by Jason Preston on June 13, 2008
It’s a really good idea for large companies to take advantage of social media technologies to remove some of the management overhead that just comes naturally with directing a large group the old fashioned way.
One of the most well known tools is a blog. Giving employees a blog they can use internally (or externally) is a good way to get your company out there.
But as we move forward, it’s more and more likely that you’re going to be hiring people who already have their own blog, either on their own hosting or with Wordpress.com or Typepad or one of a hundred other freely available services.
And you can’t make internal communities and blogging mandatory. Groudswell has a good explanation of why it’s a bad idea (with case studies to back it up!).
So the problem going forward is going to be: how do you integrate employees’ personal blogs into an internal network?
I think it would be interesting to see a plug-in for engines like WordPress that would let users specify, for example, a particular category of post to be fed only to a secure intranet area. This way an employee could keep their personal blog, but be able to participate in an internal blogging structure as well.
Blogging is just the tip of the social media iceberg, of course. Who wants to set up a brand new profile when they move to a new company?
I’m interested to see how businesses approach this problem.
by Jason Preston on June 10, 2008
I know I’ve said it before, but if you’re running your web site and you’re not paying attention to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, you’re ignoring a very good resource.
Just yesterday, Sven Naumann (who is on the search quality team) wrote a post dealing with concerns webmasters have about scraper sites that pull exact post content and republish it as their own.
So what does Google do? They use a couple of methods, which they don’t identify, to determine which bit of duplicate content is the original piece, and then point to those.
For people who see scraping sites placing higher in search results than their own, original content, they offer this advice:
Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation:
- Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
- You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
- Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.
Largely, the answer seems to be “don’t worry, we’ve got a handle on it.” But if you want more details on how to minimize duplicate content within your own domain, you can go check out the post.
What I think Google really needs to solve though, is the arrival of “old” content for the first time online. How do you figure out who the real owner of that content is?
by Jason Preston on June 3, 2008
Fred Wilson is absolutely right about web discussions: Information can be sucked out, but it needs to be pumped back in as well.
If I write a great blog post, and it gets sucked in to Facebook as a note, and the conversation happens there, inside Facebook - it doesn’t automatically get attached to my site. The problem stems from the fact that all these different web services get value from having the conversation happen on their servers.
Facebook gets value from having a complete social environment going on inside their walled garden, so they’re not dependent on search.
Disqus gets value because all the comments left in their system are regarded by Google as their original content.
FriendFeed gets value from having conversations happen ON friendfeed, which keeps people on their service.
Business bloggers get value from having comments on their site because Google sees it as original content and because smart commenters frequently add to the knowledge available in the post.
Google is the largest roadblock in this process. As long as it provides an incentive to web sites and services who collect comments and discussion on their server (first), then it’s only smart business to keep things segmented.
