Social software and online media
Analysis of social software, blogging, microblogging, and online media. Related subjects include:
A challenge to DMOZ bashers
Give or take a corrected typo, here’s a challenge to DMOZ bashers I just wrote in the flame war thread.
If you want to do something that is:
A. Correct
B. Credible
C. Potentially usefuljust go find a specific category with terrible listings, and publicize the fact with overwhelmingly clear proof of your assessment.
If that’s not EASY for you to do … then maybe DMOZ isn’t so bad after all, eh?
In particular, I’d encourage you to post a version of the category that is clearly better than what is currently there.
| Categories: Categorization and filtering, Directories, ODP and DMOZ, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
DMOZ — yet another flame war
My latest thoughts about DMOZ and the ODP may be found in this blog comment thread.
The gist is:
- DMOZ has many problems, such as categories that are at least five years out of date.
- Newly, corruptly listed sites are NOT high on the list of problems.
- In fact, the attention paid to avoiding such corruption is a terrible drain on ODP resources.
- There are a lot of liars and/or idiots bashing DMOZ in the website owner community.
- robjones is a sarcastic jerk, but he’s our sarcastic jerk.
Or something like that. As I said, it’s a flame war …
Anyhow, I’m flying off on a two-week snorkeling trip Saturday, and should be much mellower soon.
| Categories: Categorization and filtering, Directories, ODP and DMOZ, Social software and online media | 8 Comments |
I’ve decided to trust Akismet/Bad Behavior
Akismet recently upgraded so that you can see all the spam it’s holding, not just the last 150 messages. This made me a lot happier — but ironically I quickly gave up, and decided to trust Akismet without checking. Why? Well, Akismet sequesters 15 days of spam, and I currently have the following numbers of messages stashed away in it:
- 2246 here on Text Technologies.
- 4427 on DBMS2.
- 816 on Software Memories.
- 5156 on the Monash Report.
That’s over 800 spam per day across four blogs. And when I did check, I almost never found a false positive, except occasionally a trackback of my own.
More problematic is my e-mail. Eudora flags pretty much everything that isn’t from an established sender as spam. So along with my 300+ true spam, I get a number of false positives per day, some of which have turned into paying customer relationships. So THAT spam directory I do check carefully …
| Categories: Blogosphere, Spam and antispam | Leave a Comment |
Interesting comment thread on reputation tracking
Techcrunch blogged skeptically about Umbria’s* service, specifically its partnership with PR Newswire. The comment thread had a fair amount of pushback, largely from vendors with skin in the game.
*Note: Umbria has a non-obvious URL.
I haven’t actually spoken with Umbria — uh, guys, why not? — but they seem to have a reputation tracking service. Their niche is apparently to quantify/measure by a variety of metrics, and that’s supposedly what makes their service (and their competitors’) worthwhile. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Competitive intelligence, Sentiment analysis, Social software and online media, Text mining, Text mining SaaS | Leave a Comment |
Wise Crowds of Long-Tailed Ants, or something like that
Baynote sells a recommendation engine whose motto appears to be “popularity implies accuracy.” While that leads to some interesting technological ideas (below), Baynote carries that principle to an unfortunate extreme in its marketing, which is jam-packed with inaccurate buzzspeak. While most of that is focused on a few trendy meme-oriented books, the low point of my briefing today was the probably the insistence against pushback that “95%” of Google’s results depend on “PageRank.” (I think what Baynote really meant is “all off-page factors combined,” but anyhow I sure didn’t get the sense that accuracy was an important metric for them in setting their briefing strategy. And by the way, one reason I repeat the company’s name rather than referring to Baynote by a pronoun is that on-page factors DO matter in search engine rankings.)
That said, here’s the essence of Baynote’s story, as best I could figure it out. Read more
| Categories: Baynote, Google, Ontologies, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines, Social software and online media, Software as a Service (SaaS), Specialized search | 4 Comments |
For search, extreme network neutrality must not be compromised
In a recent post on the Monash Report, I drew a distinction between two aspects of the Internet:Jeffersonet and Edisonet.Jeffersonet deals in thoughts and ideas and research and scholarship and news and politics, and in commerce too.It’s what makes people so passionate about the Internet’s democracy-enhancing nature.It’s what needs to be protected by extreme network neutrality.And it’s modest enough in its bandwidth requirements that net neutrality is completely workable.(Edisonet, by way of contrast, comprises advanced applications in entertainment, teleconferencing, etc. that probably do require new capital investment and tiered pricing schemes.)
And if there’s one application that’s at the core of Jeffersonet, it’s search.No matter how much scary posturing telecom CEOs do – and no matter how profitable or monopolistic Google becomes – telecom carriers must never be allowed to show any preference among search engines!At least, that’s the case for text-centric search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft run today.The reason is simple:The democratic part of the Internet only works so long as things can be found.And search will long be a huge part of how to find them.So search engine vendors must never be able to succeed based on a combination of good-enough results plus superior marketing and business development.They always have to be kept afraid of competition from engines that provide better actual search engine results. Read more
Uncyclopedia
If you haven’t seen it yet, Uncyclopedia is an occasionally hilarious parody of Wikipedia. Definitely worth checking out.
| Categories: Humor, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
Circlesourcing at Wikipedia
Tim Melly makes an interesting point about Wikipedia. Since he was fairly meandering about it, I’ll recap it here in telegraphic form:
- Wikipedia is full of claims that are sourceable in principle, but aren’t actually sourced.
- Mainstream journalists use information from Wikipedia, even if it is not further sourced. (He has an anecdote to illustrate the point.)
- Those very articles can be viewed as authoritative for Wikipedia’s own sourcing purposes.
- Thus, unsourced information could, by virtue of having been placed in Wikipedia, grow to be regarded as authoritative by Wikipedia itself.
| Categories: Social software and online media | 2 Comments |
How to lose your credibility in 24 hours and 49 minutes
Deeply loathed football writer Ron Borges of the Boston Globe has just been brought down by plagiarism. This detailed timeline of the events is probably indicative of what happens in many other blog-driven flaps.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
Online marketing checklist for enterprise IT vendors
A recent Monash Letter covered online marketing strategy in considerable detail. The complete seven-page Letter is exclusive to Monash Advantage members, but I thought I’d share a summary checklist here. If you’re an enterprise IT vendor, and you don’t do all these things, you’re probably missing some major marketing opportunities. (The good news is – nobody, including your competitors, is doing all of these things yet.)
- Offer both a conventional website and a “developer’s network”-style technical website. Whether they’re on one domain or not is unimportant.
- Absolutely minimize the registration requirements for your sites. Why make it hard for people to accept your marketing pitches?
- When you do pay-per-click advertising, don’t just look for phrases buyers would use. Also go for the tire-kickers, or the people who don’t even know yet that there are tires to kick.
- Devote a website page to every partner. If this doesn’t make sense on your main site, create a separate website just for the purpose.
- Monitor and participate in forums where your products are – or should be – discussed. For most classes of enterprise IT, the first place to look is the old Usenet comp.* hierarchy, most easily found via Google Groups.
- Maintain one or more executive blogs.
- Maintain a news blog hosted on servers physically separate from your main website(s). That’s for business continuity at a minimum, but you can also use it for other purposes.
- Contact influencers regularly and BRIEFLY. Pinging us is OK. But constant press releases and newsletters make our eyes glaze over.
- Increase the number, and vary the style, of your success stories.
- Don’t put all your eggs in the basket of “big bang” message launches. Also build “rolling buzz.” The print publications won’t reduce coverage because the influencers have already figured out what you’re going to do.