Category Archives: Web 2.0

PodTech Bloghaus with Robert and Maryam = glimpse into future of reporting = very cool

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Although Apple’s release of the iPhone at MacWorld sort of stole the show away from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, I think PodTech / Scoble’s brilliant idea of setting up a “Bloghaus” at CES is one of the neatest conference ideas to come out in a long time.

Unlike some of the other early bloggers, Robert Scoble has been a strong advocate for the powers of blogging as cornerstone of commerce. His book with Shel Israel, “Naked Conversations”, was an excellent introduction for corporate suit people to blogging’s significance and also to blogging’s importance to a smart corporate strategy.

Many of the suits are still fretting about this and failing to grasp the obvious, but Robert’s new gig, PodTech, is proving a leader in innovative blogging, and I think the CES Bloghaus has set a new standard in the effectiveness of alternative reporting approaches and frankly what a “cheap date” good bloggers will prove to be. One prominent blogger wrote down there that he was heading over to bloghaus because he was running low on cash. “Feed me”, he begged. So for the price of a few beers and Pizza bloghaus gets a good writer and a good plug. And that’s good! I’d sure like to see a bloghaus at the next conference I attend. Sure, you can blog from anywhere at the conference with your laptop and WIFI, but wouldn’t it be more fun to be hangin’ at the ‘haus?

I’d like to compare some of the professional reporting coming out of CES with the blog reports. In other venues blogging generally wins, offering personal insight and expertise rather than a superficial skim of the topic. Also, bloggers tend to speak more frankly so you avoid the sort of “legally / commercially sanitized” fluff that sometimes constrains are reporter’s ability to tell the real story.

Bravo Podtech! Bravo Robert and Maryam and your team down there at CES. I only wish I could have been writing this … from there!

Hey, nice lookin’ website there! Too bad for you.

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Most marketing and advertising agencies are *terrible* at understanding how the internet works – they think that flash elements and print-like approaches are what should drive the projects when the exact opposite is the case.

For online effectiveness in terms of search and usually also for users you want easy navigation, few graphic elements, and most importantly a well-optimized site. The more the biz is online focused the more you want optimization over good looks.

Most SEO sophisticated places are poor at design, and many SEO whiz kids can’t be convincing enough to steer people away from the good looking sites designers tend to do. Yet those good looking sites that sacrifice searchability for beauty should be avoided.

In my opinion the people who say “hey, we can make it look super good and glitzy AND be very well optimized” should be listed online in an “Americas least wanted” list of web people.

Of course you can make sites look “OK” and have great optimization, but it’s impossible to have the classy high falutin’ feel you get from rich, large images and flashy elements and do a great optimization. Disney-like sites can afford this mistake (I think it’s still stupid of them), but most businesses count on good optimization if they are in a competitive field where many companies are trying for many related terms.

There are probably exceptions to this rule of great looks vs great optimization but I think they are *extremely* uncommon. The best simple way to describe it simply is that flash and images almost alway look better than text and almost always lead to inferior optimization than text and hyperlinked text elements.

Technology failing? Hey, it’s time to SUE!

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I simply don’t know if this lawsuit against Google, SONY, and other big players suggesting a previous right to digital distrubition has merit or not because I don’t understand the legal issues well.

However it’s another good example of a tactic increasingly used by tech firms that are not doing very well with their technologies – work the legal angles hoping to hit a big payday via settlement with a deep pocket like Google or even hit a home run with a court decision in their favor.

I’m not objecting to these lawsuits though – I think the big players have tended to give great liberties with content distribution and have taken great liberties as well. Youtube’s empire was built largely via illegal content distribution. These complex deals with gigantic stakes probably should be settled by objective legal means.

When you are raking in billions it’s easy to be generous and I predict that the real “tipping point” for Google’s fall from grace will be the shift from them getting sued to them suing other firms, especially small ones. Maybe they won’t have to sue which would bode very well for Google’s long term prospects and claim to the high ground.

Oregon Wireless Interoperability Network

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Kim Search Comments and discussion – click here

This effort is very interesting. I’m highlighting notes from a Jeff Barnard A.P. article:

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski wants the state to explore ways of helping local agencies better communicate and coordinate during rescue efforts.

The governor also is concerned that county sheriff’s departments, which are responsible for conducting search and rescue operations in Oregon, may not be funded adequately, spokeswoman Anna Richter-Taylor said.

“Maybe what we need to do is to look a little bit broader and to see if there’s a different relationship, a partnership between the state and the counties, so that we can help the counties in some of these operations,” Kulongoski told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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Kulongoski’s spokeswoman said the governor wanted to review after-incident reports to figure out where the state can better support efforts on the ground by the local communities.

“Whether it is communications, helping establish a system of centralized communications, or around equipment, the state wants to do everything it can to be supportive,” she said from Salem.

Kulongoski’s budget for 2007 includes $561 million to establish the Oregon Wireless Interoperability Network, Richter-Taylor said.The money would go toward building 54 communications towers around the state to allow first-responders from state, local and federal agencies involved in emergency operations to talk to each other.

Related:   http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,69234-0.html

See comments for more

GoogleGuy and upcoming Google Rival WikiaSari

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A couple interesting TechMemes for today:

Matt’s got a great post noting how page view metrics are breaking down with AJAX implementations. Notable from his mini-rant is this:

* If you’re doing a start-up and want impressive page view metrics, stay the hell away from AJAX.
*If you would even *for one second* consider staying away from AJAX for the sake of impressive metrics, you’re running your start-up ass-backwards.

Next, in the “Could be Good as Google” department we have Jimmy Wales of Wikimedia and founder of the superbly excellent Wikipedia project announcing today that WikiaSaria WikiSaria Article from UK  will be a community based search engine to rival Google’s search. This is really provocative news as Google appears comitted to the mechanistic, machine driven approach to search, believing it’s the best and most scalable way to deal with spam and the growing complexity of organizing the world’s info. An alternative vision is Yahoo’s approach which includes more human interaction and editing than Yahoo but still relies heavily on the algorithm. It appears the new search will focus mostly on human input from the exploding community of onliners.

Wales: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Also note the many misquotes about Amazon as a participant.

Wales: Reporters and bloggers note: Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, but people are realllllly speculating beyond the facts. This has nothing to do with A9, Amazon, etc. Help me out, spread the word. I am looking for a community of people to continue the development of wikiasari and so on. Discuss here. Join the mailing list. —-Jimbo Wales 23:24, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

More on this huge story from these blogs:

Niall Kennedy: Wikiasari: Wikipedia success applied to social search?
Michael Arrington: Wikipedia to Launch Search Engine: Exclusive Screenshot

Adam Turner : Wikipedia founder plans search engine to rival Google

 

 

Pete Cashmore: Wikiasari – Wikipedia Founder Launching a Google Rival

Time’s Person of the year … is YOU!

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 Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year

Time gets it right naming you, me, and everybody else in the exploding online community the person of the year.   The power of the community internet aka “Web 2.0” is the big story now and for many years to come as millions more flock online every week to surf, buy, blog, meet, marry, and much more.

Unlike the initial thrust that brought millions of ‘techno centric’ folks to the digital water coolers and watering holes of the early web the “new web” has almost no barriers to entry, a far more robust broadband infrastructure, a global reach, and will soon capture all but the most stubborn luddites.

Online community isn’t just big news, it’s great news.

More Tech Memes

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

Yikes – I leave town for a few days and can hardly keep up with all the interesting tech news items. In addition to the fun Jeremy v. Matt copycat debate we’ve got:

Jason on Digg Rigging This is just a tiny part of the HUGE number of upcoming stories which will showcase how complex the relationships are between SEO, social networking sites, and …. money.   I actually contacted the Digger Jason is effectively accusing of abuse and it does not appear to me he’s taken any money at any time.   Here’s a great summary of that “Digg Ban” case.   But his innocence does not suggest to me that there is not a huge and growing issue with Social media SEO uses and abuses.  At PubCon many were discussing how powerfully social networking can help with organic optimization as well as straight traffic generation to a site that gets “dugg” or creates a compelling (including stupid but popular) YouTube video.

Jim at Microsoft apologizing in a very web 2.0 way. Scoble would be proud of this “naked conversations” approach to corporate blogging. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see how making Robert the semi-official corporate blogmeister with the huge salary increase he deserved for “getting Web 2.0” before the suits did (most MS suits don’t even get it now) would have returned 100x on the investment.

… and speaking of “getting Web 2.0”. Yahoo does but can’t seem to get the mileage they deserve for retooling the corporation as a community internet extravaganza. This set of leaked Yahoo internal documents about the potential Facebook aquisition provides a fascinating glimpse into how big deals are analyzed. As a Yahoo shareholder I think they should save the billion and just get their stupid ass in gear with the excellent social network stuff they already own like Flickr (which should be the template for other social applications, Del.icio.us (OVERHAUL the INTERFACE and yes, you can rename this URL monstrosity! ), Yahoo Video, Yahoo 360, Answers, groups, etc, etc. As I’ve noted before Yahoo suffers from giving people so many options they tire of the decision making and go to Google’s simple interfaces, search, and simpler suite of choices. Google expects us to act like the sheep we are. Yahoo expects us to do too much mental work choosing how we relate to the internet.

TechMeme, paid blogging, and Zunes

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Lots of interesting tech news today from TechMeme which is starting to distinguish itself as “the place” for tech insiders as Digg and Technorati increasingly seek to cater to a huge audience and Slashdot remains problematic because it’s not as robust with community input.

The New York Times reports that Huffington is adding “original” reporting to her extremely popular political blog. I wonder if this is as much for advertising credibility than quality, which clear thinking people know is not a function of whether you get paid to blog or not. Hey, wait a minute. A lot of bloggers (including me) are skeptical that paying people for blog posts, reviews and other online content serves the best interests of the blog community.

Yet nobody seems to frown on a journalist when they get paid to blog. Or, for that matter, run copious amounts of expensive advertising beside quality content as Mike does over at TechCrunch. For the time being I’m refiling my pay per post concerns under the folder “maybe right, but maybe just hypocritical pseudo-elitist nonsense”.

Also at NYT is this piece on the Third World Laptop project bringing cheap computing to the poor all over the world. It’s a very exciting concept that will certainly bring about big changes and also many unintended, unpredictable consequences. I remain confused as to why Bill Gates has opposed the laptop project because even though clean water and health and food are more immediate needs, the Laptops will connect the first and third worlds in ways that will *demand* more proactive participation in third world development by us rich folks. Also this project brings some of the best thinkers – people who often dwell in abstract and expensive first world problem solving realms – into the of “global poverty and development” department of innovation. Gates’ outstanding contributions in this realm are of global and historical significance so I hope he will eventually see how the laptop project is part of this excellent trend that is connecting the rich and the poor.

Aleks Krotoski has a great piece about digital violence over at Second Life where that blossoming virtual community is now under attack by opportunistic and malicious … programs. It’s not only art that imitates life, it’s virtually impossible to escape our human inadequacies even when humans are not physically present in the environment.

And those nifty Zunes can’t seem to crack the IPOD dominance in digital MP3 players. I often wonder how much of the tech trends are habit and how much innovation. Zunes seemed to offer better features yet they appear to be losing the battle. Ironically the neat song sharing feature using DRM restrictions seems to be backfiring on the Zune.