TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

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

Google Buying Feedburner; Feeds are another media like Radio, Print, or WWW

TC breaks it: GOOG is buying Feedburner for 100M. WatchMojo covers the origins of FB’s 10 million in VC funding, DeepJive says it only makes sense, and SEW sums up some good advantages for Google.

Holistic Analytics and Advertising

From where I’m sitting, it make sense. Feeds have been out in left field for a long time in terms of a consistent means of measuring their audience and impact on site traffic; with this acquisition and their existing analytics portfolio, Google has a means to connect all of the dots and create a truly holistic means of looking at sites.

Of course this also means that Google can expand their ad inventory as well, offering feeds as another media channel to advertisers. Feeds have evolved into another “media,” so to speak, and as Google has tried to expand into print and radio, so they are taking a stab at RSS.

Creepy

One final thought: as is mentioned more and more, Google’s reach is sort of creeping me out. The Internet is increasingly at the mercy of Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto - here’s hoping they stick to it.

analytics, feedburner, google, news, rss, stats techcrunch

Craig to Newspaper Association of America: “You’re Screwed”

Found this on FARK and wanted to share in light of my earlier, ongoing quantitative analysis of Craigslist’s explosive growth: I agree with Craigs assessment that the “printing press industry” is screwed, presented to the newspaper industry high-ups at this year’s Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention. Craig notes, however, that there’s plenty of money to be made in quality journalism & investigative reporting.

When you’ve got growth like this over a month…

…you’re allowed to prognosticate.

“We have no advertisers to keep happy and no investors to keep happy. That’s a great relief,” Newmark said to about 250 newspaper executives from around the country, who probably wish they could say the same.

EDIT: From TechMeme - the newspaper association of america has positive news about online readership growth, citing figures showing that online newspaper traffic is growing at twice the rate of the wider internet.

classifieds, craigslist, news newspapers