TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

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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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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The Big Digg Disappointment

I long appreciated digg; if not for its content, then for its algorithm’s ability to dynamically sift through the huge volume of submissions and deliver that content. Today we find out digg’s algorithm relies at least in part on human moderation.

What’s the significance (to me)?

1. Digg isn’t an agnostic platform, its as editorial and mod-driven as FARK.
2. Any non-zero amount of moderator activity complete invalidates the democratic elements of the platform.
3. That’s not a bad thing, or wouldn’t be if Digg hadn’t been positioned as agnostic/democratic/algorithmic.
4. Misrepresenting the technology behind one’s site is weak and doesn’t speak well for the digg team’s ability to deliver or for their respect for users.
5. The value of digg’s underlying technology has plummeted.
6. The FARK model works well, and digg has value as a FARK competitor focused on geek news.
7. As TC points out, it makes digg competitors like Reddit a lot more welcoming.

Lord knows I’ve had enough digg-meta news to last a lifetime. Maybe this issue will kick digg off the stage.

digg reddit

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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

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Keegy: Geo-relevance rankings

Keegy has an interesting concept: Its a website that serves up “relevant” news by correlating what other people from your same geographic region clicked. Localization is a good buzzword to be touting at the moment - Keegy’s execution seems to be confused on a number of levels.

1. Geography? Arguably, when it comes to web browsing, geographic location is a poor basis for relevance correlation to begin with. Clickstream behaviour is motivated by interests, which in internet land are loosely if at all correlated with location. i.e.: A gamer living in Winnipeg is more interested in international “gaming” news, not news that other people from Winnipeg may have enjoyed. It seems to me that location should be one spectrum of correlation - not the only one.

2. Transparency - Its unclear how Keegy relates my location to the content it serves up. At what level does the relevancy calculation take place? Province? City? Country? Can I change it? Given that there doesn’t appear to be a way to get an un-modified view of the site, I need to know “how” my world view is being generated.

3. Ranking - imagine if the Digg homepage didn’t tell you the number of diggs any given story had gotten. Would you find the page more or less trustworthy as a news source? Just how relevant are results are on Keegy is currently a mystery - i.e.: how much clickstream data is the page that Keegy served up based on? What I want is a “digg equivalent” score for each story that clarifies its ranking: “Viewed by 28 Winnipegers, 76 Manitobas, and 891 Canadians” would be a nice summary.

The Keegy press release helpfully offers this non-explanation:

“In a personalized news service users interact with the site and their activity anonymously generates statistics for each city/country. Using this information, an artificial intelligence algorithm ranks the posts for relevance according to a visitor’s location and the stories and home pages are edited automatically every minute.” [from Press Release]

4. Don’t Confuse Yourself with a Search Engine: For some reason, Keegy creates and maintains its own index of content blogs, fundamentally limiting the depth and breadth of Keegy-served content to its own crawl. Why not tie Keegy in with a browser extension and let users roam the net? I imagine that would create a much more valuable and interesting clickstream, and keeping only reasonably correlated data (across a given geographic user body) would eliminate “outlier” content.

In a nutshell, Keegy seems like a half-implemented slice of a larger project. Err, fortunately Keegy is “…closing seed capital stage on November 21th. and starting their first round of investment next October.” [from Press Release] Well, good luck to you. In a crowded market of social discovery services, I don’t think Keegy has the spark to go big.

aggregator, digg, keegy, news, social stumbleupon

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Corrected: DNHour.com - Digg for Domain Name News

DNHour.com is a community driven news site for the SEO domain name industry. IMHO this is a great vertical to target - the domain industry (and somewhat-related SEO industry) has a very high noise-to-signal ratio, and a good community (and algorithm) would go a long way to sorting some of the wheat from the chaff. Though its currently a little sparse on the community interaction side, its brand new, and I’m willing to give it a chance. I’m adding the DNHour feed to my reader. [found via Press Release]

From the press release:

DNHour.com is founded by a Malaysian-based domainer and serial entrepreneur, Koay Al Vin. After missing out on some big domain name purchases, he decided to keep in the know by tediously scouring domain forums and listing sites for what is available. He founded DNHour.com to ease the process and today, all domainers can help each other by sharing those important news and events at DNHour.com.

Other Coverage:

Net Monetization says get into DNHour early.

CORRECTION: Koay Al Vin contacted me to indicate that the site is focused specifically on Domain Name news & finds - not SEO as I assumed. Thanks for the correction!

digg, dnhour, domain+names, domaining, domains, marketing, optimization, search, sem seo

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Digg the Real World: Bookstores and more

After writing about how grocery stores could embrace Web 2.0 and getting some interesting comments on social networking around creamed corn, I got to thinking about other opportunities that 2.0 principles have to come to the offline world.

Applying the Digg Algorithm to Bookshelves

Consider the example of a common book store, for instance. Items are up on shelves, arranged alphabetically by author, or in special sections ordered by release date, or a national best-seller list. The special sections are the equivalent of the Digg frontpage - the key difference, however, is that in the case of a bookstore, the contents of that front page are driven by factors that have little to do with the actual users of the bookstore - i.e.: the shoppers. At best, they are a product of national-level, week or month old, aggregated sales data.

So - why not create an algorithm to populate those shelves? National bestseller status and release dates would be factors in the algorithm; but so would local store level sales. So - when a local newspaper review drives a surge in sales of an author’s old book, the algorithm would push that book onto the store’s “frontpage” and capitalize on the opportunity. Or when Kurt Vonnegut’s passes away, the algorithm reacts to spur sales, and the store doesn’t miss a spike because the marketing department missed the significance of the headlines that day.

Anyway, many retail venues seem to be stuck with relatively static approaches to in-store promotions. I don’t think this needs to be the case.

algorithm, digg, marketing, promotions retail

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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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Truemors is live: Read the Mysterious Beta invite email, Revel in the SPAM

Welcome INQUIRER readers!

Glad you made it here, but don’t stop reading with Guy’s funny email (below) - please feel free to browse, or subscribe to RSS. Or check out some reviews: if you’re into collaboration, read up Collanos. Hot for social tools? Check out Cluztr.

Whatever the case, thanks for stopping by, and please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Guy Kawasaki’s widely discussed venture - Truemors - is live and alive, a day before the embargo was supposed to lift. I’m not going to go into it in detail, as that’s been done all over the place already - see TechCrunch, CenterNetworks cool Video Review, Mathew Ingram’s typcially insightful comments on the notion of community, or Frantic Industries’ assessment of the low barrier to competition here.

I will mention, however, that to me the name has always sounded to close to “tumors.” That’s a grim association, and one that’s proving all too prescient as the ability to post anonymously has run the site over with cancerous spam and gamed posts, and snarky shots at Guy. Do I think Truemors is a digg-killer? No. Is it a Twitter-killer? No. May it yet find an audience among the celebrity-gossip-perez-hilton-TMZ crowd? Alarmingly - yes. I wish Guy nothing but good luck.

SPECIAL BONUS: Also below you’ll find the email text received by those who responded to Guy’s original “Help Wanted” post - its pretty rambling and philosophical, and positions Truemors as the evolution of communication following the printing press, desktop publishing (on Apples, of course), and blogging. Sort of cringe-worthily funny given the way the launch has gone.

///// The Email:

Thanks for responding to the “Help Wanted” ad. Call me a romantic, but I
believe in the democratization of information–that is, access for everyone
to everything, so I’m creating a site called Truemors.

A long time ago royalty and religious leaders had scribes. Around 600 the
Chinese printed using negative reliefs. Around 1450 Johann Gutenberg,
combined hundreds of years of progress into the screw printing press.

Fast forward to 1985 when Apple (Macintosh), Aldus (PageMaker), and Adobe
(PostScript) produced “desktop publishing.” A few years later people could
create web sites. Then blogging appeared on the scene. Still, people needed
a computer and a blogging tool like WordPress or TypePad to disseminate
information. Not that Truemors is in the same league as Gutenberg, Apple,
Aldus, Adobe, etc, but now all that people need is a phone to “tell the
world.”

I also believe in demonstrative technology–that is, products that enable
the open exhibition and expression of information, emotions, and opinions.
Where democratization implies that the many can read the content of the few,
demonstrative technology enables the many to create content too. Thus,
Truemors is the melding of democratization and demonstration that enables
people to “tell the world.”

People can post their rumors, thoughts, news, opinions, celebrity sightings,
and personal greetings, and anyone with web access can read them within
minutes. I was inspired by Twitter, BoredAt, Digg, PostSecret, PopSugar, and
HotOrNot–mull that over for a few minutes–and wish to acknowledge their
pioneering work.

You can start by posting a truemor in any of these ways….

///// End Email

digg, guykawasaki, kawasaki, perezhilton, tmz truemors

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Kevin Rose jumps on the Twitter-wagon

Om shares the non-news that Digg’s Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka are working on an IM-like Twitter competitor. Andy Beal, Rex Dixon, and Paris Lemon speculate further.

Speculative options include:

1. Digg-ified Twitter Clone: Voteable twitter posts, sounds a lot like Guy K.’s Truemors. Plus, why not just build an IM submit pipeline for Digg itself, like Meshly uses?
2. An actual IM competitor (as opposed to a twitter competitor): I have no idea what this might entail; IM is a weird anti-hype vortex - its huge, used by millions, monetizeable, etc., but by-and-large buzz & hype free. The digg-squad could be the crew to sex-up IM again - they’ve got the promo chutzpah and better-mousetrap ideas to make it happen.

Will it be one or the other or neither? Who knows! Hopefully whatever it is is a separate corporate entity so that it doesn’t get pulled down when the DMCA grim reaper comes knocking for Digg.

aim, digg, im, instantmessaging, jaiku, kevinrose, livemessenger, truemors twitter

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