Tag Archives: blogging

Technorati in BusinessWeek

Posted on by

David Sifry and Technorati in Business Week: Tracking the Blogs:

Q: You say you welcome competition from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, should they decide to offer blog search. Why would you welcome such Net heavyweights as rivals?
A: The larger question is, is it really competition? I look at what Google and Yahoo and other companies in this space are doing, and they’re really fantastic at helping you pick out what’s the best reference site for something. You go to Google and type in wine, and it will tell you the best places to buy wine. But if you really want to find out what the world’s leading wine experts are talking about, Google isn’t really built to do that.

Q: Why can’t they build themselves up to do that with a blog search engine?
A: Well, good luck. We’ve been doing it now for almost three years, and it’s a lot harder than you think. Doing it on a small scale is not terribly difficult. Doing it to scale becomes pretty hard, and every day the blogosphere is growing by leaps and bounds.

The blogosphere today is about 30 times as big as it was three years ago. So just to give you some ideas on what that means: Every single day we’re seeing about 80,000 new people who are starting blogs. And we’re seeing about 900,000 new posts every single day. So that’s about 11 posts every single second that you’ve got to now index, you’ve got to score it, you’ve got to make sense out of all of its relevance, and you’ve got to push it to your servers really, really fast so people can stay up to date with what’s going on.

…Q: You say Google can’t tell you what wine experts are talking about, but Technorati can. How do you do that?
A: When you think about the words that we use when we talk about the Web, we talk about pages, we talk about documents, we talk about directories. What does that mean, the language, the metaphor we use when we think about the Web today?

Q: It’s a print culture metaphor.
A: Exactly. But there’s a long way to go. We’re really trying to do something a little different from that. What Technorati is trying to do is looking at the Web in a different way. And the way that I like to think of it is, it’s like this big river, it’s like this conversation flow. It’s about people and conversations.

Just as Google invented page rank, reordering the way that we sort the Web, what we did was say, “O.K., why don’t we take the same idea and apply it to people.” So the way that Technorati calculates what we call “Net attention” is we look at how many people are linking to you.

…Q: What are you working on that business users might be excited about?
A: First, there’s advertising and sponsorship. Business users can advertise on search results that have something to do with their company.

Second, we’re unveiling a new service in August that’s currently in beta testing that’s geared toward professionals — people who need a deeper view of a company or its products, such as PR people, people in marketing or advertising, financial analysts. [Basically,] people who need to track buzz, how it changes over time, who are the influencers who is talking about their company or their product. These will be subscription products.

“What wins? Attention.”

Posted on by

ZDNet: Steve Gillmor: “Information will search for you”:

…the news is out. How to say this kindly? Here’s one for Ed Brill: Like Notes, print is dead. And like print, page views are dead. Like Notes, print and the page view model will go down fighting. It will take a long time, as everyone still locked into Notes can tell you.

What wins? Attention. Who, what, and how long. It will take on, supplement, and eventually, supplant search. Information will search for you, not the other way around. How many people, once they switched to AOL on Live8 Day, went back? The same number who switched back from RSS. My friend still hasn’t fired up Bloglines, or Rojo, or iTunes for that matter. But he will. That I’m sure of. It’s a matter of time.

more at Roland Tanglao’s.

HonorTags and Citizen Journalism

Posted on by

Jeff Jarvis’s lists the first duty of a news editor in citizen journalism to “Aggregate, organize, and highlight the best of newsroom and citizen media”.

That’s *exactly* what our volunteer editorial team attempts to do at Philly Future. You can be the judge whether we are successful or not. Doing so requires tools and knowledge to use them. The tools we have are evolving, but are not yet where they should be.

One of the evolving tools we have is the practice of self tagging our own writing and photos with terms that make it easy to aggregate them – to pull them together for use. Folksonomies – collections of these collaborative categorizations – and tools that make use of them – are springing up all over the web

If it wasn’t for this practice, we would have had a near impossible time bringing together our regional web’s coverage of Live 8 . Technorati’s Live 8 aggregator, which brought together a tremendous amount of posts that were tagged as relating to Live 8, and Flickr, which had photos tagged as relating to Live 8, helped to identify relevant posts for review to highlight them at Philly Future.

Our Live 8 Philly coverage will continue to grow long after the event – specifically because of Technorati, Flickr and Philly Future’s own aggregator, which has who we consider the best bloggers in our region in it.

Philly Future attempts to be a tool that brings together the best of our regional web. Opinion, news, information, and more. It’s a daunting task for a volunteer effort. One of the issues we face is finding and attempting to discern if someone is posting something that is a factual news item, or an opinion piece. Reading is the ultimate arbitrator of this, but how to locate these posts initially is very difficult and flawed.

Think about it. How did you find *this* post? Probably from your aggregator. Or another blogger. Maybe a blogroll. What if no one linked to me? What if I had posted a quality piece and had no initial audience among those who are already well read? If I was some feed in a larger aggregator – that no one referenced – this post would easily be missed. Part of the din.

Clay Shirky wrote, way back in 2003, a piece that keeps getting overlooked in some places
“Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”. Essentially, you must be linked to from those that are already linked to, in order to garner initial attention and traction. Shelley Powers has wrote extensively on this subject.

I took part in a related discussion at Jeff Jarvis’s site the other day. A great quote from Jeff: “I have to constantly kick myself to stop thinking of blogging in big-media terms, to stop judging it by the top of the power law and in silly lists, to stop assuming that bloggers want to do what media does (emphasis mine – Karl), to stop thinking that blogging has to be media, to stop thinking of blogs as publications and remember that they are people.”

Me too. He’s absolutely right. A tool to help combat that is to know a little about what the intent of a blog post is. What is the author attempting to achieve? Share his opinion? Post a news item? Do some activism? Tags can help here.

Look – we can rely on those that are already well linked to for telling us what is the news. For telling us who to read. For telling us what is important. Or we can search. Search for the new voice. Search for the new perspective.

Let those that are creating their own content tell us their intent.

Tags help us to do just that – help us to know the intent of an author. In Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us they help us to filter based upon the author’s choice – not some “authority’s”. This helps a host like me find content that I am looking for.

Still we have a long way to go – this volunteer still needs to read far too much to tell ya the truth. And it’s growing by the day.

That’s why I when I saw Dan Gillmor’s post about his group’s concept to help – HonorTags – I became very intrigued and did some thought. I believe – after the team has some discussion – we will use these within Philly Future to help folks identify – for themselves – what they consider the intent of their own writing. I believe it will help readers – and editors – know whether an author wants them to consider a post in different important ways.

Self-tagging is imperfect, for sure. It can be easily abused. And I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject. But I welcome any new tools in my belt that can make life easier. I think this can be one.

Left Self Correcting?

Posted on by

Chris Bowers of MyDD posts a roaring call to arms and announces he is going local – he wants to pursue reform of the local Philadelphia Democratic party.

He’s joining the terrific group Young Philly Politics that have been pursuing the same.

Meanwhile, Shelley Powers, a writer whose opinion I respect, declares she’s going Green.

I just mentioned three Democratic leaning bloggers pushing for either reform of their own party, or leaving it all together.

How much of this is blowback from November? How much of it is because we feel empowered to make change? Or maybe more precisely – how much of it is because we don’t feel empowered – that we don’t feel a collective ownership of the party?

A commenter in the MyDD thread rebuts that instead of forming whole new organizations that maybe we should be working actively to change what is already here: “If you want to make changes, contact your committeeperson, say you’d like to go to the next ward meeting and get involved, then go. Being a footsoldier in local politics is a thankless job and volunteers for it are few – you won’t have much competition. Or volunteer to work at the polls. Don’t know how it is in other wards, but after the election, all the pollworkers in my ward are invited to a post-election party where one can smooze and network.”

Congrats and Condolences

Posted on by

A late congratulations to Robyn and Todd on the birth of their baby boy, Nathan.

Late congratulations on turning 41 Malcolm.

Congrats to Mike Zornek who got a new job.

Jim Cappozola is in trouble and is near homelessness. He’s taking donations from PayPal.

And my condolences to Mithras who lost his father last Sunday.