March 4th, 2008 Curt Monash
Doug Caverly highlights a Matt Mullenweg quote indicating that about 1/4 of all the blogs ever on Wordpress.com were spam (aka splogs). Now, that’s probably a higher fraction than for the blogoverse overall, because:
- Wordpress.com provides costless hosting; using your own domain costs money.
- Besides being free, Wordpress.com hosting may provide a little “google juice”, which is the whole SEO point of spam blogging.
But there’s one more factor. Splogs have much higher posting frequency than real ones. 10-20+ posts per day is not uncommon, and 50-100+ is not unheard of. That’s 5-10X the post frequency of even the more active human-written blogs. So let’s assume:
- 10% of all blogs are spam.
- 10% of all blogs are actively written by humans.
- 80% of all blogs belong to humans, but are updated very infrequently if at all.
In that case, over 80% (and indeed probably over 90%) of all blog posts are made by machines rather than by human beings.
Please sign up for our feed!
Technorati Tags: Splog, Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress
Posted in Blogosphere, Search engine optimization (SEO), Social software and media, Spam and antispam | No Comments »
February 15th, 2008 Curt Monash
I got a long email today from a Very Smart Person who asked, in effect “What is Twitter for? I don’t get it.” Coincidentally, Rex Hammock posted a good answer yesterday, albeit with a bad title that I won’t repeate. The essence was:
… the most amazing thing about Twitter is this: everyone uses it differently.
It’s a little like trying to explain the telephone by describing what people talk about on the phone. “Telephones are devices that teenagers use to spread gossip.” “Telephones are the devices people use to contact police when bad things happen.” “Telephones are the devices you use to call the 7-11 to ask if they have Prince Albert in a can.”
Like the Internet itself, Twitter is hard to explain because it doesn’t really have a point. And it has too many points. Here’s what I mean: All it does is provide a common-place to relay short messages to a group of people who agree to receive your messages. Here’s the second part of what i mean: When you stop thinking those short messages aren’t limited to “I’m about to get on the elevator” but can be eye-witness accounts of breaking news stories or bursts of business-critical intelligence, or warnings that a gun-man is loose on campus, or shared conversations about political debates you and your friends are watching on TV, the possibilities of what can be done using Twitter becomes amazingly confusing — I think in a good way.
I’ve recently put up two posts on Twitter use cases. For yet another — well, as Shakespeare didn’t quite say, a 140 character limit is the soul of wit. Here’s my (ever-changing) list of Twitter “favorites”. The humor ranges from the sophomoric to the erudite; there are some serious aphorisms as well.
Please sign up for our feed!
Posted in Fun stuff, Humor, Social networking, Social software and media, Twitter | 1 Comment »
February 13th, 2008 Curt Monash
Monday, I posted about four Enterprise Twitter use cases. Episteme responds that that’s all well and good, but what’s really important is that Enterprise Twitter would lead senior management to communicate in a human way with the team. I agree completely, and think this is one of the big reasons Enterprise Twitter could be an improvement over email for many uses.
That post also illustrates a use of public Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Social networking, Social software and media, Twitter | 2 Comments »
February 11th, 2008 Curt Monash
My long discussion Saturday of how to evolve (or replace) Twitter included a short discussion of what might be called Enterprise Twitter. Dennis Howlett just alerted me that there’s been considerable other discussion of the subject recently. For example:
- Dennis reported on an internal SAP Enterprise Twitter research project, and pointed at a number of the other pages I’ll mention. (Note: If that goes anywhere, it will have to be in conjunction with Business Objects.)
- Jevon MacDonald listed pros (many) and cons (few) of Enterprise Twitter.
- Andrew McAfee argues at length that an enterprise needs multiple social networking tools, to match up with different intensities of collaboration among coworkers.
- Niall Cook offers a short, convincing use case for Enterprise Twitter.
- JP Rangaswami also offers use cases.
- Ed Yourdon argues that Twitter is “good enough” for enterprises. But he seems to concede it could indeed be a lot better.
- Paul Gillin praises Twitter’s business potential for us self-employed consultant types.
- Sid offers a number of quick-hit use cases for Enterprise Twitter.
- Bill Ives takes a more skeptical view, focusing on enterprises uses of today’s Twitter.
- Nancy offers many Twitter use cases, some of which are enterprise-relevant.
Here’s my take on the subject.
I see four basic (and somewhat overlapping) use cases for Enterprise Twitter:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Business Objects and Inxight, SAP AG and TREX, Social networking, Social software and media, Twitter | 10 Comments »
February 9th, 2008 Curt Monash
Twitter is a rather new communications service, wildly popular in the technology blogging and podcasting communities. There are close to a million registered accounts or users, but I’d guess the active users number in the low-mid five figures. Even at that low usage, Twitter is on overload, plagued with outages and data loss.
Scaling Twitter is a huge challenge. Doing so will involve changing just about every aspect of what Twitter is. A number of commentators have suggested lesser fixes, but none that I’ve seen is apt to work. (Generally, they forget that UI options will need to change as usage grows.) However, I think I’ve come up with an approach that would indeed work, for:
- Arbitrarily high levels of public Twitter use.
- Twitter integration with other communication tools such as instant messaging or IRC-style chat.
- Enterprise or integrated personal/enterprise use of Twitter.
The sections below cover:
- Future metadata needed by Twitter “tweets” (i.e., posts)
- Filtering enhancements Twitter will need as usage scales (and could greatly use already today)
- Present and future Twitter use cases
- Twitter CEP and database architecture (almost everybody else I see writing about Twitter gets this wrong)
- Enterprise Twitter
- Twitter’s competitive vulnerabilities
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Social networking, Social software and media, Twitter | 10 Comments »
February 5th, 2008 Curt Monash
Bill Burnham argues that a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would drive down M&A prices. Marc Andreesen disagrees. His argument is essentially twofold:
- Microsoft and Yahoo were never more than a small part of the exit opportunity anyway.
- A merged Microsoft/Yahoo will be so slow-moving it will create more opportunities for competition than it destroys.
Andreesen certainly knows about slow-moving behemoths making wasted acquisitions; Netscape was acquired by two companies (AOL and Sun) that both dribbled away the parts they respectively acquired.* However, I think he and a lot of other observers are missing something this time — the Microsoft/Yahoo synergies are too large to ignore.
*The legalities of the merger were a lot more complicated than that, but in essence AOL got the “internet” piece of Netscape and Sun got the enterprise side.
Given the opportunity, here are some reasons I think integration would go a lot better than most people think: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Enterprise search, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Social software and media, Yahoo | 1 Comment »
February 5th, 2008 Curt Monash
Social technology has been hugely important to me since 1991. I met Linda on a Prodigy bulletin board. Blogging is crucial to my business. Mailing lists have led Linda and me to two vacations, most of our computer gaming, multiple TV shows (especially Buffy/Angel), and a whole lot of books. I find LinkedIn useful at times, and for the past few weeks I’ve been Twittering up a storm. My love life, work, and entertainment all are rooted in technology that gets people communicating with each other.
I’m not just saying that for street cred. My experiences also illustrate two important points – people use many different kinds of social technology, and social technology is very important to them. When you feel or hear negatives about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blog reading or whatever – those are indictments of particular services or technologies, not of online social networking in general.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Social networking, Social software and media, Twitter | 4 Comments »
February 3rd, 2008 Curt Monash
Many – perhaps most — commentators on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo are thoroughly missing the point. The most interesting part of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo isn’t the horse-race retrospective “How did they screw up so much as to need each other?” It’s not the incipient bidding war for Yahoo. And it’s certainly not the antitrust implications.
The Microsoft/Yahoo combination could revolutionize the Internet. I’m serious. The opportunities for huge synergies might just be enough to blast the merged companies out of their current uncreative, Innovator’s Dilemma funks. Search is open for radical transformation in user interface, universal search relevancy, Web/enterprise integration, and just about everything to do with advertising and monetization. Email stands to be utterly reinvented. Portals and business intelligence have only scratched the surface of their potential. And social networking is of course in its infancy.
Here’s an overview of where some synergies and opportunities for a combined Microsoft/Yahoo lie.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Enterprise search, Google, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Social networking, Social software and media, Spam and antispam, Web site filtering, Yahoo | 14 Comments »
January 28th, 2008 Curt Monash
We all know how “The Year of X” kinds of predictions go. Still, when I read that Forrester Research says enterprises are ready to seriously adopt wikis and message forums, it made sense to me. Email threads — via Notes/Exchange or otherwise — aren’t doing the job any more. It’s time to go straight to communally-created web pages.
Personally, I think it’s also time to further replace email disasters, by having broadcasts over something like an enterprise version of Twitter. Clearly, enterprise Twitter would have to have a lot more tagging, group filtering, and automated censorship — ::sigh:: — than current public Twitter. But that all fits very well into the CEP-based architecture (or some near equivalent) that I believe to be the future of Twitter anyway. So would a complete integration between enterprise Twitter and point-to-point enterprise instant messaging.
Please subscribe to our feed!
Technorati Tags: social software, Enterprise 2.0, forums, Forrester Research
Posted in Social networking, Social software and media, Twitter | No Comments »
January 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
The first post ever on Strategic Messaging went up at 2:49 am. Within four hours, I had my first splog trackbacks, all from the same site. The strategicmessaging.com domain itself had just repropagated through DNS hours earlier, and had no incoming links other than Whois and the like.
Pretty impressive spamming. Not that it did him any good, of course, except insofar as he was stealing a bit of my content …
Technorati Tags: splogging, trackback spam
Posted in Blogosphere, Search engine optimization (SEO), Spam and antispam | 1 Comment »