Anthony “gets” reBlogger and buys it

This is great unsolicited feedback from a customer who downloaded the 30-day reBlogger demo:

This looks like a really cool program. It addresses so many SEO issues in one neat package. I am really excited to see it work. I am going to run it through the paces and if everything works out I will definitely be buying the program.

I was pleased to see his feedback, so I asked him specifically what he liked about reBlogger. This was his feedback:

The biggest thing is fresh content specifically targeted to my keyword. It allows me to add pages to my site without giving up pagerank. It creates optimized pages specifically targeted to my keywords. These are not just spam pages. I have just started using it but I am pretty sure I can tweak the key words so reblogger can create tightly themed pages our visitors will find interesting and use as a resource. I see this section of our site as something to draw visitors back over and over again to our site. Reblogger also addresses sitemaps, and no-follow. But again I see the biggest thing as having the ability to provide timely useful content to our visitors. The hope is our site will become a hub for dog related sites.

At first Anthony seems to have been attracted by the SEO features but then rapidly realized reBlogger's incredible ability to create themes on anything. Anthony purchased reBlogger a day later. Cha-ching! Awesome.

Anthony at 5 Star Dog, we thank you! You've made our day. We hope you go on to grow the leading hub for dog related sites.

One site to rule them all

Something dawned on me last night. I began to see the confluence of some trends (or currents) in the current web. To understand this post, you may need to read several of my previous posts.

I see four strong trends intersecting. The software we build must sit at the fulcrum of these trends. The trends IMO are:

1. writers of content
2. builders of extensions to enable better consumption
3. revenue sharing for both the writers of content and the builders of extensions. Writers earn when their content is viewed. Builders earn when their extension is used by a consumer to find content.
4. consumers of information (build it and they will come!)

I'll expand a bit on this below. The numbering and headings below do not correspond to the items above.

Strong and bold trends that I perceive:

1. user generated content

There is also an incredible growth in user-generated content - see the wikipedia foundation, or read this post on growth of the blogosphere or my related post: 50,000 posts an hour and a new blog each second. There seems to be no end to the potential growth going on, see my post 1 billion blogs by 2010… exploring the tree.

2. content based revenue encourages syndication

There is another huge change which is related to the rise and rise of content - the ownership and use and earnings from that content. It's very annoying for an author to see another site earning from their own hard work. However it's very rewarding and pleasant for an author to see their work being used in a respectful manner. Our product (reBlogger) reuses other people's content and our site (SEOData) tries to show respect for the owner of the information.

One of my friends has tons of ads around his reBlogger and we don't have ads on SEOData. He get emails all the time complaining about using their data, we have never yet had a complaint - in fact we've had the opposite, compliments. See my post A huge vote for us where I discuss how to respectfully use someone else's content and to see their fantastic response when he saw his content on our site.

So the real crux of the situation is unfairly earning from from someone else's information. A site that collects information in order to earn revenue is sometimes called a splog. But I suggest that there is another way to avoid this problem, and that is to share the revenue. Please read three of my posts which relate to this: FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts, Blog content ownership and control, Content theft or revenue generation?.

My solution to this is to encourage the use of YPN, AdWords and related offerings within the feed or post.

3. website ad revenue sharing encourages syndication

In the point above, I explain that YPN encourages revenue earning within a post, therefore encouraging the author to syndicate their posts as far and wide as possible.

But there is another movement happening. Ad revenue sharing… not within posts, but on the sites which use the content. So a site that uses other people's content will share it's revenue with them (for example CrispyNews (blog), DotnetKicks). If YPN in a post is the bazaar (encouraging the vast proliferation of copies of the posts), then this approach (YPN on the site) is the cathedral (encouraging the centralization of posts and centralisation of eyeballs viewing the posts). Read my post The cathedral and bazar if you're interested in this topic.

4. Social interfaces replace search interfaces

Another trend happening is a new generation of user interfaces coming up. See my previous post about the Battle of the UI’s (search *or* meme/social).

It's possible that the social interface will not replace the search interface, but instead the "builder" interface might be social and the "user" interface is still search oriented.

Builders and users have different needs. Builders explore, tweak and kick tyres. Users want the answer to their question… Right! Now! They may explore or vote or kick a tyre after getting what they are looking for.

Google demonstrated that simplicity is the killer feature for users. Builders want access to raw materials (content) and easy one-click tools (ajax-based voting). One characteristic of the winner is that they will intersect both of these.

5. Mashups and extensions

Building on the point above, the intersection of builders and users is vital. The site that can make building new extensions very easy will go a long way. Firefox and OSS clearly shows the emergence of what Alvin Toffler called "prosumer" in his book The Third Wave way back in 1980!

I wrote a post called Semantic mashup artistes describing my primitive initial thoughts on this growth within the blogosphere. I now see that people (writers and builders) will actually begin to make a real living (income, a life) in this website we are building. Highly prolific writers will benefit, but highly successful builders will benefit the most because their contributions will be reused on so many pages. To imagine what this looks like, consider that real people make a real living in the virtual world Second Life. Although they buy and sell using "Linden $" they have an online marketplace, and there is a real exchange rate to the US$! Creators of things in that world come with intellectual property rights. Read about people who make a real living off Second Life (Wired).

Update: I found this post: The Widget Wars I think that is just a start of what I am referring to.
So, in summary:

There are three sets of needs to consider: builders, writer/authors and users/visitors/searchers.

Imagine a site that encourages both consumption of information and the building of extensions to help others around them consume the information - that site will be enormously successful. As the builders get better and better at their craft, then people can find good information more and more easily (or with better context, or… who knows?).

By injecting ad revenue sharing in at the level of a builder, there is an enormous incentive for builders to apply their skills to build even more useful widgets.

A site like this will collect masses of data, especially if people can contribute data directly into that system - adding value to the content that is already there.

I've written an abstract about the eventual end-point for this growth of prosumers. The post is quite long and abstract: Semantic web for real - ZACK but it might be useful in order to understand where things are going IMO.

The cathedral and bazar

Read this to understand the cathedral and bazar metaphor. Raymond describes the cathedral as closed and proprietary, but I see it differently.

I think the cathedral is technorati and the bazar is the wild west of millions of competing tiny blogging websites. The only time I can think of when a cathedral lost was when the walled-in AOL lost to the sprawling web. (Their real failure was to try and milk their enclosure for far too much money.)

The cathedral always wins if it embraces the efforts and contributions of it's users. Centralization and grouping always occurs in society. Two political parties survive to compete. One or two software companies survive to compete. One Linux kernel survives as the core - if there were too many then Linux would be a bazar, but it's not, it's a cathedral. XBox Live (centralization of logins, subscription, notification - cathedral) is so successful that Playstation has decided against their "federation" approach (each software company does their own thing - bazar) and so there will be a centralized (cathedral) server for the PS too. (Pun intended).

I am 100% sure that the cathedral approach will always win - if they embrace their users. All the content may be created in millions of blogs, but it will be used (viewed) on the site that displays it in the most useful way. The users (viewers) always go to the place where all of their needs are met, this is why Yahoo (by buying del.ico.us, flikr and other social software) will win with their Yahoo 360 integration across so many useful systems. Google is also spreadng itself across many related topics. MS Office and BackOffice taught the world that the one who covers most of the needs of the users in an integrated package will win.

reBlogger does that well by covering so many content and SEO topics in one go. Take a look at my tongue-in-cheek post about how to make a free reBlogger to see the fairly long list of things we do well.Having greater revenue on one site means that site has more income to pay for innovations - which in turn encourages more users to come to them. This is the positive cycle that Technorati has going for them: reinvestment into more user-oriented and useful features. This centralization and reinvestment is one of the reasons why the cathedral always wins.

At the moment the competition between sites is focused on "coolness" (one word: Ajax) but as every site gradually gets the same coolness (voting etc.) there will be a shift to functional and useful and productive. Look and feel is low hanging fruit, everyone can get that relatively easily - but usefulness is fruit that is higher up the tree, it's harder to reach.

Google bowling (or… Eliminating The Competition!)

Finding it hard to beat your competition in rankings? Google bowling! (Link 1, Link 2 ,Link 3, Link 4). Here are some things they offer to "take down" the opposition (muhahahahaha):

• Links from bad neighborhoods to ANY site you want
• Java Scripts or “un”-sneaky Redirects to ANY site you want
• Mass Automated Querying of their URL in Google

It reminds me of an assasination somehow.  I'd cry if it wasn't so funny.

Battle of the UI’s (search *or* meme/social)

It seems to me that every service has one or two things that they do. No one does everything. reBlogger does a lot of basic "engine" things well (take a look at my tongue-in-cheek post about how to make a free reBlogger to see the fairly long list of things we do well). It's almost like we have innovated in the technology stack (the "engine&quot but now we have to innovate in the user-facing features area.

For our upcoming public version we need to build a whole bunch of user-facing software. In the same way that we tied up the various engine aspects we must tie up the various user aspects too.

So if we're going to build a user interface - what should it be? We have two choices. Search or social. But not both.

If we go with a search interface, then make searching very simple (Google-style) but then innovate with the results (like Flikr has done). But if we go with a meme (or social) interface then the layout itself has to be interactive (voting, ajax suggestions etc.) as well as innovating with the results.

Think about it. Why doesn't Google offer voting? They have chosen the search interface. Technorati, cloudee and the excellent chuquet have all chosen the meme (or social) interface.

Update: It's possible that the "builder" interface might be social and the "user" interface is still search oriented. The two types of users have different needs. The one wants to see the "raw material" (posts and feeds) and the other is passively searching.

In my previous post I commented on the enormous number of websites in this space. Well… while writing this post I've found yet another one! CrispyNews (blog, must see example). Interesting - they also do ad $ sharing. In terms of voting I love it that rojo calls it's vote "adding mojo". Heh. Cool. dotnetKicks calls it "kicking". DotnetKicks also does ad $ sharing.

Squidoo and MySyndicaat

I am astounded at how fast this space is maturing. I found 6 potential competitors yesterday alone!

Back in November 2005 Robin Good did an interview with Giovanni Guardalben of MySyndicaat. Robin said over and over that MySyndicaat had the first usable newsmastering solution.

Now I am finding so many newcomers to this space it's astounding. For example Squidoo (blog) (article). Their primary goal is to help users create lenses. Here is a kayak fishing lense. The community clearly has a huge need to learn how to make lenses, so they have a uni and a MIRC chatroom.

Building subject collections

Apparently what reBlogger does is called "building subject collections"

By design, reBlogger is designed for:

1. researching and tracking admin-specified content across unlimited feeds
2. building collections based on admin-defined subjects
3. it's also an offline installer for companies and not online
4. and it's designed for use on a public-facing website

Here are some installations of reBlogger for technology websites:

• A BizTalk reBlogger on TopXML
• A Search Engine reBlogger on SEOData.com
• An SAP reBlogger on The Spot 4 SAP
• An Oracle reBlogger on The Spot 4 Oracle
• A Climate Change reBlogger (about greenhouse gasses)
• Let us know your reBlogger URL and we'll insert it here

Feed Rinse / Digest / Blendr / Shake other…

I just found feed rinse. Seems like a nice site, good look and feel.

The feature list is here. The keyword include/exclude design is excellent. We have had requests for combination keywords (which sort of corresponds to their "filter only if all criteria are met" tick box) but I wanted to make a note of this because it's a good interface - and because it shows that this space is getting filled rapidly.

Their feed rinse blog is here.

Update:

Another RSS filter is here: ZapTXT

Check out Feed Digest and their video and their blog.

What about Feed Blendr here is their blog

How about Feed Shake- their blog is here

I really like the graphic logo for FeedBlendr

Tags /= keywords. Making a tag search site!

Every now and then I come across a blog that has really great information. Tagsonomy is one of those blogs and in particular I am really impressed by this post: The year in tags Having all these items together in one post really reinforces the changes that are happening at the moment.

IMHO what is missing is the ability for tags to be compared and matched, so if something is tagged in Amazon, Yahoo and Del.ico.us then searching for a tag on wordpress.com reveals content on those other systems - because the various tags are known to be the equivalent of each other.

I'm not sure if that was clear enough. You have probably seen opmlsearch.com right? You can search for a keyword there and find the opml files that contain that keyword. Cool. Is there such a thing as a tag search?

Update (Tues 4 April 2006): I found a tag search site! KeoTag
If I go to a tag search site and look up a tag, will it only return the posts that have that exact tag?What about related tags? What about similar tags? If you're only finding that exact tag, how is that different to a keyword?

Tags are not keywords. Content can be tagged differently on different sites. How we choose to tag content can reveal much about the content and also about our own thoughts.

Tags help to reveal two things:

1. It reveals my perception of the context of the post I am reading. It's about the post. "I think this is about search" or "It's about memes" or "It's definitely about tags", or "What a great post about keywords"). A tag is in the eye of the beholder. (Or is that beauty?!)
2. It reveals my perception of the thing *I* am looking for. It's about me. I am looking for "food","meat", "a recipe", "research" or whatever.

It's the same piece of content, but my choice of tags can reveal my intention (about me) and can reveal my perception of what I am looking at (the object).

So a tag search site would not function like a keyword search engine (simply looking for a keyword), it will have a deep understanding of core root or stem words and ontology in order to understand what the implied context is (of the post) from the reader's perspective.

When the tag search system can correctly understand the various tags that have been applied, then it can far better understand the post.

So here's the parts of what is needed for a tag search site:

1. We need to have access to all tags on all systems (APIs from Amazon, del.ico.us, technorati, google etc.)
2. We know the intention/perception of the person who tagged the content (relatively easy!)
3. We then need to understand the intention/perception of the searcher (hmmm?!)
4. Match the two together for a perfect results set containing content which matches my intention/perception

This would result in a far better search engine than what we have today.

Update (Tues 4 April 2006): This is a good blog post about tagging, Folksonomies - Tidying up Tags?,

Semantic web for real - ZACK

This is a post about the next generation use-driven application. I've written a lot within the company about how I want our products to evolve - particularly limiting myself to a vision which is within reach of what I see around the web (otherwise no one can relate to it). I've been cautious about speaking in a limited way, but this post is a radical call to something vastly different. I'm not the inventor, I'm just standing on the shoulder of a great people and commenting on my perception of the future.

This new environment and approach I will call: ZACK. I need a name that can protect the names of the innocent… oh, and to avoid lawsuits.

I am writing as if I am speaking to the inventor of ZACK.

Procedural? Class? Conversational and organic!

In blogs we all persist with a conversational style of marketing. But ZACK will not happen in a spontaneous combustion of conversation. ZACK will not come out endless conversations, even though it's structure is conversational. That is medium/message thinking. No, I think it will happen out of being used. All you have to do is start letting people use it!

Rather than create YAPLCL (yet another programming language and a class library) and making people use the "improved" class library and having them add on to it, you've done something entirely different. You've made the beginnings of an environment in which people can extend language and meta-sets of words can construct visual things, movement, time, spatial oritentation. If you don't have these things, it will come in time because they all grow out of the language - just like in the real world.

I don't know HOW you built ZACK, but I do see why if enough OSS people got excited by ZACK, it would be extended out of sight.

As far as I can think about it, you're built something that is made out of actual language. All languages have certain core words out of which all the others are built. Wherever ZACK is introduced, it will grow from there organically - sort of like how a fractal can keep expanding from one starting point on a page. So bothering existing organizations is not a good investment IMHO, just let people start using it.

Needs centric

The reason this is so different is that while Gates thinks it's about being "user-centric" (read: User-centric part #1) it is in fact about being needs-centric. For some people that's research, some need a market (market-centric) and some have other needs. In a system where the meaning of a word is contained within the word, all the various knowledge needs of a real person would be met by a system like this.
Or in other words, it's about being like eBay (focussed on helping people doing things) or being like that big marketplace company which is allowing it's users to write their own code and upload it so that they can sell services to each other. Cool.

But ZACK goes beyond those walled systems. ZACK is community, a market and it is conversation driven from the ground up. It was built using words and it will be extended by extending the words it uses into more meta-words. The more ZACK is used, the more it's extended. The more ZACK gets extended the more it's used. Viral to the max.

I can't imagine how this gets built… I am not a coder.

I don't know how you'd express the relationships between things in order to indicate context, but my simplistic guess is that the relationships between words (the object) are basically a new kind of "inheritance" between words, so the context is expressed as words. Word feeding off words feeding off words. Words are only useful when surrounded by other words. Words are unintelligable unless surrounded by other words. Word placed together become phrases. Words are the building block of ZACK.

For those reasons, I don't see how you avoided an indefinite loop either or gobbling up far too much processing power either - a high level word (meta-word or combination word) could "consume" or "depend" on thousands of words. heheheh. The mind bogggles.

Making money

I won't tell investors they can make money off it (other than with IP and licensing - which will alienate the very people who will make it grow). Why won't it make the inventors money? Because if ZACK is free and all a person needs is a server to store it on, and then data can flow freely from it to the other ZACK servers. Perhaps you can sell ZACK identities and the locations of words (which are really objects like hyperlinks, or names, or DNS) and ICANN would indeed be the people who could implement that.

Sure some people will make money. Of course. Amazon. People who sell things. That's normal. And unless Microsoft invents this or buys the company owning it, they should be afraid. The only people who will love this are the people who have learned to live in the OSS world of consulting.

IBM will be big winners. They jumped onto Java. They will jump onto this. They will advise British Airways on how to build words that people can use in their writing so that airline details show up right there in the document. (I can hear Microsofties complain that this is "smart tags" but it's totally better and different). At first British Airways will tell the ZACK (the architecture) to protect the component, IOW don't let anyone grow it. But in this day and age of mashups, see Semantic mashup artistes, they will either open up or be pushed aside by the hordes of "word growers".

What we have seen in firefox through the creation of extensions will pale by comparison. And if building an extension is as simple as understanding the words, and even better if I already know some of those words, then anyone can contribute extensions. It will explode. People may prepare for meetings by defining the words they use and synching their partners applications beforehand.

Controlling the meaning of words

Controlling the meaning of words will more than ever before be the way to control society. The US government will be excited. They have not been able to control the internet for a long time and now the internet IS the mainstream (sure it's inefficient, sure it's largely just a platform waiting for a truly good application - but it's still the mainstream at the moment). But if the US Govt can regulate ZACK by law then they can at least HAVE A HOPE of regulating thought again - by controlling the meaning of words used.

For a while FOX NEWS TV was the mainstream - they redefined the meaning of words on a daily basis. But now the mainstream (for word invention and meaning) is blogs - they are wild, wooly and uncontrollable.

If ZACK channels the mainstream, and if the meaning of words is *in* ZACK (not just is ZACK, but is also contained by ZACK, that is to say, through constant use and recombination language actually evolves within ZACK) then they (the Govt) have a chance of re-influencing the mainstream again. They have one place - a pressure point - through which meaning can be controlled: ZACK.

Diversity won't protect it. Even if too many people create alternate words and meanings, society still drives us all to collect behind one or two political parties, one cool event, the coolest RSS icon - the others languish fighting over the leftovers. It happens over and over again.

The dynamics will be interesting. ZACK will no doubt allow me to replace one meta-word with another meta-word, because the new one performs the same function, but because of a different meaning, it gives me new options and the end result is a different output than what I had before. ZACK will offer me other words that other people have created that appear to fit in. Perhaps I will be able to try before I buy… but in the end like with Firefox, most extensions will be free.

But even in a free for all medium like the internet, only a handful of websites end up being dominant. and the same may be true of ZACK, because just like the internet is not walled off (like AOL was) we still only visit a few places. Surfing ZACK will be different because you're always IN the ZACK application, but the information will be more recursive, more like Dave Winer's vision for OPML, where you're always in the OPML browser, but RSS feeds and websites and OPML entries all blur together and you just keep drilling down down down as you surf more and more, finding what you want.

However ZACK is different, you don't surf for interest. It's market driven, needs driven, want driven, interest driven. Right now you surf to find something to use. When I surfed for the first time on a green screen at a business I worked for almost 15 years ago, I wondered what to surf for. I was told there were TONS of things to see. I wasn't motivated. ZACK will let you surf things to USE them. If I can't find one, I can make one - and republish it.

Everything is a compound word or a meta-word

But back to the money side of things - ZACK will offer to sell my meta-word or compound-word for me, but in the end the mystery that is Linux, Firefox extensions and OSS will gradually destroy that market. "For sale" components will need to move further and further up the tree as the OSS free-as-in-beer crowd gobbles the low hanging fruit and moves up the tree.

In ZACK, every"thing" is like a hyperlink - except the thing *is* the thing, it's not a representation of the thing. A hyperlink can be edited and improved and republished. The other users can choose to be notified of upgrades to hyperlinks. Since ZACK is simply a compound of invented words (with only the very core root or stem words being protected) the number of notifications of possible upgrades expands astronomically as the words are upgraded through the larger number of visitors. Words are upgraded by inheriting from other words. The number of notifications would rise to become a real problem. The wiki and slashdot approach (where users contribute by coting onthe usefulness of words) and notifications below a certain level don't display. See, Relevancy! Relevancy! Devel… err… Relevancy!

Growing language by using and extending language

Or, I am only notified of the alternatives when I want to extend something. Or even better what if ZACK could track my behaviour and my goals and try to help me achieve my goal. If it was that functional (in terms of having functional "words&quot then it could bring to my attention recently published words that suit what I am trying to build.

That requires very high level behaviour words. The word "behaviour" itself is a compound word and once it is "invented" in ZACK, it can be used and "grown". Most words will be grown by users. Once grown they can be used. ZACK should track my behaviour and experiment with words to find the one that matches my need. The words that must have been grown in order for this to happen include: need, goal and action. Each are compound or meta-words, so many other words need to be grown first. ZACK will ship with a basic set of root or stem words and users will grow it from there.

It won't push any one major language since users will quickly port each word across to their own language, in the same way that the magnificent wiki project is gradually growing (through it's contributors) into many major languages.

The impact

ZACK has the potential to impact

• knowledge gathering and storing and use
• application development
• the diversification of language away from English
• the rapid expansion of the number of word in use
• rapid expansion of IP owned by individuals rather than companies
• the identity-ownership relationship will be maintained even while the IP is being replicated thousands of times around the ZACK-web (by comparison to how blogger lose their ownership of their posts, see blog content ownership and control)

Hard to beat

ZACK will be very hard to compete with, because:

• people have a tendancy for to gravitate to one solution, especially if that solution provides everythng they want
• the better ZACK "grows" words, the faster it will consume existing knowledge and language and extend it
• even if the intial "growing" process is cumbersome, the "growers" (the users, the Firefox extension builders) will grow a better growing process. The better the growing process, the more people it's accessible to. The more people, the more contributions and the more growth.

I'd like to hear thoughts and feedback.

Tagging

Take a look at this (flash video) example of del.ico.us tagging between pages.

This is a whole new kind of user-inputted a_href link. How cool is this? I have been going on about cross linking and about the user having far more input into the sites they surf and applications they use. Now I see this.

It’s the thin edge of the wedge and Yahoo must simply love the idea! Users are helping them figure out the relationships and importance of pages.

Two more cool links (link love):

• You’re It! - a blog on tagging
• i-Tags wiki 
• The huge cloud lens bubble map web2.0 click the image to view the details

Archive of blog posts updated

To follow the excitement, or to help, read this: Getting an archive of blog posts

User-centric part #2

The previous post was User-centric part #1

For web companies like mine (we make reBlogger) the change from web-centric to user-centric is harder to imagine.

For us it means:

• letting users mashup our blog content the way they want to
• letting users change the default list of keywords and add their own
• letting users share their information with other users
• letting users mark it up blog information in the same way that Flikr lets you mark up images
• letting users tell us what new tools they want
• letting users change the layout of the site, add or remove tools (like WordPress let me add widgets to the side panels under the "Presentation" section) - this is more than colors and templates!

User-centric part #1

You know there’s trouble when Gates (aka Microsoft) “gets” it. They don’t do things by halves.

In this (very short) article he says:

Everything we do now, we have to be user-centric, not device-centric 

If he doesn’t “get” it, then what he has in mind is to improve the user-interface of Office 12 and Windows to expose more stuff to users.

If he really gets it, then he intends to completely change all applications everywhere in a VASTLY more fundamental way.

The writer of the article obviously didn’t “get it” at all - he/she named the articles “Gates: Yes, We Get It, the Future Is Online” and that’s entirely wrong. The online bit was last century. This article should have been named “Gates: Yes, We Get It, the Future Is User-Centric not Device-Centric”

Here are some changes that will occur within the industry:

• Most applications currently look and work the way admins want, not the way users want. Changing the colors of windows really isn’t customisation.
• The user is permanently “sandboxed” into a very narrow space of functionality. The sandbox will be removed. Users will set the boundaries.
• The application will not be a defined thing, but a collection of tools which the user combines and recombines until they have it the way they want it. Where does blogging begin, when you consider flikr and other yahoo features? And what are all of those when you take into account Yahoo! 360.
• Mashups are cool, but most people can’t do it. Only the geeks. Mashups will take off when a mashup is as simple as dragging this thing onto that - and a connection is made between the two. I know it’s not the current model of mashups, but it’s a user-oriented mashup.
• Sharing will explode when mashups are that easy (see above) and the change in relationship that the user created is then able to be shared with other users.

What underpins all these technology changes is the phenomenal rise of the individual. The individual is saying - if you don’t let me do it my way, I will move to another vendor who will let me do it my way. So there is a mad rush to let the user do whatever they want.

There are an enormous number of companies and projects already in this space.

For this reason I am about to move 600 photographs from one storage-display site across to another one which has far more features and benefits that I want.  Ugh. 600. And then move the text.  Reindex it all. Categories. It could take forever… but the features are so much better - I guess it’s got to be worth it? It is. I think so.

This change from device to user-centric reminds me that I read a book about GE and how they refocussed from their “devices” to services. They began to make heaps of money again after that change. They added a service (a monthly cost) for each device. For example, a hospital might buy an expensive machine costing a fortune. The insurance for the loss of life (should the machine fail to operate) would be astronomical. So GE sold the customer a webservice where the GE systems monitor the device and technicians are sent out BEFORE the device fails. Clever.

The changeover from device-centric to user-centric is uniquely Microsoft. XBOX 360 is tremendously user-centric, games have been user-centric for a long times (what do you want to wear, fight with, carry, drive, etc.)

A huge vote for us

This site, Library Clips, has written about Newsmastering and advertising and covered the ways each blog-software company uses blogger posts. This is a very informative and insightful post IMO.

He writes:

Now if someone clicks on an ad whilst viewing this page, my blog doesn’t get any money as I’m not explicitly affiliated, yet it is my content, and if my content were not there, they would be not clicking on ads, therefore no money.

I encourage you to read four of my posts which relate to this:

• FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts
• blog content ownership and control
• Content theft or revenue generation?
• Sharing affiliate revenue

Now when he writes about reBlogger he says:

Here is a sample post of mine re-syndicated in a professional newsmastering tool called reBlogger, this Public RSS Reader created with reBlogger is called SEO Data.

It is so professional, it re-syndicates full-text, but if you want to leave a comment it points to the native post…at the top of this post is states the blogger (me) and a link to my blog, as well as the category my blog belongs in SEO Data, and an index of my posts by date, (this doesn’t have ads).

From what I can see, here are the things (in his opinion) that we are doing right:

• not earning from ads on seodata.com
• linking back to him
• encouraging people to leave comments at HIS website
• posting the full text (not partial)
• looking professional
• providing an index of his posts

Woohoo! Recoginition feels so good!

Videos: using the reBlogger admin area

We have thirteen (13) great videos showing off how to use the various reBlogger admin features. Enjoy!

My fav meme site - cloudee

Why is this (cloudee) the only meme site that produces content I actually LIKE reading? Every other meme site I closed and ignored, this one I don't want to close and I am enjoying reading. Why? It might not work for everyone else, but I like it and I've read several items on it.

Digg meets Slashdot

I really like how Digg has managed to combine the “below threshold” collapsible divs into their layout.  Take a look.

Now it’s getting serious

You may know the saying: cometh the time, cometh the man.

Wink and you missed it. Let's take a look at this social app.

• Uses Google's engine data (apparently)
• Allows me to vote up (click the star) and ban (vote down)
• Assemble a set of tags and favorite links on a topic - a collection
• Do a search and then vote
• Do a search and see the results ordered by the votes of others
• "Featured collections"
• Has API type stuff
• Their blog is here

Read this blog post of theirs, they are focussed on exploring too.

At each step along the way I tagged the pages I was on. There were two ways to do this. The first was to click on the yellow star to the left of any result. A pop up opens and gives me a chance to add a few words I think were relevant. It was pre-populated with the query term, and I sometimes added additional words. When I hit “return” the star lit up and the number above it incremented by one.

I decided to make a collection of all the links I’d found, and called it EOS Lenses. Now someone who really got interested in researching lenses for an EOS camera could find everything I’d found in one easy place

Uh-oh. Here is his collection.

We have competition. They only have half of what we envision, but they will rapidly get the rest soon - no doubt.

An interesting thing is that they don't have their own content, they perhaps just use the APIs of the various services they call.

Interesting stats

This is from Syndic8

Distribution of feeds across the version of RSS

Ratio of RSS to ATOM and distribution across languages

Getting an archive of blog posts

Where can I get an archive of past blog posts? With 26 million blogs, the archive would be enormous.

A query on Alexa shows they have 825k of rss (searching for "mime=XML&quot pages, but that's just a drop in the ocean. And their T&C prohibit copying the data - even though unlike web pages, RSS feeds are *INTENDED* for syndication.

Aaargh. So I'm back to wondering how to get an archive. Does anyone have one for sale (at a reasonable price… I'm just a guy, not a big corp).

Update: 23 March 2006

I had extended discussions with the Alexa Web Search project manager, Greger, and the upshot of it all is that we can't use them as a spider and get the content from them. Their terms and conditions specifically forbid copying the data.

What is Alexa Web Search for? We are only meant to use them as a search engine via their API. You can only collect the search results data, not the underlying data. So it wasn't a good outcome for me.

Here's what I think is wrong with their strategy:

• I can't get the content, so I can't innovate by using the content they have collected
• They want to do the search themselves through their API. This means I can't get the content and use SQL Server full text indexing etc. and optimize my own searches according to what I perceive as my user's needs
• Their content is out of date, but they may extend the API so that someone can request far more frequent updates/spidering of certain websites.

I think they would be far better off allowing me to buy SO MUCH data that I eventually have scalability problems and I begin to look for a hosted solution… which is what their API offers perfectly. But I'm not there yet, I'm here - I have small time needs, not big time needs.

So it seems the only way forward is either:

• to begin collecting the data ourselves, or
• to build a system which doesn't require an archive - which is what most meme-services are like, they act on current themes and don't keep archives, or
• to buy a defunct website which has been going for a few years and has somewhat of an archive, or
• to find someone who has an archive and is willing to share it (or sell it cheaply)

Onward and upward.

Update (Tues 4 April 2006):

TalkDigger (blog) is also struggling with needing an archive as I have written (Getting an archive of blog posts) - we are struggling with the same problem with reBlogger. They also may consider building a crawler. What a shame that Alexa doesn't see this need and fill it for us. (hint hint)

A better search

Here are some great posts on this topic that I want to keep for the future.

Better query refinement, quotes and opinion from source such as Robert Scoble
Robert's actual post is here
10 things Google did well a while back
25 thing that same person thinks they suck at now

BlogDigger comes close

BlogDigger groups comes close to reBlogger in one way:

You can create a Blogdigger Group using any blogs that have RSS feeds. Once you specify the feeds that comprise your Blogdigger Group you will be able to view the posts from those feeds

Except that they still don’t use include and exclude words to filter the information down to just the information you want to see.

And you can’t install it on your own website! 

Dave kinda gets it

Want to make a million $? Dave gives out a free idea. He says:

Implement a search engine that accumulates all the stories pointed to by the top meme-engines over time.

I always wondered what would come next after the meme-engines, and now I think this may be it. It's one level more concentrated than the meme-engines.

I think that Dave thinks it's about storing the "thread" of related items that memeorandum collected together, because it's kinda hard to collect them back together later on. Tin Finger has already written along these lines!

My opinion is that reBlogger is going to be even better than that!

• Why should memeorandum create threads of related items? Users should.
• And why only include the most current discussion items into that thread, why not include 1 year old items or 5 year old items into that thread.
• And why fix the thread in time, let it evolve and mature as more and more people edit the thread and republish their own thread.
• And as threads intersect across posts which they have in common, show the various intersections and the different directions you can go in - all from this one post.

He also says:

Make it run off their RSS feeds. You'd have to build it quickly (get there first) and build it to scale, because it would be pretty popular and would grow fast.

He's not wrong.

Update: Monday 13 March 2006

Dave's getting warmer and warmer.

I don’t want to only see the stories that most people are interested in, I want interesting stories.

Here is a list of some of the features.

1. Reverse-chronologic order. Every item gets a shot at being the top item.
2. Not grouped by which site they came from or which type of site they came from.
3. The relevance algorithm gets looser so that more items make the grade.

Dave Winer wants the new reBlogger, he just doesn't know it yet. We better hurry up and code this puppy before someone else does!

Interesting business model to encourage submissions

DotNetKicks is a very interesting site. (Is Digg upset at the theft of look and feel? It's almost identical!)

They have a "Lots of Kicks" blog here and I'm particularly intrigued by how they have combined their revenue generation model with a model to encourage submissions by using your AdSense ID for 50% of the times your story submission is displayed! Innovative!

reBlogger doesn't need submissions, we simply collect the blogs ourselves.

Why Memeorandum and DIGG are so great: they link out

An interesting post is this one: Why Memeorandum and DIGG are so great: they link out which is a companion to this post Why Memeorandum and DIGG are so great: they link out and the essence of both posts is:

these two sites are amazing and they've been sending our network a ton of traffic

Go to DIGG and Memeorandum and they have 20-100 links out to other sites–they are generous with their traffic, just like blogs are!!! They get it and they are gonna crush the old school portals.

I can't tell you how many times I clicked on the "Title Link" expecting to see the comments and more details about the source only to end up on the original source. At first I thought this was a weird way of doing things, but I now get it. While Digg does offer a central location to chat about the topic, it by default gets out of the way and lets the content owner be the focus.

I am sure we will see a lot of similar tools/products in the future. Hopefully more of them take the a similar approach to Digg and Memeorandum by adding additional value and making the original source the focus. Sites like http://dotnetslackers.com miss the point and drive me nuts. They add no additional value and are simply focused on serving ads. I am all for re-syndicating my content, but only when it adds value to more than the re-syndicators pockets.

Phew, I think I quoted almost the whole of the Ancora Imparo post - but it's all relevant! The irony is that DotNetSlackers is a great site which is based on a forked (separated) version of the reBlogger codebase. There is clearly something to learn from this.

Here is what I have learned (so far):

1. Send the visitor to the original source - as much as possible
2. Honor the source, respect them, give them kudos
3. When the content owner perceives you're earning more ad income from their content than they are - they get upset (makes sense!)
4. If you choose to have someone's content you MUST add LOTS of value to it

This really reminds me to encourage you to read three of my posts which relate to this:

FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts

blog content ownership and control

Content theft or revenue generation?

I think all three are vital to this conversation.

Voting up/down on blog posts

A part of my 5-step solution, one of the parts is voting. I found Newsvine (through business|bytes|genes|molecules) has voting for the submitted stories to push them UP the list of stories (they also have voting on the comments too). Cool. The problem of relevancy still remains, this only resolves the identification of better/worse content.

The Newsvine blog is here and they have a post about the Digg commenting system! (I voted - what a *cool* little animation!) Read the comments for that post - really interesting!

the main problem I've seen with the new Digg comment system is that it's too easy to vote down legitimate comments. The threshold for a hidden comment is too low. You and a couple of buddies could easily vote down a comment that either does not align with your opinion or is written by a person you don't like.

This next comment is VERY interesting:

Additionally, the whole mindset of digg users towards the new comment system seems to be screwing it up. Users probably feel an obligation to either digg or bury a comment. Therefore, if a comment isn't perfect, it will get buried which harms other users who might find the comment useful. Comments should only be dugg if they are outstanding and should only be buried if they are flames, spam, etc. Otherwise, comments should be left alone at the zero mark.

Perhaps that's a good argument for not having voting down, only having voting up? Several other people comment on comment voting.

Relevancy! Relevancy! Devel… err… Relevancy!

I think the major problem in the meme space is that we don't grok relevancy. I use the word grok deliberately (not just as link-love to wikipedia). To grok, according to this jargon finder means:

When you claim to ‘grok’ some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity

Reading Scoble's post really shows me the frustration users are having in finding information they want. That a need for relevance. Do we (the meme industry) understand what Scoble is looking for? In his particular case, he needs

1. a combination of a news source (lots of new stuff),
2. relevance keywords that he chooses (reBlogger does this well),
3. exlcusion keywords (reBlogger does this well)
4. and all this combined with some kind of voting and ranking system (vote this item up, that one down - like the commenting system in slashdot) where the good stuff rises to the top.The result of such a system - as described this far - would cause the right information for Scoble's particular interested to pop-up. Of course there would be a delay as people vote things up or down, but over time (given enough community involvement) the best information would rise to the top.
5. So now, in my description, in each meme there are several blog posts that have risen to the top and are considered the best content on the web for that topic/meme. All that remains is to connect these best posts together. A thread linking system to link these best articles together - to create a reading list that spans the blogosphere in a useful and meaningful way, that would be useful I think? As more reading lists/threads evolve and pop into view, it would be hard to not see a system such as this as the ideal place to search for tutorials or research.

Please note that slashdot allows voting on comments to get the best comments out - given the ENORMOUS volume of comments they get. But I'm saying that we have such an ENORMOUS number of blog posts (50,000 blog posts per hour) that we need a similar voting system to find the best posts.

This is an interesting issue: would this post right here get voted down or up? Is it worth seeing or not? Well… for someone tracking the keyword "memes" it may be worth seeing, but for someone tracking another word that happens to be in this post, it may be completely irrelevant! So voting must be tracked in-the-context of the meme/thread/topic being viewed.

It's interesting that Digg has implemented the Digg commenting system here is a video showing the voting up and down of items. Again their voting is about comments.

Jeremy Zawdony write on the demise of Feedster. I see a few interesting things in his post: he tracks keywords, and when Feedster stopped giving him relevant results he dropped Feedster. Relevancy! Relevancy! Devel… erm… Relevancy! (I scream, as I wildly cavort across the stage sweating, huffing and puffing).

Jeremy Zawdony writes that Slashdot will go next. I think his words are salient:

Haven't we figured out that the crowd is generally smarter than any one individual in the crowd?

Memes or just news?

When I visited Memeorandum, Megit, Tailrank and Chuquet (and others) I simply saw the same news headlines being displayed over and over. They didn't keep my attention. Technorati is impressive, but largely the same: simply a news source.

I have found some really interesting blog posts that imply that the art of meme tracking has not yet truly been invented yet. (That's great news, because then we still have a chance of getting this right with our own software!)

Alex Barnett blog - The real 'meme' trackers are yet to be invented

Publishing 2.0 - Idea Filter

This next link is a ripper! (The irony can be seen by first reading this post by Scoble)

Robert Scoble - The John Dvorakification of the blogosphere (I’m signing off of Memeorandum)

The key thing here is that Scoble (and others) wanted to follow the hype of the day - memeorandum does an excellent job of tracking the hype, who's saying what and about whom. In this way there is an ever-present flow of energy as the blogosphere (the people) jump from one topic to the next.

My point is this: hype /= relevance. You can remain hyped, or you can do some real work, do something useful or learn something new. But hype is just that - opinion followed by the energetic opinion of a bunch of people. It's no indicator of the usefulness, originality or value of the post.

Most of the best posts on any topic are still found through a search engine, because they are old and have long since fallen off memeorandum or technorati.

BTW: You'll notice that I happily post old blog posts - but that's because I'm not all that interested in New! as much as I am interested in Relevant! (As I find great posts on the topic of meme's, semantic web, web 2.0 and more. I'll put them in here. Enjoy!)

Semantic mashup artistes

Someone makes the car, another person engineers it, another builds the car show to display that year's best cars, another makes a car magazine, another offers to hotrod your car - and so on.

Is writing the blog post the end of the usefulness of that blog? No. Someone writes the blog, another person makes the blogging software, another (YPN) provides ads, another (FeedFlare) makes widgets for feeds. There is a whole ecosystem.

We all know about mashups for using applications (via their APIs) to merge them in new and interesting ways… but in the world of blogs… what about semantic mashups.

As a programer/project manager/business analyst I discovered there were two kinds of programers: builders and designers. The builders were the C++ types, they built the widgets (VBX, ActiveX etc.) that the designers (Visual Basic types) would use. You hardly ever found a VB programer writing a grid, they simply used a grid someone else had already built (usually in C++). It's anathema to a VB coder to write a widget, they use widgets!

This corresponds to the person who builds a chair and the interior decorator who uses the chair beautifully in a room.

This is why in a world of content, the 2.0 thing is to do a mashup. The builders have provided tons of apps for the designers to use in a mashup. PageFlakes shows that this concept is already very mature. Mashup camp shows there is already a mashup ecosystem growing well.

After cars came car shows. After C++ programmers came Visual Basic programmers. When you have enough variety of chairs, styles, colors and shapes - then come the interior house decorators.

Shortly to enter center-left: the blogoshpere designers… semantic mashup artistes. The question on their mind is: all this great content lying around in the blogosphere - what can we do with it?