Blogosphere

Best part: Anil dancing to thriller in the background…

I felt the need to at least pay lip service to Time’s most recent ‘person of the year’ announcement. I won’t spend a million words talking about an article that has already received a great deal of commentary from the blogosphere. I doubt I could say anything original about the article anyway.

But if you hadn’t heard about it yet, it’s definitely worth reading. So click on through and take a look.

One of the great things you learn in statistics is about emergent properties in large numbers. The basic idea is that as the number of things you are analyzing–be it people or neurons or stones on a beach–gets bigger and bigger, new properties emerge. These properties are not proportionate in any way to those that would emerge if the number of stones or neurons or people were cut in half. They would disappear altogether, or be diminished by more than half their size. Quite literally, emergent properties begin to happen when the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

This is why when your research people are trying to draw conclusions about markets, they want to have a large sample size. The more people you look at, the more likely that an observable phenomena–like the propensity to buy red clothes around the holidays–is occurring because it can be predicted by another factor rather simply occur by random chance.

The blogosphere is a perfect opportunity to leverage the power of those numbers to get a real handle on exactly what people think of your product. What better focus group than people who already have strong enough opinions on your area of expertise to blog about it? No matter what area you’re in, there’s probably a big enough sample size out there to get started.

Just some good stuff I found in my RSS reader

• IM as social media by Jeremiah Owyang
• Scoble on Microsoft’s potentially colossal SEO influence
• The TailRank buzz about NewTeeVee
• Office for Mac users (like me) are SOL with the new office
• You’re either “LinkedIn or left out.”

In his book, The Looming Tower, Middle East expert Lawrence Wright lays out a number of the personal and technological barriers that prevented agents at the CIA and FBI from “connecting the dots” to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In both Tower and the 9/11 Commission’s report, intelligence community culture–which guards information like Google guards its precise algorithm for determining relevance–was faulted for keeping critical pieces of the 9/11 puzzle apart.

Yesterday, the New York Times magazine reported that this culture is reinforced in the computer systems used by the agencies:

The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting-edge in 1995. When [former Defense Intelligence Agency agent Matthew Burton] went onto Intelink–the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network–the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to anwer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three letter agency–from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands–used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog–that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

Offline, inter-agency information sharing is similarly impeded by a morass of bureaucracy. This wasn’t a problem when the USSR was the enemy. The communist government moved slowly and deliberately. By contrast, Al-Quaeda and its sister organizations move much more rapidly and covertly than the Soviet Union ever could.

One step in the process was an essay contest sponsored by the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Agents were invited to submit essays about how to improve information sharing. One of the winners was an essay by Calvin Andrus, the CTO of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A entitled, “The Wiki and the Blog; Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.”

From the Times article:

When a blogger finds and interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree, it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink–linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important–then mob intelligence would take over.

Who knew that the echo chamber could be used in such a powerful way for the defense of the United States?

Like with any organization, there are very real institutional obstacles to overcome in order to implement these technologies. But even within the intelligence community, some agents have begun experimenting with a wiki system they call Intellipedia. The system has even been used to generate a National Intelligence Estimate, which the Times describes as “an authoritative snapshot of what the intelligence community thinks about a particular state–and a guide for foreign and military policy.” Elsewhere, blogs are being used to collect and disseminate information about the state of the H5N1 Avian Flu virus threat.

This is as innovative a use of blogs and wikis as I’ve seen. It’s also great evidence for the potential of blogs and wikis. If the national intelligence community can use these tools to break down age-old institutional barriers and save American lives, companies can use them to improve efficiency and flexibility. Pretty exciting stuff.

Technorati Tags: FBI, CIA, intelligence community, 9/11, blogs, wikis, national security, new york times, open-source spying

There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about the fact that Yahoo! is launching a number of media properties without RSS. The theory is that they want more eyeballs on their actual site through a browser than people only clicking through from their RSS readers when they find something truly interesting or meaningful.

Obviously, advertising revenue is at stake here. But I think Yahoo! is making the wrong decision, long term. If you were an advertiser, would you rather pay a little bit of money every time someone who might or might not care about your product looked at your ad or a little bit more money every time someone who is almost certainly interested in what you’re selling looked at your ad?

Yahoo! is forgetting that context-sensitive advertising–placing ads only with articles that overlap topically with the advertiser’s market–will deliver a smaller but more dedicated audience for an advertiser’s message. Giving users the option to click through from their RSS readers when they really care about a story means that your advertisers will get their message out to the people who care.

Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: RSS, Yahoo

If you don’t know the ending to that line, then you’re beyond my help. For more Gumpishness, check out Jim Turner’s funny and insightful post with great blogosphere advice in Gump-talk.

Technorati Tags: Jim Turner, Forrest Gump

I googled Jeremiah Owyang this morning, only to discover that his old blogspot blog still comes up first in the Google search results. It only took me one extra click to find his new, self-hosted blog, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

But then I remembered a weird problem in Google with fellow PodTech geek Robert Scoble’s blog. A quick search for Robert still brings up his ancient blog rather than his current one.

Now, I know this is nothing new. But it’s telling that more than a year after Scoble’s move from weblogs.om to wordpress.com, Google can’t bring up the most relevant result first. Inbound links are a great measure of influence and relevance, but it’s obvious that Google’s special sauce needs some further adjustments. Perhaps recency of inbound links could be weighted more heavily towards current relevance.

PS: Jeremiah, break a leg on your first day at PodTech. I know Silicon Valley isn’t Hollywood, but close enough ;-).

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, robert scoble, jeremiah owyang, google, inbound links, relevance

I’ve been told that I’m a workaholic. I’ll go in on a Sunday afternoon if it’s required. I’ll even meet up with Steve the day after Thanksgiving for some pre-CES planning. But I will absolutely, under no circumstances, check my RSS reader or post to any blogs (except for maybe, TeresaCentric) on Thanksgiving Day. There’s too much cooking to be done and football to be watched.

I will, however, be using this weekend to enjoy two bloggy books that I’ve had hanging around for a while now. One is John Battelle’s The Search about how search has revolutionized business and culture. I’ll also be thumbing through Maria Langer’s Wordpress 2, because I’ve been told that it’s a very comprehensive guide to anything I’d ever want to know about my favorite blogging platform.

So that’s it! Happy Turkey Day, kids. Don’t eat too much stuffing and pass out on the floor in a food coma like my Uncle Mike.

Technorati Tags: The Search, John Battelle, Maria Langer, Wordpress 2, Thanksgiving, Bloggy Books

I must have been asleep at the wheel on Friday (I blame my new asthma meds) to have missed this. Our keynoter leaves his job and I’m not paying attention. Jeez!

Calacanis’ resignation comes on the heels of Time Warner naming Randy Falco to replace Jonathan Miller as CEO of AOL.

Calacanis says he hasn’t planned his next move yet, but according to his beta Calacaniscast, he’s received tons of job offers already.

It will be interesting to see where he lands.

Technorati Tags: Jason Calacanis, AOL, Jonathan Miller, Randy Falco

While doing some research on bloggers and CES, I came across this Blu-Ray site. It looks like a blog, but it doesn’t act like a blog. I can’t find categories, permalinks, or an RSS feed. And don’t even ask me about the code. But that three column layout sure looks familiar…

Why didn’t these folks just download WordPress and build themselves a nice, pretty free blog? I don’t get it.

Technorati Tags: CES, Blu-Ray, wordpress

Today, Wired profiled ReputationDefender, a company that combines advanced Internet search and good, old-fashioned detective work to clean up clients’ reputations on the Web. This looks to be a solution for those whose youthful hijinks are coming back to bite them in the tuchus when potential employers look up their names in Google.

It also introduces some complicated new questions about the power of the blogosphere in terms of personal and professional reputation. It’s often cited as a positive that the growth of user-generated content means that people will have a much harder time escaping the bad behavior of their past. As our reader Vaspers the Grate would probably say, the blogosphere keeps the business world honest.

Do services like this make sense to you as an individual professional? What about as an employer? As a parent? I’m still forming my opinion on this, and I’d love to hear what you guys think.

On this election day, CNN has brought in 29 political bloggers for an election night blogger party at the Tryst Coffee House in Washington, DC

CNN is also featuring a customizable “your races” page. They’re really rising to the occasion this year in providing interactive information for their viewers and readers.

David Sifry of Technorati issues a biannual “state of the blogophere” report. The latest report indicates a decrease in new blogs per day from 160K per day in June to 100K this October. Sifry attributes the decrease to improvements in the detection and removal of spam blogs or “splogs” from Technorati’s tracking system.

I was most interested to see that bloggers still choose to link primarily to mainstream media (MSM) outlets such as the New York Times as sources of hard news and information. That flies in the face of predictions that the blogosphere will crush mainstream journalism.

And now for a bit of lighthearted silliness and jocularity…

During our “Grapes on a Plane” event last week, we made a post-conference foray to Hedges Family Estate in Richland, WA on a couple of private jets courtesy of Greenpoint Technologies. Just about everyone had a few glasses of wine. This made us all rather silly.

The next thing you know, Robert Scoble is performing “The Butter Knife Scratch,” a new and innovative musical sound that can only be produced by scratching melted vinyl records with a butter knife.

I’m proud to say that I’m a part of the “Butter Knife Scratch.” That mellifluous female voice at the end of the recording belongs to me!
I am also the proud owner of the piece of melted vinyl upon which Robert played his opus for the assembled throng. It is pictured at left encasing a bottle of Hedges Family Estate Red Mountain fortified port.

Christophe Hedges, if you want it back, you’re gonna have to come and get it!

We now return to our regularly scheduled seriousness…

A lot of people try to match their blogroll to the list of blogs they regularly read, which makes a lot of sense. But I like to think of my blogroll as an entirely separate list of links - they are the blogs that I recommend to other people.

There’s a fairly subtle difference between the two concepts, and I get that there seems to be an inherent contradiction in recommending a blog that I don’t read, which is why it’s a lot more common to find a blog I read that isn’t on my blogroll.

This is because blog discovery is still in its very early stages.

I don’t think that search is going to be the mechanism for blog discovery. Search is a great tool for finding something you’re already looking for, but blogs are fundamentally nebulous, and it works a lot better to have a blog recommended to you than to go randomly searching for something with the right keywords.

This is why blogrolls are so important - because aside from the brand-new and amazing MyBlogLog Communities, they are the only real mechanism for sharing new blogs. Since recommendations are far more powerful if you give fewer of them (If someone comes across a blogroll with six blogs on it, they’re more inclined to look at them than if they come across a blogroll that lists 140 different sites), I keep my blogroll short and diverse.

This way, hopefully people will be encouraged to click out on my blogroll and find something new that they really like. And this is why my blogroll is different from “the blogs I read.”

…Or an example of another snarky blogger? Alas, I suspect the former.

All we can say to corporate America is once again, if you’re planning a blogger campaign, consider hiring a consultant (like us) to help you. Joel Spolsky has written a scathing essay about his experience with Sprint and their Power Vision Network. Ultimately, it appears that Sprint has some lessons to learn here (many of which we cover BTW at our conferences, seminars, and consulting sessions) about blogger engagement:

“Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free.

That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it.”

Conclusion? Have some finesse. Work on having an agenda that’s a little less transparent. Form a relationship, cultivate a bond of some kind. Sending out phones to targeted “influencers” is a one-way, old world, broadcast model notion. An engineer asking a blogger for their input because they’ve read a post of theirs about interface concerns forms a two-way relationship. Here’s a question to Joel — was the PR person a blogger themselves? Would it have made any difference? Our feeling is that to engage a blogger, it helps to BE a blogger.

“Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments.”

“There’s no desktop integration, no ITunes integration, no feature for subscribing to Podcasts, nothing like that. When you plug the phone into your computer using the supplied USB cable, it thinks you want to use the phone as a modem. Yes, one day I might want to do that, that’s true, but for now I just wanted to get MP3s onto the thing…”

“…I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.”

Conclusion? Understand your audience. Don’t send a geek engineer a product that a geek engineer that won’t respect. Make sure you are providing something of real value. Beware that it’s real easy to post negatively too. If you aren’t sure, hire a blogger to help you.

“And now suddenly someone at Sprint read some book by Scoble and then they read Malcolm Gladwell’s theories of tipping points in the airport and Hey Presto! Maybe we can make this work by finding the tipping point people! You know, the bloggers! And all the bloggers get free cell phones, and Sprint gets tons of publicity, but frankly all the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic.

Ouch. Conclusion? Ask/hire for input before pushing for a “review.” This was a classic example of how sending Spolsky a prototype phone a year ago could have saved Sprint from shipping a sub-par product, and could have given them a heads up that he’d pan the thing as is. As I suspected, other bloggers in the program also seem to want to be more than just co-marketers, and have influence over the product’s direction.

For a day or two, Cingular added the name of widely read technology blog Engadget to the list of banned words and URLs on its customer forums. The move brought some light snark from Engaget, after which Cingular reversed course and allowed users to refer to the popular blog once more.

Speculation about the reason for the 48-hour ban is rampant. But regardless of the reason, the ban was a bad decision on Cingular’s part.

Limiting profanity is absolutely reasonable. But if you provide a space for your customers to discuss your products–be it a blog or a forum–you have to allow them to say what they believe and cite sources to back up their opinions. This is true even when those opinions or sources offer criticism. Suppressing dissent usually only makes people madder.

We’ll be talking more about the best ways to manage blogosphere criticism at our upcoming conference.

Even for businesses who don’t blog, RSS monitoring has become an important way to “take the temperature” of public opinion about your company. The most assiduous monitors will usually track the feeds of relevant blogs, as well as feeds generated from search engines that allow users to track an RSS feed of their results like Yahoo! and MSN.

Another great way to track the vox populis is by monitoring online forums such as Yahoo!’s message boards on topics that are relevant to your company. This is particularly useful for getting a broader perspective because many people who post or participate regularly in message boards are not necessarily involved in the blogosphere.

Most message boards offer RSS feeds, although many are tricky to find. Using an RSS-enabled browser like Safari or Firefox is advised.

We’ll be talking about RSS monitoring in the “RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz” session at our conference coming up this October.