be posting over there when it comes to product news but I’ll continue to provide pointers from here when it makes sense. Lots of great work going on that should see the light of day in the very near future – the team works at lightspeed!

  • Turning off Feedburner Link Splicer

    Nothing worse than looking at the last five posts for your blog and seeing a bunch of Links for 2007-06-08 [del.icio.us] which is just a sorry excuse for saying that your blog still has a pulse. I’m working dammit – if I have something to share I’ll blog about it and, if you subscribe, than you’ll know. No more random links to clog up your feeder’s inbox.

    From today I’m turning off the daily delicious links that have been carried in the feed of this blog using Feedburner’s Link Splicer. I’ll continue to gather links into my delicious feed so if you want to continue to get a daily dose of what I’m reading, feel free to subscribe to that linkroll’s RSS feed.

    For those interested in a more nuanced highlight of my thoughtstream, I’ll take the best links of the week and roll them up into a Friday post on this blog.

    Sound good?

  • MyBlogLog layers on tagging

    The new feature serves a number of purposes, founder Eric Marcoullier told me this evening. The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page (ours is here) and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word.

    The company is also asking users to help fight spam by tagging spammy sites with the word “Schmoe,” which they say stands for “Social Media Optimizer” (SchMOe). The team will review those tags and associated sites and take appropriate action.

    MyBlogLog Gets Into Tagging

    MyBlogLog – tagging – new feature – techcrunch – Robyn Tippins – YCoolThing – Eric & Todd – Cameron Marlow’s Idea – fingers tired – new job