TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Finding Dulcinea: Attack of the Mahalo Clones

Finding Dulcinea is a freshly launched Mahalo clone that’s labelled itself “librarian of the internet.” How much of a clone, you ask? How about this quote from their PR Newswire release:

“A recent survey showed that 85 percent of all search queries fail; the user tries and tries again, but eventually succumbs to search-engine fatigue,” said Mark Moran, CEO of findingDulcinea. “Our Web site is the cure.”

Or, this quote from the “Why Use This Site” page:

“How much time have you wasted online, wading through a sea of useless or unreliable information? Online searches may give you millions of search results in under a second, but you’re left to sift through them yourself. Our team has spent more than 40,000 hours scouring the Internet for the best resources on thousands of topics. We distill our research with knowledge, judgment and insight, presenting you with Web sites that are clear, informative, and enlightening.”

Sound familiar? It is, because its more or less Jason Calacanis’s story for Mahalo.

Let’s have a look…

The first thing you’ll notice about the FD landing page is… there’s no search box. For an “Internet Librarian,” this seems odd. Regardless of how many hours FD has spent compiling useful data, they’ve made it hard to find. In fact, believe it or not, the ONLY way to get to FD content appears to be navigating taxonomy trees. Don’t believe me? Check out the tour.

Oh, but wait, here’s an article that references the CEO’s response to the problem:

“While findingDulcinea currently has no search engine, Moran says the site will add one in about a month which will be limited to some 25,000 sites chosen by its staff of writers and researchers. The company currently has a full-time staff of about 30, along with 25 freelance contributors.” [from MediaPost]

Ummmm… what? I think both the article writer and Mr. Moran missed the concept: FD indexing the web (or a slice thereof) shouldn’t even be on the radar when FD doesn’t even index its own content.

I wonder if Mr. Moran realizes that in FD’s quest to make information readily available, they’ve taken the “search” transaction from a simple keyword search followed by a click and turned it into a multistep, multi-teired quest through someone else’s content taxonomy.

Anyway…

FindingDulcinae is divided into three sections. “Web Guides” are equivalents to Mahalo SERP’s (Search Engine Response Pages - the result of a query). “Beyond the Healines” is a stab at supplementing topical news items, and “Netcetra” is basically a featured-SERP holding penn. I’m going to focus in on the Web Guides here as it appears to be the core of the business, and the other site sections are essentially alterations to the core guide concept.

Web Guides follow the form of a brief introduction, followed by a list of questions commonly associated with the guides topic, for example, NYC…

Expanding a question reveals a narrower topical summary divided into “Insights” - summaries of important points - and “picks” - well-described external links.

The content of the day’s featured guide (NYC) seemed to be well organized and well thought-out, and included good descriptions and valid links that seemed appropriate to the site’s intended audience.

FD NYC:

Mahalo NYC:

Compare the FD NYC page to the Mahalo NYC page and you’ll see the difference - FD has a lot more human processing going into the construction of their pages; in comparison, the Mahalo SERP looks as sparse as a Google page. While the human-authored text on the page doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of the links selected for inclusion, the impression communicated is that FD is both friendlier and better researched.

Of course, I can’t even really link to the FD NYC page, because I can’t freaking find it. Its today’s featured Web Guide, which apparently excludes it from the painful-to-navigate taxonomy. Speaking of which, I finally found where it should be - which is apparently under travel, though given the nature of much of the page’s content, I’d expect it to be under a “cities” category, which doesn’t exist. Attention Mr. Moran: this is the conceptual confustion and cognitive dissonance that imposing one person’s arbitrary taxonomy onto an entire population causes. Compare to Mahalo: I got to their NYC page in with three keystrokes (”N” “Y” “C”) and one click, and Mahalo has a consistent, clean, easy-to-link-to URL.

So let’s leave it at that.

In a nutshell: FD is too early out of the gate, presumably to meet the Christmas rush. Core parts of the user experience are completely missing (SEARCH) or ill-thought out (lousy taxonomy). That being said: FD has what appears to be a great repository of deeply researched content; my suggestion to them is that they abandon their web search engine ideas and focus their development budget inward.

FWIW I’d also suggest a less esoteric name for the site that’s easier to remember and spell. People might not no what “Mahalo” means, but its short, sonorous, and easy to spell and recall.

calacanis, finding dulcinae mahalo

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The Blogosphere Loses a Bright Light: Scott Adams

Over thanksgiving weekend, Scott Adams blogged that despite the great artistic satisfaction he derived from uncensored blogging, he felt he was alienating his core Dilbert audience - not growing it. So: he’s not going to blog controversially anymore.

Well. That sucks. Adam’s shit-disturbing “what-if” posts and the comments that followed were a highlight of many a blog-reader’s day. Its too bad that Adam’s is able to blog only for the hope of compensation, not for the pure joy of it. (from the post: “It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.”) Perhaps his lawyers or agents suggested that he back off on controversial topics? Scott recently took on managing a restaurant, so I don’t imagine that blogging is the worst of his work/life/family balance issues.

A suggestion: persona management. Scott, if you take as much glee in your rabble rousing posts as you appear to, continue to make them under a pseudonym, as in the example of Fake Steve Jobs. Separate your “dibert author” persona from your “blog author” persona and grow both independently.

blogging, dilbert, persona scott adams

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Is their a market for niche-vertical Digg Clones?

Dave Winer is talking elitism again, suggesting that he’d like a digg-clone with 25, 100, or 1000 members comprised of those who he considers worthy.

First observation: FARK is essentially a hybrid between Winer’s vision and Digg. The FARK elite are the mods who have the power to “greenlight” a submission from TotalFark and push it up onto the frontpage of fark.com. FARK imposes a Winer-style “elite filter” on top of a Digg-style submitter-pool. ParisLemon points out that Calacanis’ Netscape tried for a similar model, with more public moderation and moderated and user-voted content in parallel.

Second Observation: The Blogosphere already does this, to a degree. This is the concept that TechMeme figured out first: each link in a blog post is essentially a “submission” to the blogosphere, if the blogosphere were itself a digg-style aggregator. That is to say, bloggers are the curators: Each blog post that links to the same story/webpage/etc. counts as another vote in its favour. To carry over Winer’s idea, he’d like a customizable pool of blogs to draw on to populate his aggregator.

IMHO, TechMeme lost its way a bit over time, by including things like MSM coverage, dugg stories, and press releases - opening the curation too wide (hence my response at TechWatching).

Bring it all together…

And were talking about a spectrum of curation with two axes:

Dave Winer’s staked out that corner that says “community moderation of small pool of submitters,” compare to, for example, FARK’s position at “direct moderation of a large pool,” or Digg’s “indirect (community) moderation of a large pool.” Netscape sits awkwardly in the middle, hoping to hold the middle ground.

So: is there a market in Dave’s corner of aggregation-space? What do you think? The chart above does nothing to relate position to “quality” - so I suppose ultimately it depends on the quality of the Elite that Winer deigns to include. Perhaps there’s a different middle ground to be found by voting on who’s considered “elite” enough to be one of the curators…

aggregators, dave winer, digg, fark, scripting news, techmeme techwatching

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

TechWatching Blog Search is coming along…

Want to know what the tech blogosphere has said about Windows Vista in the past week? Click here to have a look.

TechWatching now surfaces the indexes that it uses for meme-tracking as a searchable database. Some compartive analysis:

1. Its very vertical. This searches only those blogs that TechWatching indexes - about 225 as of this writing. This number will grow over time of course, but it will never have the breadth of say Google Blog Search. On the upside, results will be spam free and from “trusted” sources vetted by the entire tech blogosphere.
2. Its not deep yet. TechWatching isn’t crawling sites - just following feeds. So the content is very chronologically shallow so far, going back only 7 days (that’s when the current database was rolled out). Of course, it gets deeper second by second, but if you’re looking for older stuff, its back to Google or Technorati.
3. It indexes titles only. I’m trading efficiency for depth here, based on the assumption that if a blogger is writing about something for a feed-reading audience, they’re going to put their important topical keywords in their post titles. Undoubtedly some posts will fall through the cracks because of this - but FWIW, if a blogger is constantly obfuscating their posts with titles that bear at-best tangential relation to their post content, well… that’s annoying for feed scanning people too, not just robots.

I also built in a time-boxer today, so you can see posts from the last few hours, today, etc. Of course, the periods longer that two weeks don’t mean a lot as the index doesn’t go back that far yet….

Anyway - enjoy. I built this engine on top of TechWatching because I find Technorati frustrating and inconsistent, and lord only knows, the world needs an alternative to Google. Also, I believe in the power of focused verticals to deliver superior results.

More to follow - stay tuned.

blog search, google, technorati techwatching

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Yahoo!’s Meebo competitor “MyM” - new part of Yahoo!’s tanged social web

Wow - Yahoo is adding another layer to their insane social lack-of-strategy - a meebo-like service called MyM, story broken by Valleywag.

The Wag points out that Yahoo! already has a crowded, disjointed social plate, with overlapping and competing networks in the form of 360 (soon to be decommissioned), Mash, Flickr, Upcoming, Delicious, Mail, etc. Q: Where does MyM fit into this?

A: It doesn’t. That’s the point - Yahoo! is a ship without a rudder. I don’t know if its the stream of widely publicized executive exits, middle-management talent flight, lack of inter-departmental communication, or just cluelessness - but Y! is drifting like a Mary Celeste 2.0.

I like to think of it as the “General Motors” strategy - spinning out half-assed products, and sticking different brands and badges and superficial details on in an effort to capture share in many different demographics. Take a look at GM’s recent history; do you think that a complete lack of central value proposition is good for sustainability?

A: No. Its not. Jerry’s got work to do.

meebo, mym yahoo

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, American friends & readers! Just another two days at the office up here.

On the positive side: I think the main RSS feed out of techwatching is now fixed such that you won’t get any more deal links in your readers. (fingers crossed) Next up - tag search and tag-specific rss feeds. Good times!

Anyway, happy turkey day to all!

-R

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

TechWatching.com v1.5 is Live

I mentioned earlier that I might spin off my relevance algorithm as a standalone site - which I’ve now gone ahead and done at TechWatching.com. TechWatching is a blog/news aggregator that competes squarely with TechMeme.

TW is divided into 4 sections:

1. Hot Topics: TW maintains a keyword index of the blogs it follows. When a keyword shows up more frequently than average, it can be promoted to a Hot Topic - in which case it will show up at the top of the page with closely related keywords and relevant stories.
2. New Stories: Immediately under the Hot Topics resides “new stories” - stories that are getting attention in the tech blogosphere, but that don’t fit into a specific Hot Topic. This area is analogous to the TechMeme presentation.
3. Below the Fold: Under New Stories resides BTF: Stories that have fallen out of the New Stories area because they are aging and haven’t gotten enough momentum behind them to stay “new” or to be promoted to a Hot Topic.
4. Must Read: The right-hand column contains a list of the most-clicked on stories of the last 24 hours, collected from the site and RSS readers. Presumably lots of people are reading these - and thus, so should you.

That’s it in a nutshell. Its only refreshing hourly right now, but I’ll be ramping up the rate tonite.

Below is a screenshot, or click over to http://techwatching.com to see the real thing. Feedback is welcome and appreciated!

aggregators, blogs, techmeme techwatching

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

My spare time TechMeme competitor

I have a rudimentary knowledge of a lot of things: statistics, programming theory, php, mysql, consumer behaviour, and so on. Individually, I’m an expert in none, and could not do any professionally to save my life. Taken as a package though, I know just enough info about just enough disciplines to have a little bit of fun.

In that vein, over the last week, while recovering from a flu/cold/lackofsleep, I glued together a clunky TechMeme competitor as a conceptual exercise for myself to see if I could apply the bits and pieces that I know to generate relevant results.

You can see the system’s (live) output here: http://hddb.net/techstream_index.html

(hddb.net is a different venture of mine, and a convenient development box)
(”techstream” is just my internal development prefix, not branding)

It refreshes every half hour, and as of right now, is actively following 167 blogs in the technology sector. It uses MagpieRSS to cache and check feeds, so hopefully if you’re on the list you’re not seeing weird spikes from hddb.net.

Once it picks up your post, it does a bunch of brute force, ugly stuff to it to try and place it in a larger context. It looks for other posts that yours links to, and other posts that link to yours. It splits up your post title into tags, and searches for other posts that share common tags. When all is said and done, it stitches together tag relevance, links to and from, how long the post has been kicking around, click-through popularity, etc, and through magic that I can’t even really follow any more, its spits out the output that you see.

The algorithm takes about a minute to run during low post volume times (like Sunday evenings), and swells to up to 5 minutes when the blogosphere is cooking.

The result? Not bad, IMHO. Its not as balanced as TechMeme, in that hot items will cling to the top of the page for longer than they should. The page is also longer than it should be. It also doesn’t have the breadth of TechMeme - I imagine Gabe’s algorithm is following more that 167 posts. I’m also manually adding feeds - one of TechMeme’s greatest strengths is that it (I think) picks up new blogs to follow automatically, based on link volumes that it sees. I’d like to get there eventually. I’m also missing any RSS output - there’s nothing to subscribe to yet, and I’m not even sure what form such a subscription would take (I’ve never really followed TechMeme’s bulk feed output).

Anyway, enjoy. Your thoughts/comments/etc. are welcome. If you’d like your blog added to the index, let me know.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs techmeme

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Out for Two Days

I’m going to be out of the loop until Wednesday. I’ve got a horrible flu bug, and expect to be comatose for the duration. See you in a few days!

flu

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Apparenlty $35M is the margin between life and death

A $35M loss is apparently all it takes to bring down a company with billions in revenue and thousands of physical locations, according to CNET’s Don Reisinger. Its a good thing Don doesn’t do automotive journalism; given the way Ford and the General have survived years of losses of much greater magnitude in the face of nimble, innovative competition, Don would have been driven mad by their failure to comply with his dreary prognostications.

Ok, things don’t look great for Blockbuster. On the other hand, they have a physical distribution network in place and massive brand recognition; if management could pull themselves together, I can’t believe they wouldn’t be able to leverage those two assets into something meaningful.

blockbuster cnet

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!