Weekly Recap 050908: LouisGrayCrunched, BitchFeed

May 9, 2008 4 Comments

The week that was…

“Awesomesauce” “Apple sauce?” “Awesomesauce”…Corvida of SheGeeks.net coined this term, applying it to things she really likes. It’s gaining traction. I saw Alex Williams write it on FriendFeed. Robert Seidman’s thoughts on this? “would not say ‘awsome@^%$!’…speaking of Corvida, congrats on that ReadWriteWeb gig…

Louis Gray runs something of a debutante ball for emerging bloggers. Three separate times, he’s run a post that calls out five bloggers to watch (here, here, here). When you get called out, you experience this rush of hits and an increase in blog subscribers. It’s really wild…Colin Walker’s blog was called out. His reaction? “We had the Digg Effect, then the Scobleizer effect but now it’s the Louis Gray effect :)”…Alexander van Elsas blog was called out as well. His reaction? “Thx Louis, its great to hear that there is actually someone reading the stuff ;-)”…I used the term LouisGrayCrunched when this blog got its Louis Gray spotlight. You really can’t believe how his mention changes a blog. I can’t wait to see his June list…if Louis Gray raises a blog like that, I can only imagine what a Scoble callout does…

This exchange is a little dated, but I thought it was funny. Emily Chang is something of a luminary in the web world. I guess she was growing tired of Techmeme. She tweeted this: “techmeme sort of reminds me of a gay bath house”…Did Techmeme Gabe Rivera get pissed? Nah. Tweeted back: “Thanks @emilychang …was getting terribly bored with the ‘echo chamber’ cliché”…

Have you seen people “retweet” on Twitter? It’s a little odd. There’s a couple variations. One is a person reposting something they tweeted earlier. The second is when you pick up someone’s tweet, and broadcast it to your followers…People do wonder about this practice. Shel Israel asks: “Would someone please explain retweeting? Do people retweet when no one responds? I seriously don’t get it.”…

Give credit to Guy Kawasaki, Alltop becomes a badge of honor…the aforementioned Corvida made it on there, as she noted in her blog…Sarah Perez was inducted, also noted on her blog…and Mark Dykeman was added…congrats to all, the recognition is well-deserved…please pass along updates on traffic referrals from Alltop as time goes along, will ya?…

Yahoo…boy oh boy…One thing I admire is that Jerry Yang stuck to his guns through a flurry of criticism. There are good arguments on both sides of the MSFT-YHOO acquisition saga…At business school, they drilled into me the importance of equity holders above all. On that score, Jerry and team really need to come up with a strong plan to get Yahoo moving forard again. Is Yahoo only a couple moves away from getting to $37 per share?…

One thing I did this week was add a FriendFeed link to a blog post…Hey, there was a good discussion going on at FriendFeed! I didn’t want my blog readers to miss it…

Speaking of which, there was a revisit of the dispersed comments issue this week. Quick recap: some bloggers don’t like that comments related to their blog posts are not actually being added to the blog itself. The comments end up on places like FriendFeed. For a recap of the previous flare-up of this issue, see here…The difference this time? The debate didn’t erupt over on Techmeme. It stayed on FriendFeed here…Instead of a Bitchmeme, perhaps we should start talking about a BitchFeed…

Alert. Alert. Alert. Robert Scoble is building out his subscriber base in FriendFeed. He issued an open call for new people to whom he should subscribe. Get in now before you hit his limit….Can’t wait to see how this experiment unfolds…

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/b814ceb3-4359-1cfe-78c7-878e9b72618b

Filed under geek Tagged with ,

Spammers on Twitter and FriendFeed: Really a Problem?

May 7, 2008 7 Comments

Spam is a well-known issue in the email world. Personally, I’ve set up an email account used specifically for some online applications requiring an email address, just to manage the inevitable spam that will result. Spammy comments on blogs are also an issue, which Askimet handles nicely on wordpress.com.

But is spam an issue on Twitter and FriendFeed?

Two things I’ve recently read discuss the issue of spam hitting those services. One is on TechCrunch today, “Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers“. From the post,

You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members.

The other was more a question in one of the comments on another post on this blog:

I would just add that, although I love FriendFeed, I would not be surprised to see, as FF gets more popular, it too is overrun by silly people and spammers, to where its traffic sent is huge but equally as useless. These social sites go through a lifecycle of usefulness to pointlessness on their own.

Am I missing something here? If someone is spammy on these services, you simply unsubscribe. This isn’t email. Someone can’t start sending you spam on Twitter or FriendFeed just because they have your member URL. I do see spammers subscribe to me on Twitter, but I never subscribe back. I don’t see their spam.

I can understand the service providers wanting to manage this. But for members, the beauty of these tools is their permission-based nature.

You can’t spam me unless I let you.

UPDATE: Good discussion of this on FriendFeed (here). Mitchell Tsai notes the possibility of comment spam on FriendFeed.

Filed under geek Tagged with , ,

WordPress Content Recommendations: Off to a Good Start

May 7, 2008 3 Comments

I love recommendations. Well done, they make my life easier and provide a great source for learning things I didn’t know. So I’m pretty excited about a new feature rolled out by WordPress.com, “possibly related posts”, on April 26, 2008.

At the bottom of blog posts on wordpress.com, you’ll see a list of several blogs under the heading, “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)”. These are posts which should have some relation to the blog post you just read. WordPress is working with Sphere to deliver these recommendations.

There’s an priority ranking to the recommendations:

  1. Similar posts on the same blog
  2. Similar posts from around wordpress.com
  3. Articles, blog posts from elsewhere on the Web

Two areas are of interest here: (i) what recommendations appear on your blog; (ii) what other blogs are showing your posts shown as ‘possibly related’.

Recommendations That Appear on Your Blog

I surveyed five of my blog posts to see what were listed as possibly related posts. They’re shown below, along with a rating of ‘yes’ for related, ‘no’ for not related, ‘sorta’ for posts that might appeal to some readers of the blog post.

I. Ten FriendFeed Visitors Beats 1,000 StumbleUpons Any Day (link)

  • Wired blog: FriendFeed Offers Developers the Key to Build Custom Social Apps (link): no
  • New York Times: Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise (link): yes

II. You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play: A Blog Hits 50 Posts (link)

  • This blog: When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched… (link): yes
  • A wp.com blog: asylum street spankers, and a word about hits (link): sorta
  • CBS Sportsline: Major League Baseball (link): no

III. How Do Solo Bloggers Break into the Techmeme !00? (link)

  • A wp.com blog: break (link): sorta
  • A wp.com blog: Ichimonji No Kata – Raiko No Kata – Kukishin Dakentaijutsu (link): no
  • Scobleizer: New PR Trend: Anti-Gaming TechMeme? (link): yes

IV. The Best Blogs You’re Not Reading? Toluu Knows (link)

  • A wp.com blog: ‘A Fistful of Euros’ awards (link): yes
  • A wp.com: The demise of letter writing: oh, really? (link): yes
  • A wp.com: Reading blogs simply (link): no

V. How to Write a Farewell Email to Your Co-Workers (link)

  • A wp.com blog: How To Write Emails People Will Actually Read (link): yes
  • A wp.com: Email Etiquette (link): yes
  • A wp.com blog: Getting Better Results from your Email Marketing (link): no

The recommendations are off to a decent start. “Related” is a subjective measure, and my ratings above may not match what another reader would think.

How about comparing the WordPress recommendations to other sites? Here’s what Kleiner Perkins-backed startup Aggregate Knowledge’s discovery algorithm currently shows on the Washington Post story, “Failed Yahoo Talks Leave Google on Top“:

Only one of four are related to the Yahoo – Google story. Admittedly, Aggregate Knowledge doesn’t tout itself as a ‘related articles’ service, but their list of other articles should be viewed in this context: “Will people click on those links?”

And here’s what the New York Times shows as “Related Articles” for the article “Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise“, which discussed lifestream companies FriendFeed, Iminta and others:

None of the ‘related articles’ relate to the story.

Recommendations for Your Blog that Appear Elsewhere

What’s interesting here is that you, as a blogger, can see what other blogs have similar subject matter as you. Oh, and the possibility of increased traffic doesn’t hurt.

I’ve really only seen clicks to this blog on ‘possibly related’ recommendations from two sites (with links to posts that include links back to this blog):

  • Scobleizer.com (link)
  • Alexander van Elsa’s Weblog (link)

Neither of those is a surprise. Both have good posts related to social media and Web 2.0, subjects which are covered as well. The ‘possibly related posts’ from this blog shown there are relevant to the posts on which they appear.

Final Thoughts

I’m a fan of this feature, which is still in its early days. It does have its detractors though. Here are a couple comments posted on wordpress.com about the feature:

I actually hate the randomness of this, even though you’re using an engine to try to find related material. Here’s why this is a horrible bad idea, and really, you should turn it OFF everyone’s blog unless they specifically ask for it: If I want random, unvetted links on a topic, I’ll google it. The REASON why blogs are a great medium is one of TRUSTED information. If I know a blogger is smart, savvy, well connected, and honest, I will trust THEIR opinions, and look to what links THEY supply. Making these robot-choices LOOK like they are endorsed by the blogger is where this really falls down, and makes me want to shut it off immediately and everywhere. It is so unfortunate that this is on by default. I will recommend to everyone that they shut off this feature. This is so anti-blogging, it’s not funny, and in fact sad coming from a trusted blogging platform. I bet if you took this issue to serious bloggers first, they would have chimed in overwhelmingly in the negative camp.

Morriss Partee

What it seems to be designed for is to keep the readers IN wordpress, which is understandably your goal. What it PROBABLY will do for individual bloggers is take the reader away from his or her blog into someone else’s blog within wordpress, a dubious result in my way of thinking. But what do I know?

Alice

Count me as a fan, and I hope they continue to iterate through improvements to the recommendations. I fundamentally disagree with Morriss Partee. Blogging is about conversations, even if they go elsewhere. If my blog post piqued someone’s interest and they click to another blog, that’s fine by me. I’d rather the reader have a good time than try to trap him onto my blog.

Go WordPress, go!

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/7a1528d4-96c3-40ea-f5c3-6493372fa956

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , ,

Ten FriendFeed Visitors Beats 1,000 StumbleUpons Any Day

May 5, 2008 32 Comments

The average StumbleUpon visitors stay a few seconds on the site and then leave having visited one page. That’s exactly how I use the StumbleUpon toolbar, clicking the Stumble! button quickly unless a site particularly grabs my interest immediately.

Traffic Growth #5 – What Value In StumbleUpon Visitors?
Fog of Eternity – Robin Cannon

Robin’s observation probably rings true for most bloggers. Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg can drive significant traffic to a site. If ad impressions or clicks are important to a blog, then those visitors might have value. If your goal is to build an audience with whom you mutually learn and build relationships, those sites aren’t worth much.

Traffic from StumbleUpon and Digg is like loading up on empty calories. They fill you up for a while, but they have no nutritional value and leave you hungry for more soon thereafter.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, lets bloggers build a solid foundation of long-term readers who in turn serve as the best sources of new readers.

FriendFeed Difference: Trusted Referrals

What makes FriendFeed such a great platform for building your blog readership? Two big reasons:

  • Trusted referrals
  • Blogger participation

FriendFeed enables trusted referrals at two levels of a blogger’s social networks. The first level are those people who subsribe to the blogger’s feed. They’ll be the first to see new content. These members may then comment, share or bookmark the new blog post.

The second level is more distant from the blogger. This is the “friend of friends” feature, as shown below:

With this FriendFeed feature, your blog is reaching people who do not subscribe to you. In the example above, I’m seeing Rex Hammock’s blog post because he’s a friend of Robert Scoble. A crucial thing to notice though…I only see Rex’s blog post because our mutual friend Robert ‘liked’ the post. His action is the key that makes this feature pop up. In other words, you’re not just bludgeoned with a huge flow of unfiltered feeds in the friend-of-friend feature.

I personally have used the friend-of-friend many times to follow new people I didn’t know. I have moved from being a second-degree member of the bloggers’ social network to a first degree member (i.e. a subscriber). This is a powerful feature of FriendFeed, both for bloggers to gain new readers and for members to discover new content.

The pictures below show how the FriendFeed social graph works. The initial picture shows a blogger’s beginning social graph. Four people subscribe to his FriendFeed updates. But those four have their own connections, enabling their networks to see the blog post. If they like it, then their friends will see it too. A viral process for blog exposure:

The outer bands of the blogger’s social graph get exposure to the blog. As the blog is viewed further away from the core, the viral distribution falls off. But some of the members in the outer bands will subscribe to the blogger’s FriendFeed, which increases his core social network:

The new subscribers become the source of additional readers through their social networks. A new blog post comes out, and their friends will see it, bringing new subscribers. And so it goes, on and on. With enough time, a blogger will have a terrific base of people that enjoy discussing similar topics.

StumbleUpon, Digg: Drive-By Readers

Contrast the slow-building, strong ties forged in FriendFeed to the fast, drive-by traffic coming from StumbleUpon and Digg. Sure, the traffic is great. But you likely won’t see those readers again. With StumbleUpon, many of those visitors are just clicking their ‘Stumble!’ button. With Digg, the blog serves as content for a community that exists entirely outside of the blogger’s social graph. So the blog post gets its moment in the sun with the Digg community, which then moves on to other content.

Final Thoughts

FriendFeed makes it easier for a blogger to build readership than did previous options. I also have a suspicion that exposure via FriendFeed makes it easier for smaller bloggers to make it onto Techmeme.

What do you think? Is FriendFeed becoming the true social graph of bloggers and their readers?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=ten+friendfeed+visitors+beats+stumbleupons&public=1

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , ,

Explosion of Blog Aggregators…How to Keep Up?

May 4, 2008 6 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen the names of a number of aggregation sites out there. It’s a very popular space, and I have not really understood who they were or what made them tick. But my growing enjoyment of FriendFeed made me wonder about what these other sites are up to. So I put together a high level survey of several of them.

There’s a really long table below. Before that, a few notes are in order.

Selected apps: This is by no means an exhaustive list. For instance, I just got into Yokway today, but haven’t had a chance to try it out. I just came up with a list from the serendipitous finds I’ve had. I also focused on earlier stage companies – no Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

How stuff gets in there: There are three way that blog posts and news articles are added to these aggregation sites:

  • Submit: Users add a specific web page to the site, often via a toolbar ‘add’ button.
  • RSS share: Google Reader lets you ‘share’ an item in your RSS feeds that you like, posting it to your publicly accessible ‘shared items’ page, which is tracked by an aggregation site
  • RSS feed: The aggregation site takes a feed of all posts from a blog or news site

What’s interesting: Every site has its own secret sauce for what makes it tick. I tried to find things that seemed to each site apart from others.

Experience: I rate the user experience of these sites based how much was required to use them effectively. In this earlier blog post, I describe examples of light and heavy user experiences. Generally, lighter is better, but heavy can be OK for really good, distinctive features.

The point of this chart: It’s not to praise or bury any of these apps. Just to put together a list of what’s out there. If you’re an information seeker, a writer or seeking social connections with like-minded people, then you should check out some of these sites.

After the chart, I include links to other blogs with more information, plus a few thoughts as well.

Quick thoughts in dot…dot…dot fashion:

Diigo’s people matching based on common bookmarks and tags is a really cool idea, it reminds me of Toluu‘s matching based on common blog subscriptions…LinkRiver and Reddit have a very similar philosophy, with Reddit deploying a lot more categorization than LinkRiver….ReadBurner and RSS Meme are also very similar…Shyftr may have a light experience, but I’ll admit I found the overall user experience confusing right now (they’re in beta, it will improve)…Twine’s automatically generated tags for different categories was really interesting, need to explore that more…no notes on FriendFeed, just click ‘FriendFeed’ in my tag cloud for information about it…I kind of like getting my daily Social Median emails with news updates…Blog Rize has a spare UI, but it is strangely compelling…luckily, none of my blog posts have received the ‘lame’ or ‘facts wrong’ ratings on Blog Rize…

Wrapping up, here are some blog posts to get you started on the various apps:

I may be posting about some these sites in the days to come.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/9bdd0ad9-a377-f65d-6140-8dc4e835c6c3

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play: A Blog Hits 50 Posts

May 3, 2008 3 Comments

WARNING: this is a navel gazing post. If don’t want to read this, go see what’s on Techmeme.

This blog just hit 50 posts, nearly three months after it started. That number actually crept up on me – hit me when I wasn’t looking.

I wanted to recount a few things of note over the past few months. Ideally entirely in Larry King dot-dot-dot format. But I tend to be more verbose. Anyway, let’s dig in, shall we?

Dot…Dot…Dot

I’m having a lot of fun, the little blog experiment has taken on its own life…getting blog subscribers, FriendFeed followers and Twitter followers means I don’t have to pimp my blog on other blogs as much anymore…that Louis Gray, well, whew boy…one thing I’ve learned, there are informal, unstructured social networks of bloggers…speaking of which, I need a better connection with Sarah Perez…my appreciation for uber blogger Robert Scoble has increased immensely: insightful, witty opinions that fire up readers…best feeling in the world is to put a new post up on the blog at midnight, go to sleep, wake up and see Gmail filled with notifications of new blog comments, Twitter and FriendFeed follows, links from other blogs…my social media consumption workflow: gmail, this blog, FriendFeed, Google Reader, Twitter, in that order…appearing on Techmeme, like getting a plum part on a Law & Order episode for an unknown actor…Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera’s Twitter page currently has a picture of lion eating a zebra, which makes me think, what’s Gabe’s story?…how long until I screw up and write something I shouldn’t?…my blog idea process is ad hoc, haphazard and based on serendipity – every day is a surprise…

Biggest Surprises

I titled this post “You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play” as a way of saying that you need to just participate in order to see the benefits. I could not have foreseen some of the following things that occurred when I started this blog.

LouisGrayCrunched. Louis Gray wrote a very nice post on April 7, 2008 that said this was a blog people should be reading. He did it after I wrote a post reviewing the Toluu service. His post put this little blog on the map for a lot of his readers, many of whom are here now as well. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for his ongoing support.

Proposal to Clean Up FriendFeed Clutter. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor picked up on a post I wrote suggesting ways to better organize the updates in FriendFeed. He posted it to FriendFeed and a there was a really nice discussion there around the ideas.

Web 2.0 Jedi. This post has really surprised me. It was picked up by Digital Inspiration, based in India, which has a huge following (“the 40th most-favorited blog on the Internet”, according to Technorati). Many, many clicks from there, and that blog has been a gateway to bloggers around the world. A number of international blogs have included the graphic and linked to the original post.

Techmeme. Three posts made it onto Techmeme (here, here, here). Can’t believe it.

Social Media Identities. I love the discussion that occurred here. Included industry folks with whom I don’t normally connect.

Twitter Just Grows and Grows. This simple post turned out to be quite popular. It told me there’s a real interest out there in Twitter, and information is harder to come by than I realized. TechCrunch later ran a post about the “real Twitter usage numbers”.

‘Peanut Butter’ searches. I continue to be haunted by the mysterious ‘peanut butter’ search visitors. People searching for ‘peanut butter’ continue to be my biggest source of visitors. Who are you? What search engine are you using (it’s not Google)? What makes you click through? I may never know the answer to these questions.

My 5 Favorite Posts of the Blog

This is like picking your favorite child, but here they are:

  1. FriendFeed RSS Is a Fantastic Discovery Tool
  2. Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi
  3. Farewell, Pay By Touch, Farewell
  4. Proposal to Clean Up the FriendFeed Clutter
  5. Innovation Requires Conversations, Gestation, Pruning

Best Posts for Comments

These posts were most active in the comments section (including my comments):

  1. Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi: 20 comments
  2. Social Media Identity: Personal vs. Professional: 16 comments
  3. The Best Blogs You’re Not Reading? Toluu Knows: 11 comments

Most Viewed Posts

  1. How to Write a Farewell Email to Your Co-Workers
  2. Early Adopters: Attention Is Migrating to FriendFeed
  3. Pay By Touch and the Peanut Butter Manifesto
  4. Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi
  5. Farewell, Pay By Touch, Farewell

Top Referring Websites

My blog really isn’t part of the StumbleUpon and Digg worlds. FriendFeed has become my top day-in, day-out referral site.

  1. Techmeme
  2. FriendFeed
  3. Google Reader
  4. louisgray.com
  5. wordpress.com
  6. Digital Inspiration
  7. Twitter
  8. Stumbleupon

Top Search Terms

Peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter! Aaagh!

  1. peanut butter (several variations)
  2. farewell email (many, many variations)
  3. pay by touch
  4. peanut (basically a peanut butter variation)
  5. friendfeed rss
  6. blogs
  7. facebook
  8. reasons for fatigue

And that concludes the navel gazing. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/9c2030a5-c02e-dd79-f274-caf58e1af8e8

Filed under geek Tagged with , ,

FriendFeed Is from Mars, Twitter Is from Venus

May 1, 2008 6 Comments

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint.

Friends of Men vs. Women on Social Networks, Rapleaf, 4/30/08

Blogger Corvida is a prolific Twitterer (Louis Gray Twitter noise ratio 9.75). She decided to go cold turkey on Wednesday 4/30/08 to see what non-Twitter life was like. She avoided FriendFeed as well. She blogged about the experience. These thoughts stood out to me:

Twitter is crack people (I’ve been saying this for months)! Twitter is more than just a social hub for me. Twitter is ME!

[FriendFeed is] not as addictive and I peruse it leisurely and more so for the conversations than the content. I wasn’t feigning for Friendfeed, but I sorely missed it.

My immediate thought was that I’m exactly opposite. I’ve really become a fan of FriendFeed, and think of Twitter as something I peruse on a more leisurely basis. And yet there are a lot of similarities between the services. Indeed, when Twitter was suffering outages today, people migrated to FriendFeed, as the conversation here shows.

Why the difference between Corvida and me?

  1. Myers-Briggs
  2. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

Myers-Briggs

You may be familiar with Myers Briggs – it’s a personality assessment test. After you take the assessment, you get assigned a 4-letter code. The first two letters in that code? “E” or “I”. Explanation of the letters from Wikipedia:

  • Extroversion: People with a preference for Extraversion draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline.
  • Introversion: Those whose preference is Introversion become less energized as they act: they prefer to reflect, then act, then reflect again. People with Introversion preferences need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy.

Twitter is a constant, keep-up-with-the-action experience. Now I’m always an “I” when I take those Myers-Briggs tests, so it’s no surprise that I don’t find the Twitter experience as compelling as Corvida (who has to be an “E”). It is fun though.

FriendFeed streams can flow quickly, particularly as you subscribe to many people. But via ‘Likes’ and comments, two things make a particular update findable repeatedly:

  • Each interaction causes the update to pop to the top of the page again
  • Your comments and ‘Likes’ serve as bookmarks, making the content and all its associated comments easily findable

So FriendFeed satisfies the introversion crowd: reflect, act, reflect again. It also has enough action for the extroversion crowd as well.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

More from the Rapleaf study:

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint. Spending less time on a social network but transacting more equates to having roughly the same number of friends as women, who spend more time on social networks, but are busier sustaining relationships.

The report doesn’t explain what a “transaction” is. I’m going to assume that men tend to have relationships around some sort of structure – a “transaction”. Women tend to have more general conversations to sustain their relationships, not needing the organization of a “transaction”.

FriendFeed has “transactions”. They’re the content updates that flow through there. Blog posts, tweets, FriendFeed messages, Flickr pix. Those updates are the conversational structures – your comment on the content itself, your ‘Like’, your comment on someone else’s comment. You have group conversations.

Twitter is less of a transactional place. It’s more of relationship-sustaining place. You can maintain parallel one-on-one conversations with many people at once. There’s not really an organizing principle in Twitter. That’s been one of its attractions. It’s a wide open social thing.

I enjoy the conversations around content that define FriendFeed. More so than general relationship building, for which Twitter is really good. As Corvida said, “Twitter is more than just a social hub for me. Twitter is ME!”

Final Thoughts

I know I’ve horribly oversimplified things here. Plenty of guys love Twitter and are really good at it. Plenty of women enjoy the conversational scrum around content that can define FriendFeed. And there’s plenty of room for reflection, not just action, on Twitter.

But assuming there’s truth to the averages, those are some thoughts into what will drive the relative successes of Twitter and FriendFeed.

*****

See this itme on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/f8827724-34f6-fa36-fca5-a00c75bc171d

Filed under geek Tagged with , , ,

Did You Notice a Change in Your Google PageRank?

April 30, 2008 4 Comments

Something changed the past few days in the Google PageRank of this blog. Posts that were getting a predictable average number of hits each weekday are suddenly zooming up in terms of views. I don’t know what my PageRank was before (being a blogger n00bie and all), but it’s a 5 now. Perhaps a new round of the Google dance?

I’m not alone in seeing this. Here are a few others who have noticed the change recently:

Frederic of the Last Podcast tweeted:

just noticed that my pagerank must have increased from 4 to 5 in the last few days – nice 🙂

Mark O’Neill of Better Than Therapy wrote:

I got a pleasant surprise today when I noticed that my Google pagerank has been increased by one. I am now a 6 which is nice.

And on Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz noted:

Over the past few days, many webmasters and SEOs have been noticing an update to the PageRank score found in the Google Toolbar. Usually PageRank updates aren’t that noteworthy, but it seems something is different about this PageRank update.

I’m no expert on search engine optimization, but it is interesting to hear Barry say that something is different about this PageRank update. Click here for a post on Court’s Internet Marketing School discussing the PageRank changes, along with a ton of reader comments.

One Example: Farewell Email Post

I have a post on this blog that’s been up for nearly two months now. How to Write a Farewell Email to Your Co-Workers provides a humorous look at that ritual of leaving companies, the farewell email. Given that people tend to leave on Fridays, the page views of this post follow a predictable path, increasing each day to a weekly high on Friday.

This Wednesday’s views were the highest ever for a single day, and we’re not even at Friday yet. The chart below shows the daily views for the post, with the Wednesdays highlighted by arrows.

I normally wouldn’t note the increase in views, as it risks coming across as some sort of bragging. But the magnitude of the change is pretty significant. And here’s why it’s happening. The post has now risen to the #2 position in a Google search on ‘farewell email’. It wasn’t that way before. I’d check on how the post ranked periodically, and it tended to be around the 10th or 12th result. So a jump of 8 or 10 places in search results is worth 3 times the hits. Now I see the SEO industry in a whole new light!

Of course, this blog isn’t about ad revenue. And the blog’s heavy Web 2.0 content may not appeal to the search engine visitors. But, I decided to add a message for my farewell email visitors:

Welcome to the blog. I know you’re here for tips on writing farewell emails. If you’re at all interested in Web 2.0, I invite you to look around the blog a bit. Use the tag cloud below, or the recent posts on the left-hand side to find info. Also, let’s connect on Twitter and FriendFeed: twitter.com/bhc
friendfeed.com/bhc3

From an advertising perspective, there’s a mismatch between the farewell email post and most of the blog’s other content. So I’m not ‘targeting’ the right audience. But if any of those visitors decide to stick around, I hope they get enjoy the blog.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/a8133912-d2e9-f680-6592-a66e08abb717

Filed under geek Tagged with , , ,

Social Media Identity: Personal vs. Professional

April 29, 2008 23 Comments

I recently had to engage social media not using my personal identity, but under my professional identity. A bit clueless how to proceed, I sent this out on Twitter:

Facing an interesting decision about mixing my personal and professional online personas. I think I need to establish a “professional” ID.

Brian McCartney brought up a great point in response:

A “professional” ID is a good idea but there are things on my personal ID that I might want to share with the professional world…

Which got me wondering about social media identity. By that, I really mean these three things:

  • What subjects do you cover
  • What “voice” do you use
  • How does your social network perceive you

When it comes to developing professional identity in social media, a key consideration is the size of your company.

Company Size and Social Media Identities

The graph below depicts where the professional and personal identities diverge.

The idea in the above chart is that the smaller the company, the more closely your personal and professional identities are tied. As the company size increases, the more separate your identities become.

Where can these identities come into play?

  • Blogging
  • Posting on blogs
  • Twittering
  • FriendFeed
  • Etc.

Entrepreneurs and Small Companies

For entrepreneurs, your social media interactions are your marketing. How you think. What you care about. What insights you can deliver. And employees of small companies are the company. So their identities are very closely tied to the company.

Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software, is a good example of someone blurring professional and personal identities. Here are his social media identities:

  • Twitter: Sam mixes a heavy dose of Jive-related tweets with interesting tweets on other subjects. He ain’t afraid to keep it real out on Twitter.
  • Go Big Always: This is his personal blog, covering the social and enterprise software market. Jive gets plenty of attention, but it’s not the focus of every post.
  • JiveTalks: The official company blog. Sam can be found here, and the posts are product-related.

Here’s what Sam said about his multiple social media identities:

Up until now, I’ve been blogging on JiveTalks. But a corporate blog is just that – a corporate blog. I wanted to have a place where I could more freely voice wider observations and thoughts beyond Social Productivity and Jive’s business.

That being said, you get Sam, you get Jive Software.

Big Corporates

Employees working for larger companies will tend to have separate professional and personal social media identities. It’s tempting to say there’s the the “authentic” you and the “corporate” you. I think that oversimplifies things. The work you do is part of your authentic identity – if it wasn’t, presumably you’d quit the job.

But there are important differences when it comes to your professional identity. Here are a few that apply when using social media on behalf of a large corporate:

  • You write about things that are part of your identity only while you work for the company
  • You have to err on the side of “corporatism”, with language consistent with that of your company
  • Your company’s stuff is great, all competition sucks (of course, this applies for entrepreneurs as well!)
  • You’re likely in “sell” mode

The separation between personal identity and professional identity is the greatest for employees of large corporates. Whereas Sam Lawrence’s social media identity is very much a personal and professional combination, I decided to create a second identity for engaging social media professionally. My handle became Hutch@[company name]. You see that, you know I’m doing things on behalf of my company.

Final Thoughts

There’s a notion that someday all of our social media identities will be blurred. “Your personal identity is your professional identity in Web 2.0.” If we’re talking “professional” in terms of your career and talents you can bring to a company, then yes, that statement is true regardless of where you work.

However, if “professional” is the identity you assume on behalf of your company, then that statement really only applies to employees of small companies. For employees of big corporates, managing your social media identities is more complex than that.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter.

Filed under mba Tagged with ,

Early Adopters: Attention Is Migrating to FriendFeed

April 27, 2008 11 Comments

Based on the reaction to a recent post about Twitter early adopters, it’s clear there’s an appetite to understand when trends emerge and applications migrate across the technology adoption lifecycle.

To that end, there are important updates about FriendFeed.

FriendFeed has been out for a few months as this cool app that lets you look at what your friends are doing across social media. If you were to stop there, it sounds nice, but somewhat useless to everyday activities. “Yeah, I check it every so often to see what my friends are up to.”

But, it is so much more. FriendFeed is emerging as the one lifestream platform to rule them all. The ability to see and interact across a range of services is proving addictive. And it may inadvertently disrupt a few other services along the way.

Four recent comments show that a trend is emerging. People are consuming updates from their social apps not directly from the apps themselves, but primarily from FriendFeed. FriendFeed is starting to get the lion’s share of attention and page views, to the detriment of other services.

Here are the quotes.

Robert Scoble tweeted about his declining use of Google Reader due to FriendFeed:

FriendFeed has replaced much of what made RSS cool to me. I’m still reading Google Reader, but less.

Thomas Hawk messaged on FriendFeed about his declining use of Flickr due to FriendFeed:

I find that I’m going to Flickr’s most recent photos from my contacts much less than I used to and going to friendfeed to view my contacts and imaginary contacts flickr photos much more.

Steven Hodson commented about potentially leaving Twitter altogether due to FriendFeed:

FriendFeed as for me it is a much better resource than Twitter will every be. It has gotten to the point where even now I’m seriously thinking of moving strictly to FF.

Jason Kaneshiro blogged about his declining use of Google Reader, due to FriendFeed

FriendFeed is replacing Google Reader as my information aggregator / filter.

If you’re trendspotting, you’d do worse than to look at the comments of those four to see where the early adopters are moving.

Finally, the compete.com graph below shows March 2008 had a huge spike in visitors to friendfeed.com:

How about you? Are you feeling it?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/0b9e5d3f-e644-6105-5e28-7b4a95e1b34a

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , ,

How Do Solo Bloggers Break into the Techmeme 100?

April 27, 2008 8 Comments

26% of US internetters have started a blog
Stat from Universal McCann study, courtesy of the blog 3008

A couple weeks ago, Steve Hodson at Winextra wrote a post that caught my eye. In Why today’s solo bloggers may not see Scoble-like fame…, he observes that the emergence of investor-funded professional blog networks (e.g. TechCrunch) will be the dominant industry structure going forward. Breaking the top end of that oligopoly will be tough for any solo blogger.

However several solo bloggers are regularly in the Techmeme 100, as Steve notes here. It got me thinking about how someone’s blog goes from a little experiment to achieving a large audience and becoming influential. The stat above about 26% of Web users starting blog strikes me as high, but let’s assume there’s a large number of individuals starting blogs.

From where I sit (far, far outside any kind of Techmeme rankings), I can envision three ways the influx of solo bloggers can break into the Techmeme 100. To be sure, there are other rankings beyond Techmeme. For instance, the Technorati 100 is a big deal. Political blog Huffington Post doesn’t show up on Techmeme, but it dominates the Technorati 100. The paths below apply to non-tech blogs and non-Techmeme rankings.

The three paths to the Techmeme 100 are:

  1. Long Slog
  2. Big Events
  3. Celebrity

Long Slog

Slow and steady wins the race. This is the most accessible to a the solo blogger. Through a lengthy amount of time, you accumulate readers. It’s a ground war, where you need to be “good enough” most of the time with flashes of occasional brilliance. Here’s what the growth chart would look like:

Patience. Quality posts. Devoted long time fans.

Big Events

This blog experiences a series of big events that give it jumps in subscribers. Each events attracts a flood of new visitors, some of whom decide to subscribe.

What might these big events be?

  • Recognition by bigger bloggers with huge followings
  • Freakishly popular posts
  • Specialized area of focus that suddenly becomes hot

I think that if a blogger emerges on the other side of these big events to have a wide following, there’ll be this sense that they burst on the scene. But like an actress who suddenly gets hot, you’ll never see all the bit parts and ‘B’ movies that she was in before.

‘Big events’ is the one that’s most likely to get solo bloggers into the big time. This is the path that requires the most luck.

Celebrity

This is a path open only to a select few. Celebrities who have made a name for themselves in other realms, and then turn out to have talent in blogging as well. Celebrity blogs attract subscribers almost from day one:

Marc Andreessen has proven to be quite talented at blogging. And it didn’t hurt readership that he had already achieved legend status based on Netscape. Imagine if Microsoft buys Yahoo and Jerry Yang decides to start blogging on his own. I guarantee that will get subscribers (I know I’d subscribe).

Final Thoughts

Celebrities go right to the front of the line, but they’d better have blogging talent. Long slog blogs are testaments to the love of blogging. Big events seem to be the most likely path for the next Robert Scobles and Louis Grays to emerge.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/d7b6d330-9c38-f5cf-f6f2-1de1582c0153

Filed under geek Tagged with , , , , ,

Are You a Twitter Early Adopter?

April 25, 2008 12 Comments

Are you a Twitter early adopter? You know, the kind of person who’s “in the know”? If you’re not using Twitter right now, apparently you ain’t!

As noted earlier, Twitter saw a remarkable surge in visitors in March 2008. The hockey stick growth says Twitter’s moving into the mainstream.

And apparently, we have dates for when you were “in the know” and when you were “following the crowd”.

From Jeremiah Owyang, it’s April 25, 2008.

April 25th, 2008 1:06 pm

******************************************************************

I’ve noticed an influx of new users, there’s clearly a change now. I consider everyone above this line to be ‘early adopter’

From Robert Scoble, it’s April 9, 2008:

Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow.

So there you have it. If you joined on say, April 16, 2008, you’re in a tough spot. “Sorta” early adopter?

And we’ll leave open the question of why the hell it matters.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/f059c0b0-12f3-c761-f53f-d51c70cc3167

Filed under geek Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →