Category Archives: Web 2.0

Dodgeball vs Twitter

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alexa3

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

In a recent analysis for TechDirt Insight Community I was looking at mobile social networking. Although Alexa comparisons leave something to be desired this Twitter vs Dodgeball reach comparison is pretty darn striking, and shows how the more “robust” Dodgeball has been crushed by Twitter. My take on what happened with Twitter is simple: Twitter rocked the SXSW conference last year as the key networking application for a large number of “alpha” onliners. This popularity has carried over as mobile networking moved into the techno mainstream.

It’s not clear to me if Twitter – or any similar application – will hit regular folks in the same way only Myspace really has done so far with Facebook as a distant second in total social networking. Myspace’s popularity stands in stark contrast to the way it is largely disparaged in much of the hardcore tech community where people will use Twitter and LinkedIn and to some extent Facebook, but would probably laugh out loud at somebody who asked them to check out their Myspace page.

2008 will see a tidal wave of social online activity and applications

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My prediction about the evolution of the internet in 2008 is that we will see a lot more excellent applications like Flickr and Picasa to store, organize and share stuff as well as a lot more Twitterfeeds and Tumblrs which allow you to more easily share and assemble content you have stored or created elsewhere.

I don’t think there will be more huge breakthroughs in search or social applications, rather we’ll see people increasing and refining their use of social applications (and to a lesser extent search aps) and we’ll seee a huge number of new programs arise to accommodate the tidal wave of online social activity.

We’ll see blogging go much more mainstream and probably show signs of levelling off in the affluent world as those of us who are compelled to write all get blogs.    People in tech who like to write already have blogs, and people out of tech who like to write are mostly in the process of “getting blogs”, and I mean that in both senses of the word “get”.    In the developing world, with the advent of One Laptop Per Child and other great technology enabling projects, blogging will begin to take off in extraordinary fashion as everybody with something to share will soon have the means to … share it with everybody.

These are exciting times for those of us fortunate to be on earth and online.   Let’s not screw it up, OK?

Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 from Tamar

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Tamar Weinberg  has an excellent  list of some 250 internet marketing posts she collected from various online marketing niches that she feels were the best blog posts of the year.    Obviously you can’t be exhaustive with this type of list but it would be a great way for somebody unfamiliar with internet marketing to jump in and “get it” pretty fast.

Weave -ing the twisted path to browser enlightenment?

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Mozilla is announcing Weave, an application that will enhance the browsing experience in various ways.   I’m somewhat confused about what this means to users, but my early understanding is that this is a Flock-like approach, trying to make the browser environment a better one for socializing,  multitasking, and customized uses.

Generally I think this is a positive thing.   For reasons I don’t understand few of us really take the time to use and configure the many applications that allow us to customize our desktops in more functional ways.    Google desktop, My Yahoo, Flock , and many more tools would allow us to build a great “control panel” for our online needs, but this appears to be a fairly low priority for most of us.    I think it is analogous to how rarely people use even the simplest extra commands at Google search to refine their search.    For reasons that escape me we don’t like to improve on design or functionality even when doing so is easy and does not take much time.     Some do, most don’t.  Why?

You are killing people in your Social Network?

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Massive multiplayer online gaming is increasingly becoming a mainstream social activity.     Leaving aside for the moment many interesting questions about how this affects the offline behavior and psychology of those who are playing these games many hours each day, there are a lot of practical business issues of great interest as well.

Daya over at Webguild suggested recently that the next generation of social networks may be inspired by these multiplayer online video games.     This is a really interesting idea for game developers – could you maintain the excitement of the game play but have players socialize after the game was over in the same way they socialize on Myspace or Facebook?     I think it’s a tall order.    There is limited socializing in the game space to set up games, play, collect a team, yell at your teammates or opponents, etc, but from a business and social perspective this is probably not significant as social activity outside of the (highly relevant) gaming activity.  

An amazing killer application – pun intended – would harvest the motivation, intellect, and creative thought that goes into playing online games and use this for more practical applications – perhaps in real time as tens of millions play the games.      Unfortunately the most viable applications for the current crop of mostly violent games would be military, leading to a very sinister vision of teenagers around the world unwittingly (or even volunteering?!) to help direct battle in real places.    But I’m thinking more along the lines of some fuzzy logic applications where problem solving at the game level could be used for problem solving in some business applications.      Probably not practical – especially as computers become better equipped to create content and analyze opportunities.     

Joe Duck – Chinese Edition

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Click HERE for my Chinese Edition.    Cool?

Actually, any web page can be auto-translated in this fashion by Google.  It’s a really cool feature though I’m guessing the translations must leave something to be desired.    My understanding is that you still need humans to pull quality meaning from one language to another.    Still, this is a huge step forward and the advent of hand held translation units, online translation, and a lot more global travel is breaking down one of the barriers to international understanding – language.

China is expected to be the world’s top travel destination by 2020 and I don’t doubt that estimate.  It is one of the reasons I’m anxious to get over there to SES China in Xiamen, the Xianglu Grand Hotel (though I’m not clear if this is the SES China venue or not), The Great Wall of China, Beijing and the Forbidden City, Hong Kong Harbor, Hong Kong, Kowloon, and much more of the amazing China Travel landscape. I want to start exploring and understanding the nation and culture that may eventually eclipse the USA in terms of global influence  (I’m not predicting that – just noting it is a possibility.  What is a certainty is that China will continue to be one of the most influential nations for some time to come).      One of the most interesting graphs I have ever seen showed the global GDP of about 1850, noting that India+China were over half the global totals, and the USA was not even in the same league.    The USA’s remarkable industrial rise since that time led us to the global economic dominance we now enjoy, but things could change … again.   I don’t see this shift in Economic dominance as a negative, rather more an inevitable balancing and levelling of an increasingly globalized playing field – the world Tom Friedman has described so well in his book “The World is Flat”. 

Search Ranking Factors

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Rand Fishkin’s SEOMOZ has been doing some of the best work collecting data from prominent SEO folks and groups of experts and then analyzing that data.     Back in April I missed this report about SEO ranking factors but it’s a great read, especially for those who have little idea about how to optimize a website and web pages for better placement in search engines.    Note that experts do not agree.    Also, my fairly extensive experiences have convinced me that Google changes the ranking rules regularly simply to make it impossible to reverse engineer them.   But it’s still important to follow these basic recommendations which include what I’d argue are now the “prime directives” for optimizing websites:

Create pages that are of high and unique content quality.

Use URLs and Titles that are highly relevant to the queries you wish to rank for.

In bound links are still very important – seek external links and create internal incoming links using your desired keywords as anchor text.

Tend to exaggerate the keywords you are targeting.   ie the best writing will NOT result in the best optimization due to defects in the way machines process word information.     

CES 2008

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Click HERE for the latest on my CES Experience

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas I’ll be blogging as much as possible, liveblogging the Bill Gates keynote on Sunday and trying to get a grasp on the big picture at this huge conference.    I’m really looking forward to seeing the latest gadgets and trends in technology.     One of the gadget themes I’ll explore are language translators.   These are important in travel and I’ll hope to test a few during the China trip this April.

Franklin has a translator device that looks like one of the best offerings out there – a twelve language translator where you type in the word and it speaks it back to you.

Google’s got an interesting new language translation “bot” for the Blackberry that Google is blogging about here.   Maybe they’ll have a Treo version later?

Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?

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Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging.    I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists.   Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).

I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings.  Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.

It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” –  to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.   

Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people.  Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not.    Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper.   That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.

Copy, right?

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I’m writing to so many blogs these days it’s getting hard to keep them all straight.    Here’s my thinking on the Lane Hartwell incident over at the Webguild blog.

Webguild is the Silicon Valley marketing and internet networking group that meets at Google every month and sponsors a couple of conferences each year.   It’s a volunteer effort but run with exceptional professionalism and innovation by Daya Baran (Webguild President) and Reshma Kumar (Webguild Vice President).    I’m looking forward to the Web 2.0 Conference to be held in January.