TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Recommendations & Discovery are the New Search

Recommendations and discovery are becoming more and more important - to the internet in general, but also specifically as a complement, supplement, and (gasp!) replacement to core search activities.

The big question I’m wondering is how long it will be before a “Search” box appears on the StumbleUpon home page - leveraging their human derived index to allow for narrowly focused, highly relevant stumbling.

In one sense, the rise of “R&D” can be seen as a response to Google’s dominance - services like StumbleUpon, Medium, and so on offer entrepreneurs and investors a way around Google to influence people’s web-usage patterns.

In another sense, however, the evolution of R&D is a natural consequence of technology’s march. R&D services are fundamentally search engines: they just use a different class of algorithm (clickstream correlation), and accept queries in a less-structured fashion. Effectively, R&D services are another point in the spectrum of human vs. algorithmic search options: Google pins down one end, while Mahalo, ChaCha, and even Yahoo! Answers compete at the other. StumbleUpon and their ilk exist in the center blending the human element (clickstreams) with the machine (automated aggregation and analysis).

Continue Reading…

calacanis, chacha, delicious, google, mahalo, medium, search, stumbleupon yahoo

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When AdSense Fails

For all Google’s algorithmic awesomeness, the AdSense crawler still has the incredible ability to suck at keyword analysis. Take, for example, the awesomely popular Desktop Tower Defence game. Check out the AdSense placements:

Yes, that’s an ad for some type of antenna tower, because the page says “Tower” on it in a number of places.

Meanwhile, the perfectly serviceable meta keyword and content tags tell the real story:

<meta name=”description” content=”A flash version of Warcraft III TD”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”warcraft, flash, game”>

So - Goolge is missing some killer targeted inventory, and HandDrawnGames is missing revenue. Is there no opportunity to create a better connection between content and ad placement here?

1. Meta Tags: I understand that meta tags are easily abused and Google by-and-large disregards them. What about algorithmically assessing the credibility of meta tags on a site by site basis on the criteria of URL age, history, and traffic pattern?
2. Webmaster Tools & AdSense: Again why not let webmasters categorize their sites in Google’s Webmaster Tools, allowing superior placement? Again, a credibility algorithm could reduce the impact from link farms, etc.
3. Tie into DMOZ: Ok, DMOZ is dead in the water. But perhaps its time to resurrect it, and make use of it as a categorization engine for AdSense. Crank up the community profile of DMOZ again, and surface its “category lookup” as a free API, of which AdSense would be the biggest but not only customer.
4. Del.icio.us: Ok, the Yahoo ownership might make this sticky for Google, but Del.icio.us URL tag history would be a great way to categorize sites for AdSense inventory purposes. Sure del.icio.us can be gamed, but so can anything, and community self-policing tends to dampen gamed popularity spikes. Perhaps Yahoo should be using this as a source of competitive advantage in Panama?

Are people at the search engines thinking of these sort of things? I would have thought Google would be all over this, given that relevance was what made AdSense king in the first place.

adsense, del.icio.us, delicious, desktoptowerdefence, dmoz, dtd, google, meta, metatages, panama, tags, warcraft yahoo

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Engagement - 4 tips for Startups & Established players: using digg, del.icio.us, technorati, and google to build your community

Companies on the web (speaking in terms of 2.0 startups here) can be sorted into two categories - those that actively engage their communities, and those that don’t.

I base that on my first 2 month’s experience blogging here. Some reviews have been actively commented on over time by the company reviewed - take a look at the Collanos post, for instance: the Collanos folks are all over it with opinions, other ways of looking at things, feature updates, and so on. Same thing with Teqlo - lots of conversation flowed from that post.

Most reviews, however, haven’t gotten any attention from the firm in question. SuTree? TxtVox? Meshly? Hellooooo…?

There’s a number of ways that engaging Bloggers with comments or trackbacks is valuable for web companies (or any, for that matter) new or old:

1. Establishing a relationship often turns critics into advocates.
2. Share your side of the story: supplement, complement, and correct.
3. Gather feedback.
4. Gain eyeballs - posts with good discussion get more readers.
5. Build brand equity - your company looks better if its approachable and engaged.

Anyway, the benefits of Naked Conversations have been endlessly hashed out elsewhere.

So - how to go about realizing these benefits? Doing so does not have to be arduous or time consuming, nor do you necessarily need to rush out and hire a community manager. There’s 4 simple, fast ways to identify, track, and stay on top of conversations about your company:

1. Technorati: Subscribe to your tag. Enter this in your browser: http://technorati.com/posts/tag/YourCompanyNameHere. For example, here’s the Collanos page. Then, subscribe to it (there’s a nice RSS link right there). Now, you’re instantly updated in your feed reader whenever someone out there properly tags a post about you. For thoroughness, be sure to subscribe to feeds for all variations and misspellings of your name.
2. Google: bookmark searches for all common variations of your company’s name, as well as things like “YouCompanyName Review.” Try searching for “SuTree Review,” for instance. My SuTree post is on the first page.
3. Did you know you can subscribe to Digg search results? Well, you can. And you should. Digg weilds undue influence - you should be commenting on posts about your company, and ready to throw out a “Welcome Diggers!” message onto your site if a post goes front page (you should have a page ready to go, designed to convert notoriously shallow-browsing digg readers into members). Here’s the digg search for SuTree - the subscribe icon is innocuous, but there.
4. Del.icio.us: You should be following what’s getting bookmarked about you - your company, reviews, and so on. Read the user notes - those capsule summaries provide a good window into how your brand is perceived online. Finding yourself on del.icio.us can be cumbersome, as del.icio.us uses their own id strings for URLs. Here’s SuTree for example: http://del.icio.us/url/76ff772c19d0c546a3b70fc4e24b6080. Click that link though, and you’ll see a URL search box: enter yours there. And, if you scan all the way to the bottom, there’s an RSS feed for it too.

So there you go: adding RSS feeds to your reader from Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Digg, and bookmarking a few Google searches will keep you generally up to speed with what’s being said about your company. Following those feeds is a matter of minutes in your feed reader. Now, the onus is on you to act on that: get out there and comment - engage your community and enjoy the rewards.

EDIT: Guy Kawasaki posted an article today about DIY PR by Glen Kelmann. The 4 tips above would be good tools for someone going the DIY and engaging customers and stakeholders directly.

blogging, community, delicious, digg, feeds, google, howto, reputation, rss, startups, technorati tips

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A Suggestion for Del.icio.us - My Top 10

I use del.icio.us for all of my bookmarking: archiving, research, and day-to-day stuff. One thing I find is that there is a set of bookmarks that I user much more frequently than any others - the day-to-day type stuff - and finding these by tag or date requires extra clicks, keypresses, or scrolling to drill down to them.

There’s a simple, unobtrusive tweak del.icio.us could make to help me out with this: start tracking outbound clicks, and maintain a list of my top 10 outbound destinations. My most commonly visited bookmarks will bubble to the top, and I’ll be happy. Those that don’t want to see the top 10 can turn the feature off.

click to expand

As a side benefit, it gives del.icio.us another very useful popularity metric to aggregate and surface.

del.icio.us, delicious, improvements, popularity, suggestions, top10 yahoo

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Meshly - diggable IM bookmarking

RedWriteWeb points us to Meshly: an IM bookmarking service that takes del.icio.us, adds digg-style voting, and uses IM as a front end. Bookmarking on Meshly works by IM’ing a Meshly chatbot (AIM: meshly, GTalk: meshly@gmail.com, MSN: meshly@meshly.com), and entering simple commands to initiate a stream of prompts:

Pages that you bookmark through IM show up on the Meshly site in your user profile, and can be voted on my Meshly.com visitors:

Even the signup process takes place via IM:

The bottom line is that Meshly provides a well executed digg/delicious alternative with a gimmicky-yet-valuable twist in the use of IM as primary UI. Its fast and easy to use, and if you’re a regular IM user (I hit meebo a few times a day), it fits into your regular workflow nicely, and is about 10x faster to submit to than Digg. The MyMesh tab on the website (once you’re signed in) provides channel and tag indexing for your bookmarks, making for a similarly powerful user-experience as that provided by del.icio.us.

Josh Catone rightly suggested that the concept of channels and tags overlapped and created redundancy. I can see what Meshly intends (user created content areas), but along Josh’s thinking, I’m not sure why tags can’t form the basis of this. Del.icio.us makes a single layer folksonomy easy-to-use, so can Meshly. Josh also suggests adding a del.icio.us-style bookmarklet to enable people to use Meshly without IM; while it sounds good conceptually, doing so might dilute Meshly’s source of differentiation - I’m not sure if utility outweighs branding or not here. Meshly could also use a web sign-up - presently registration is only through IM client.

One other question I had was Meshly’s business model: If much of the Meshly activity takes place via IM, is their ability to advertise and make money compromised? I’d be curious to see a by-activity breakdown on del.icio.us traffic and see how big a slice Meshly is missing by going IM.

In any event, Meshly is hitting a chord and getting good coverage around the web. I think Twitter has really primed people for more in the way of “instant” services… prepare for more to come down the pipeline.

1. Rexduffdixon suggests that with email overload becoming a hotbutton issue, IM may be ready to get more attention as an alternate transaction channel.
2. Libraryclips suggests also taking another look at clipmarks, spurl, and netvouz.
3. 901am compares Meshly to enabling digg-voting on every inane Twitter that you put out - personally, I don’t think the comparison applies, as Meshly is (for now) more bookmarking than just Twitter-babbling.
4. Muhammad Saleem sums up Meshly as “not greater than the sum of its parts” - suggesting that all of its functionality is available elsewhere in more established services already.

aim, bookmarking, clipmarks, delicious, digg, dodgeball, gtalk, im, meshly, msn twitter

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How to Make Cluztr the Next Big Thing in Four Easy Steps

Yesterday, Mashable pointed me to Cluztr - a new “social” browsing site that, through a browser add-on, tracks your and surfaces your clickstream. Cluztr incorporates elements of Digg, Del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog into what is effectively an in-the-cloud, social browser history. Cluztr uses this social history to introduce you to others in style of MyBlogLog.

Business Model & Privacy

The first thought I had was that whatever business model Cluztr has must revolve around selling the clickstream data they collect. Which it does:

We may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, sales, browser type, operating system, Internet, domain, demographic and profile data, traffic patterns, and related site information to reputable third parties, but these statistics will not include personally identifying information. [Privacy Statement]

Cluztr’s privacy policy also describes a retrograde-sounding “opt-out” spamming policy, whereby Cluztr will use your clickstream data to target you for advertising until you email them to opt-out:

We may use personal data to let you know about products and services that may be of particular interest to you. We may also want to provide you with related information from third parties that we think may be of interest to you. If you would rather not receive this information, please send an e-mail to: info@cluztr.com. [Privacy Statement]

Hmmmmm. So, Cluztr is in fact a market research house and advertising engine of the sort that regularly raises such hue-and-cry, when - for instance - someone finds out the DoubleClick uses cookies to track your clickstream across the internet.

And that’s OK - you’re trading your clickstream data for the value proposition of online history and social browsing, and by downloading and installing the Cluztr add in, you’re explicitly accepting this (compared to DoubleClick’s cookie tracking that took place unknown to most). Additionally, Cluztr does promise to aggregate/anonymize data, offers the (cumbersome) opt-out option, and allows you to identify sites in your history as “private” - though apparently you cannot set your entire clickstream to private.

Spam and Gaming

Cluztr has a great feature that creates a Digg-like popularity list of what sites are “hot” at any given moment. Unfortunately, this list is game-able. See the blurred out ones above? Those are pr0n sites - “sex latin chick gets ——” is not the sort of internet gold that I want to stumble across.

How to Make Cluztr the Next Big Thing

Cluztr has a great peice of infrastructure, and a social/viral model to potentially take it big. A few tweaks to the business model and site functionality could make it a very useful tool - and drive adoption.

1. Get a new name: “Cluztr” is awkward and goofy sounding. I’m sorry, but it is. The equation worked for Flickr as novelty propelled awareness, but that easy brand-equity has gone away. Additionally, Cluztr doesn’t really speak to what the site does, it looks awkward, and its more difficult to describe the spelling of than Flickr.
2. Ditch the Vocabulary: This is an addendum to the first point. Cluztr refers to popular sites as “cluztrs” - presumably because users are “clustering” around them. Jeff Nolan summed up the folly of creating your own lexicon when I called out Teqlo for using “Teqlets” instead of widgets:
   

   Every startup wants to develop their own vocabulary and at some point they realize what a stupid idea that is. We figured that out about 2 months ago…

3. Flip your Advertising to Opt-In: Credibility will drive adoption, and going the opt-in route as opposed to the current negative-enrollment (you’re signed up unless you do something) model will drive credibility. This isn’t Columbia House (the king of negative enrollment sales) - this is the brave new fronteir. Kick it up knotch.
4. Automated Categorization & Filtering: Yeah, its going to be a bitch to do, but it needs doing. GMail, Google Reader, and Porn shouldn’t be in the top “cluztrs,” or listed anywhere on the site for that matter. Neither should fully parameterized domains with people’s user id strings and hashed authentication tokens. This could be done with machine intelligence if Cluztr took the time to build the database that would feed it, or could be done with community filtering via a “flagging” system.

Summary

Though this profile may sound pessimistic, I do think the idea has legs. With a filtering system and a few tweaks, Cluztr has the potential to bring together the best of del.icio.us, Digg, and MyBlogLog in a simple to use fashion with a viral model that drives membership - real value can be delivered to Cluztr users, and Cluztr advertising/research clients alike. That’s compelling.

browsing, cluztr, delicious, digg, mashable, mybloglog social

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