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Today’s the day…

That we take off for Singapore and the start of our grand adventure. So I’ll likely be out of touch for a bit… don’t take it personally.

Catch you from the other side!

-Rod

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Tweetmeme DOA?

I’m fitting this in while visiting family, so this post is late, and likely short on insight - that being said, after pouring hours and days and weeks of hobby-time in building a relevancy algorithm (see: techwatching) I feel the need to comment on Tweetmeme, which launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Divining interesting-ness from a content pool depends on a number of bits of information that provide relationships between disparate bits, allowing them to be linked together into a topical unit (i.e.: a cluster of stories all discussing a certain topic) that makes sense. Over on TechWatching, I use four things to create topical units (”story clusters”):

1. forward links - the pages that a blog post links to
2. back links - the pages that link to a given page
3. keywords - the meaningful words that posts share - i.e.: proper names like “Google” are counted, conjunctions like “and” are not
4. time - content must have some chronological proximity to be considered “linked” - i.e.: an article about Google from two months ago is less likely to be discussing the topic-du-jour than an article from two hours ago

Now, Techwatching indexes blog posts - which are characterized by all of the above four points - i.e.: blogs are noted for linking, posting quickly (chronological proximity), using relevant keywords and so on. My question about Tweetmeme is whether Twitter provides the same fertile breeding ground of memetic confluence as blogs… Personally, I think its ephermal nature and limited length works against it. Aside from the occaisonal exceptions (Apple events, the socal fires), Twitter seems to be pretty scattershot - and those special situations seem to me to be better served by something more explicit, like hashtags.

techmeme, techwatching, tweetmeme twitter

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ON THE ROAD

Were leaving tomorrow AM early for Vancouver, and Victoria to visit family, and will be there for a few days before heading to Singapore - so don’t expect regular content updates here for quite some time!

namaste,

–Rod.

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Jan. 31 Vancouver - will be out for drinks!

If anyone wants to meet in Vancouver, we’ll be out and about the eve of Weds, Jan. 31. We have a flight to Singapore leaving at 2:00AM, so we’ll be somewhere ’till about 11:30PM - I’ll post back the location.

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Branson = Dog

With a little accessorization, hair work, and sunglasses, Richard Branson (see video below, found via Sarah Meyers) could go out for Hallowe’en as a perfect Dog the Bounty Hunter (LGT GIS, dog pic below vid). I mean, its uncanny.

bounty hunter, branson dog

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nyc.digg.com

After doing some further reading and thinking about the EveryBlock launch today, I had a thought - why not a localized digg? I initially posted this on Mathew’s EveryBlock thread, but wanted to capture it here too. So - why not nyc.digg.com, boston.digg.com, or sf.digg.com?

There’s not a lot of thought behind the idea, this just popped into my head. So tell me why it won’t work below.

digg, everyblock, hyperlocal localization

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Is EveryBlock is going to bump into EveryProblem that BlockRocker did?

Today sees the widely covered launch of EveryBlock - a hyper-local aggregator. Coverage is characterized by words like “redefines” and “slick.”

All of which is great for the people behind Everyblock, and I wish them all the best. For what its worth though, I tried a similar concept a few years ago at BlockRocker.com. The concept was simple: find every localize-able bit of info consistently published on the web, index it, and map it. Blockrocker spat out reviews, real estate listings, pictures, events, and so on, and offered nicely customizeable RSS feeds to boot. I even had a “geotag this page” bookmarklet, tag builders for del.icio.us and blogger to encourage geotagging, and so on.

If you go past BlockRocker today, you’ll find it to be a wasteland, which hasn’t been materially updated in years. I’ve cut it down to blog posts only, and even then, only those that have been explicitly geotagged by their authors. “Why,” you ask?

Because hyperlocal has consistenlty been a technology without a market. Interests are generally not boxed by locale, and localization does not necessarily convey relevance (or traffic). This applies to news stories, photos, and so on. The second part of this rant is that generally people aren’t that interested in local data - for example, TC talks about the power of Everyblock being able to pull up a list of recently cleaned graffitti in Brooklyn. Huh. How many people are going to want to check up on that regularly? Finally: the lack of good meta-data and the overabundance of certain types of listings (events and photos were my biggest problems) meant throwing users repeatedly into a needle a haystack situation.

Anyway, I didn’t intend this to be a negative post, and I really do wish the EveryBlock team good luck. Adrian Holovaty seems well equipped to lead the site to success, and perhaps the time has come for a well-resourced hyperlocal to succeed. I suppose I’m just grumpy about my own inability to execute anything in this space.

blockrocker everyblock

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Unlimited EDGE Data: $17

Sounds awesome? That’s the price… IN BANGLADESH. I’m not there yet, so I can’t attest to it personally, but word is 1150TK/month (Bangladesh Taka) gets you a SIM card set up for unlimited data access. Its prepaid, so no paper bills, no hassle. Of course, I’m imagining the bitrate may be slow and inconsistent, so no Apple HD movies for me. But whatever - its still cool.

bangladesh

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FOSS software replacements for the expensive stuff you’re used to

I’m unemployed - by choice, mind you, but unemployed nonetheless. So when choosing software with which to provision my laptop for my upcoming year-long travel-tech-blogging adventure (8 days left…), I’ve been picking FOSS options every step of the way.

Microsoft Office -> OpenOffice
Photoshop -> Paint.net

…well, um, actually, that’s it so far as everything else I use is cloud (gmail etc.). Still - its really nice to have alternatives like the two above to choose from.

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Digg growth flat for 2007? Is their a place for social curation outside of geekdom?

Anyone else notice that Compete shows digg essentially flat in (three quarters of) ‘07? And, that’s with a lot of feature launches too - topical areas, pictures, video, etc. Say what you will about the validity of Compete stats, but evidently digg is struggling to grow beyond its core 20something-geek demographic.

The continued bleeding of Netscape/Propeller in fact suggests that concept of socially moderated news may not resonate with demographic segments other than digg’s core audience:

So - here’s the question: do Jane and Joe Sixpack want to participate in their news and content? Or just consume?

bleeding, digg, netscape, propeller traffic

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