ClappingTree's Web 2.0 » *Insights

Correlation between Social Media & Financial Success

J.K. — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:16:32 +0000

THE BRANDS MOST ENGAGED IN SOCIAL MEDIA are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers, according to a new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group. ReadWriteWeb reports:

To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums… After examining the companies and their social media activity levels, the brands were ranked on an “engagement scale” where scores ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1. Those brands that were the most engaged saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%.

The study grouped the brands into one of four engagement profiles that related to the number of channels they’re involved in and how deep that involvement is. At the top of the list are “mavens,” the brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels – like Starbucks and Dell, for instance. “Butterflies” are like wannabe “mavens,” and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others. “Selectives” focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they’ve chosen. Finally, there are “wallflowers,” or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.

Keso’s understanding of Google Chrome

J.K. — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:50:26 +0000

GOOGLE’s NEW CHROME BROWSER, launched yesterday, promised to be faster, safer and smarter than other browsers. Key features include an Omnibox (where one can type in a website’s address or any search term), a Privacy mode (which ensures that traces of an Internet session are erased the moment one exits the browser) and Smart tabs (where tabs run on separate “processes, so if one website takes up too much resources or causes a software app to crash, that tab can be shut down individually).

For some reason though, I didn’t manage to install or run Chrome on my desktop PC yesterday. Still wondering whether that has anything to do a coincidental Windows update on the PC just before that. Anyway, I’m intrigued by what Keso has written about Chrome, in particular:

I think the real reason for Google to join the browsers bandwagon two years ago are this: Google needs control of a browser that has sufficient influence. It also needs to set up de facto standards through something that can be controlled and demonstrated.

Therefore, what’s important about Chrome are these two things: A new JavaScript engine V8 and a “Webified” version of the desktop app Gears. Both are part of Google’s key strategy to expand browser functions to better support future Web apps.

We often naively assume that Desktop battles are waged for the purpose of establishing Trojan horse pipelines. Actually, the smarter purpose of such battles is not for thievery or user base, but for the establishment of de facto standards that are advantageous to one’s future plans. For Google, this standard will enable its apps to run perfectly regardless of the platform or terminal that anyone may use. In order to better release its “cloud of accumulated energy”, Google needs a well-supported standard and a popular browser.

Therefore, Google has chosen not to integrate many of its own products and services into Chrome. Some people complain that one can easily install Google Toolbar on IE, but not on Chrome. Actually, there’re many more things that one cannot do on Chrome: visit Gmail with one click, publish easily from Blogger, upload video to YouTube, and even customize the default search engine…

Like Chrome, V8 and Gears are released as open-source projects. This will undoubtedly enhance their neutrality and therefore appeal to developers. It doesn’t matter how much market share Chrome will claim eventually. The key is whether it can provide the best demonstration of Gears and V8, thereby enabling them to become de facto standards.

Some people say that the target of Chrome is neither IE nor Firefox but Windows. Considering the line of “cloud”, apps and browser, I basically agree with this judgement.

Will social media change Singaporean politics?

J.K. — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 06:00:26 +0000

WILL SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISTS CHANGE the face of politics in Singapore in one or two years’ time? Will the US Elections voting patterns correlate closely with the subscription, viewership and interaction patterns on YouChoose 08 (on YouTube) and other social media such as Facebook?

Last month (March 25), in a report entitled My Biggest Mistake, TodayOnline reported that Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi admitted making the biggest mistake in thinking that the Internet was not important. The PM’s ruling coalition suffered its worst results ever in March 8 polls that left five states and a third of parliamentary seats in opposition hands.

Among them was 67-year-old opposition Democratic Action Party chairman Lim Kit Siang who won a parliamentary seat in Ipoh Timor. He ran three blogs, which were meticulously updated with multiple posts every day. Long-time blogger Jeff Ooi, 52, also won as a DAP candidate in Penang. Like many other opposition leaders, they were able to reach out to young urban and educated people, many who were voting for the first time. Mr Ooi added that Web users are not limited by age. “We attract many citizens above 45 years old and these are the people who are more interested in politics and the oppositions’ viewpoint.”

In March last year, PR, market & biz dev coordinator Jonathan Dunn reported:

YouTube has launched a channel that will broadcast videos submitted by ‘08 U.S. Presidential nominees. The goal is for the channel to act as an information hub for the hopefuls and, one supposes, offer a way to counter unauthorized, potentially damaging, videos that may be posted by other users….

So far Rudy Giuliani, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Mitt Romney and Joe Biden are on board. The videos seem to be a mix of carefully scripted campaign stops and the usual ‘on the trail/vote for me’ rhetoric. A click on the candidate’s videos on the channel home page (or on the candidate’s names above) takes you to a profile page for each candidate where other videos and info are hosted.

A few months later, in June, CBC News Today host Nancy Wilson interviewed broadcaster, researcher, and Internet evangelist Jesse Hirsh regarding the role and influence of social media on the 2008 US Presidential Election, e.g. “Why would candidates want to figure prominently on Facebook?”, intimacy on social media, dirty campaign tricks, blogging vs mainstream media, level playing field, etc.

By now, only three presidential candidates are featured on YouChoose 08: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and John McCain for the Republicans.

Will the US Elections voting patterns correlate closely with the subscription, viewership and interaction patterns on YouChoose 08 (on YouTube) and other social media such as Facebook?

Related Articles:

YouTube: US “presidents”, UK queen & now Jap PM

Internet Marketing: Successes or Scams?

J.K. — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 08:14:55 +0000

DO INTERNET MARKETERS MAKE MORE MONEY on the Internet or off the Internet? This is one of the many questions that came to mind at the end of the recent World Internet Mega Summit (WIMS 2007) at the Singapore Expo. My ex-boss, now a corporate client, had given me a complimentary ticket to the mega seminar. At the end of the four-day event on May 26-29 (Saturday to Tuesday), I was glad to have learnt a number of marketing techniques. I was also troubled by some of the things that I saw and heard.

There were 10 speakers: Brett McFall, Tom Hua, Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner, Armand Morin, David Cavanagh, Ewen Chia, Stephen Peirce, Mike Filsaime, and John Childers. Each internet marketing guru on the stage spoke persuasively of having a simple easy-to-follow system which guaranteed success. Some qualified by adding, “lots of hard work over a period of time”. Somehow though, with the possible exception of Jay Abraham and Mark Joyner, their systems all looked and sounded the same:

Basically, each guru suggested offering a freebie to lure prospects to a site and into giving their email addresses. Then the hardsell process begins in earnest: A one-time irresistible offer is made online and the specially designed website starts to sell in almost all possible ways (upsell, downsell, cross-sell, etc.) until the prospect yields to temptation and pays up.

AT THE END OF EACH GURU’S TALK during the WIMS 2007 seminar was invariably a sales pitch, whereby the guru would show what looked like an endless list of over-priced products/services. Then he would slash the prices to about a tenth or more, and tell the audience to buy NOW. Many people actually did as told.

I did a quick estimation. Some of the speakers charge each attendee $5,000++ for attending his program which includes one day of training, two days of coaching and monthly meetings for one year. If 100 people sign up for the program, he’d have made $500,000 (half a million!) per program.

I also ran some checks on the PageRanks (using the multiple PageRank checker) and the estimated traffic (using AttentionMeter.com) on the speakers’ websites and found the following:

Fig. 1: Google PageRanks for the 10 speakers.

Fig. 2: Google PageRank for some of the speakers’ sites

Fig. 3: Compete.com Graph for ArmandMorin.com, BizSuccessOnline.com, BrettMcFall.com & StephenLive.com

Fig. 4: Compete.com Graph for Abraham.com, Aesop.com, EwenChia.com, MarkJoyner.name, MikeFilsaime.com

Fig. 5: Compete.com Graph for Aesop.com, ArticleCity.com, AutoPilotProfits.com, eBookWholesaler.net, Simpleology.com

Notes:

AutoPilotProfits.com belongs to Ewen Chia, Aesop.com and Simple-ology.com belongs to Mark Joyner, ebookwholesaler.net belongs to Tom Hua.
With rampant link exchanges on the Net, PageRanks are increasingly being manipulated.
Traffick, a search engine blog, wrote (”On Alexa, Compete.com, Quantcast, et al.”, February 06, 2007):

“People who don’t know too much about web stats love to quote Alexa ranks way too much… that’s seen as a silly thing to do by those “in the know”. But still, darned tempting. You can buy better data, but Alexa is free.

“More recently, upstarts that don’t seem too dissimilar to Alexa have come along: Compete.com, Quantcast, etc…. Based on the evidence I’ve sifted through, there’s not a shred to suggest that Compete.com is better at this stage, and some to suggest it’s actually worse.”

I remember from experience that hardsell also happens in face-to-face sessions. And how I hate being subject to it! These guys are shrewd marketers. These techniques probably really work well. Perhaps consumers need to beware! How many times have we bought things that we don’t need but thought we need at that moment of buying? Still, what are the right things to do when one really needs to make a living and so sell well on the Net (or elsewhere)? And just who (if any) have achieved real successes?

Related Posts:

Saying “No” To Say “Yes” (Web of Mass Distraction II)

J.K. — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:25:02 +0000

ONE GREAT IDEA that I took away from Nexus 2007 is what Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly) calls Continous Partial Attention. Not that the phenomenon is new, but because it describes succinctly what I’ve been (and still am) experiencing. Finally, I can name it.

This is a new design challenge in this age of information anxiety and abundance of meaning. More and more people, myself included, are doing many things at the same time. However, decades of research (and common sense) have indicated that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks. For example:

“We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,” says René Marois, neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, quoted in a recent NYTimes piece about how multi-taskers max out their brains, creating neural network bottlenecks and causing confusion and mistakes (thanks, Susan Mernit).
When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large–amazingly so.” (thanks, DeedsDoing 2006)
“Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run,” says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, quoted in a CNN report last year.

IN MY EXPERIENCE FOR EXAMPLE: During Nexus 2007 last Saturday, I found myself switching among three screens on my laptop most of the time. We were using Twitter.com for message sending, Campfirenow for chatting, and Nexus Live/Interactive to view Twitter messages from everyone. I could barely pay attention to the speakers/panel on the stage. Probably listened to only half the words. One possible way to reduce distraction could be better to replace Campfirenow with a shoutbox hooked onto Twitter via its API, the way Uzyn managed to hook Ping.sg shouts into pingsg_shouts on Twitter. Open Tweetbar on the sidebar and everyone would have two less screens to distract their attention — in other words, Let everyone look at just ONE screen.

Recently, Bjorn Lee twittered: “i have ADD, maybe i shld enrol in that china camp where they reform internet addicts.. oops, thats called NS in spore.” (ADD stands for Attention Deficit Disorder here, I think.)

What other solutions are there? Listen to former Microsoft VP Linda Stone perhaps (thanks, Mike Rohde):

“Continous Partial Attention (CPA) is different than multi-tasking, where the motivation is productivity: giving equal attention to many activities. CPA’s motivation is being a live node on the network, gaining meaning from the network, being ready for new opportunities at any moment…”

“But this always on, anytime, anywhere, anyplace era has has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. The adrenalized fight or flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when we’re being chased by tigers. How many of those 500 emails a day is a tiger? Or are they mostly mice? Is everything really such an emergency? Our way of using the current set of technologies would have us believe it is.”

And learn from Jakob Nielsen (thanks, Beth):

Don’t check your email all the time. Set aside special breaks between bigger projects to handle email. Don’t let email interrupt your projects, and don’t let the computer dictate your priorities.
Don’t use “reply to all” when responding to email. Abide by the good old “need to know” principle… send follow-up messages only to those people who will actually benefit from the reply.
Write informative subject lines for your email messages. Assume that the recipient is too busy to open messages with lame titles like “hi.”
Create a special email address for personal messages and newsletters. Only check this account once per day.
Write short.
Avoid IM (instant messaging) unless real-time interaction will truly add value to the communication. A one-minute interruption of your colleagues will cost them ten minutes of productivity as they reestablish their mental context and get back into “flow.” Only the most important messages are worth 1,000 percent in overhead costs.
Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language. This will save your customers a lot of time — thus making you popular — and will keep them from pestering you with time-consuming phone calls and emails.
User test your intranet. Clean it up so that employees can find stuff faster, and make the intranet homepage their entry point for keeping up on company news and events.
Don’t circulate internal email to all employees; instead put the information on the intranet where people can find it when they need it. (This obviously assumes that you’ve fixed the intranet’s usability.)
Establish a company culture in which it’s okay not to respond to email immediately. This frees employees from the pressure of incessantly checking email and lets them get more work done.

Finally, run 5 miles or do a spin class like Beth does. She explained:

“For some reason, vigorous cardio exercise helps clear out the information anxiety Maybe it is the just the stepping away from the reflected light dancing across my eyes coming from the monitor.”

Related Posts:

Web of Mass Distraction I

Insight#5: More Good Ways to Use Twitter

J.K. — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:47:04 +0000

IT HAS BEEN A “Twittering” weekend for me.

First, read Beth Kanter’s post on Twitter for Nonprofits: Waste of Time or Potentially Useful? where she quoted Chris Brogan’s 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good. Now, let’s see: Quick Human Answers, Conference / News Briefings (or news flash), Friendsourcing, Micro-Attention-Sharing, Direct People to Good Causes, or Staying in touch with others without being intrusive… I could use some of these.

Was finally tempted enough to check out Twitter. Still, Twitter seemed to have greater potential for meaningless distraction than meaningful connection. On first impressions, most of the twitters looked pretty random and pointless. Also, seemed to me that Twitter works somewhat like a Shoutbox, except that it has the advantage of mobility — i.e. it can be received via IM and mobile phone.

“WHY ON EARTH would people want to tell the world what they are doing right now? … To think aloud? Brainstorm? Cry for help? Connect to some human? See something unexpected? Just plain bored? Exhibitionist?” was some of my first twitters. These question have been answered quite quickly through several happenings and/or snippets of information.

Found this interesting article, Group Messaging Instincts: How to recover them (thanks to one of tmas68’s twitters) which explains how ‘one-to-many’ broadcast messaging is part of our human instincts, just like the way ants use chemical messages, bees use dance and dolphins use sonar.

Next, subscribed to Mashable’s useful one-liner news updates on Web 2.0 happenings and I thought, “Great! A simply way to be updated on the move.”

Then, added John Edwards as a friend out of curiosity and was pleasantly surprised to see that he has added me too very quickly. This illustrates to me the political potential of a tool like this. Whether Edwards actually reads my twitters is immaterial at this point in time. Perhaps his secretary’s secretary does or doesn’t. What impresses me is that virtually, he seems willing to be a follower.

Next, checked out TwitterVision because Scoble mentioned it and tmas68 too. I’m impressed though I ‘ve seen a similar version in BlogPaul’s Frappr TwitterAmI map (see below) earlier and had created my own Frappr map.

The fact that TwitterVision is a visual display of real-time messages from real people (with names and photos) contextually placed on a map makes the experience rather mind-boggling. (Educational visualization)

Just 7 hours ago, Alex King twittered that Twitter Tools 1.0b2 for WordPress has just been released. This means, I presume, my daily twitters could be published together as a post like the way tmas68 does on his Vox blog. (Mobile micro-blogging)

Finally, my Web statistics shows that this blog’s getting a good amount of Web traffic from Twitter.com.

I think I’m going to be twittering for a little while more.

Afternotes (2007-03-22):

More useful tweets: Slashdot, BBC, TechMeme, Chris Brogan, Scoble and other celebrity bloggers are in Twitter too. Many, however, also send out lots of personal/useless/distracting tweets. I truly hope Twitter would make it possible for users create two separate channels — one for business and the other for friends/fans. E.g. tmas68 added a business line at 1news4tm yesterday.
Just found a list of Twitter scripts and plugins. Use at your risk!
Beware of addiction! See Amy Jo Kim’s explanation of How Game Mechanics Can Make Your App More Fun and Kathy Sierra’s post Is Twitter Too Good?

Insight#4: Of Alexa, Dmoz & Technorati

J.K. — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:34:56 +0000

ALEXA RANKINGS ARE BIASED, reported Loren Baker in Search Engine Journal last week. Apparently, Google’s Director of Research Peter Norvig recently compared his site’s Alexa score with those of Matt Cutts, Paul Graham, Jeremy Zawodny and Greg Linden and found a definite reporting difference for sites that are search or web marketing related and those which are not. Norvig wrote:

“… I get about twice the pageviews of mattcutts.com, but his Alexa pageview ranking is about 25 times more than mine (I got this by looking at the 1 year, most highly smoothed graph, and then squinting to guess at the mean).

“What that means is that people with the Alexa toolbar installed are 25 times more likely to view a page on Matt’s site versus mine, but overall, all users view twice as many pages on my site.

“That’s a 50 to 1 difference introduced by the selection bias of Alexa. Presumably this is because Matt’s site is really appealing to a core group of SEO enthusiasts, many of whom also like the Alexa toolbar.”

IN A SIMILAR VEIN, John Chow wrote:

“Alexa is a tool that many webmasters and advertisers used to gauge the size of a website. The Alexa ranking is based on a three month running average. The number shown is where a site ranks on the internet… The main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If you do not have the toolbar running, you do not affect the rankings of the sites you visit. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to cheat the system. Just get a few friends to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday. It does not take many people to break into the top 100,000. You can even do it all by yourself by refreshing your site over and over again. Get a dozen friends to do it and you’re break into top 20,000 easily.”

Alexa, by the way, works only on Internet Explorer. Now, perhaps all these explain why this blog’s Alexa ranking is 6,588,931? However, why two particularly trivial links which have nothing to do with this blog are listed in Alexa — they are totally different from the many links recognized by Technorati and 10,500 found via a Google search? Also, how is it that an empty blog such as one that’s created by default in an Elgg community blog and my Elgg profile could be ranked 64,954? Hmmm… just because both are on Elgg.net (also ranked 64,954)? Sheeeshh… no wonder! My test blog at Blogger.com has a rank of 15, just like Blogger itself!

When I scrolled to the bottom of an Alexa page, I found this statement, “Alexa’s directory listings are provided by Open Directory and enhanced by Alexa”. At the Open Directory (a.k.a. Dmoz) site, I read that it apparently has 75,151 editors and 4,830,584 sites listed in over 590,000 categories. According to one of its Help pages, “Depending on the activity level of the editors in your area, it may take up to 2 weeks or more for your site to be reviewed.”

However, I’ve tried for months and my blog is still not listed on this Open Directory. The oft-repeated reason given on support forum had been along this line: There has been a huge backlog and the editors couldn’t find enough time to clear that yet.

Likewise, I’ve tried for months to claim my blog on Technorati, but to no avail. The reason (given by Admin) looks familiar: My blog (along with many others) apparently could have been flagged for review, the support staff are facing a huge backlog and couldn’t find enough time to clear that yet.

I wonder. When I cannot claim my blog on Technorati, is my blog considered non-existent to Technorati? A search among the blog posts in Technorati yields 11 links, but a search in the blog directory yields this error message:

“Huh?

There are blogs, and then there’s whatever you just typed in. If it’s a blog, we don’t know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it’s a blog that doesn’t exist. Maybe you don’t exist. (In which case, please ignore this.)”

While I truly appreciate the invaluable services that Alexa, Dmoz and Technorati provide, I also truly don’t understand what is meant by “flagged for review”. Who flags a bona-fide blog for review by Technorati and thereby stop it from being claimed even by its legitimate owner? In any case, is there a way to open up this listing of blogs that have been flagged for review, Digg-style perhaps, so that more people can comment on them and thus help the editors/admin guys speed up and clear this site-listing backlog?

Afternote on 2007-03-16: Please HELP ME claim my blog on Technorati. Add me as a Fave on Technortiat by clicking this -» and then feel free to delete it later.

Insight#3: What’s My PageRank?

J.K. — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 16:21:49 +0000

I’VE BEEN BLOGGING CASUALLY since 2003, that is, until four months ago. At that time, I decided to start offering training workshops on blogs. So, towards the end of last year, I actually revamped my blog and the way I blog. Recently, it occurred to me that Google’s PageRank for my blog could be quite important. So, I tried to check this out using the PageRank Checker. However, I’ve been quite mystified because the following were what I got:

So, my PageRank (PR) is different for the same URL with and without www? Is my PR = 2+3 = 5?

SUBSEQUENTLY, I entered the Google Webmasters Help group. Was typing a query in the “Crawling, indexing, and ranking” category when Google very intelligently displayed this thread, Different page rank for the same URL with and without www.

According to Webado (aka Christina):

“The difference in PR between www and non www versions of the same url, also between example.com/ and example.com/index.html (for instance) has existed ever since PR has been reported. PR is always relative to the url, NOT to the page content that a url points to. All those url’s are as different as if they were totally different sites.

“At times the PR might appear to be equal – that would be because both forms are being used to about the same extent, and have incoming links of about the same quality and quantity.

“It makes sense to consolidate into one url alone all accesses meant to be for one particular page – the result will also be a consolidation of pr, with a possible increase in the final pr value for that chosen page.

“The new option in Webmaster Tools is there to take care of what’s already been indexed – but you, the webmaster, also have to do your job of redirecting url’s to one single preferred url format.

“Assuming you haven’t done either of these 2 things, and assuming your 2 url’s used to have the same PR and now are different, thats’ due to changing conditions. The incoming links to one form must have dwindled, been discounted for some reason, while the incoming links to the other form must have picked up. PR gets recalculated every few months from data a few months old. PR is also not necessarily the same across all Google Datacenters which are numerous and not in sync.”

In another similar thread, Richard L. Trethewey wrote:

“PageRank is calculated through a combination of factors beyond the simple number of links. The exact method Google currently uses is not public knowledge, but in the founders’ original thesis they describe a formula which is widely believed to still be the fundamental method. For each link that points to a page, the PageRank of that target page is increased by an amount roughly equal to the PageRank score of the page where that link resides divided by the number of links on that page. You also need to keep in mind that the PageRank score shown on the Google Toolbar is taken from a publically available database that is only updated periodically (recently, its been every 3 months or so). But Google has an internal PageRank database that they use for ranking purposes which is updated continuously as they crawl the web. There seems to be a PageRank update in progress, so you should wait a couple of days to see if your PageRank score improves.

“But the best thing you can do for your site is to set up a server code 301 redirect for all requests for pages from the old .com domain and redirect them to the new .org.uk domain. In a few weeks, all of the major search engines will merge their records of the two domains and your rankings should improve. It would also be a good idea to ask thewebmaster of any site that still links to the old .com domain to link to the new .org.uk domain to help speed up the process. But installing that 301 redirect is very important.”

And so, that’s what I have done recently, adding a 301 redirect to channel all requests for the URL without www to the URL with www. Now, waiting and hoping that my PR will be doubled (almost) soon.

(See also Matt Cutt’s SEO advice: url canonization and Michael Bloch’s Giving search engine spiders direction – 301 redirect.)

Insight#2: Antidote for Babel Babble?

J.K. — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:12:50 +0000

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves…” — Genesis 11:4

“OH NO! NOT ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK!” Don’t you get this feeling nowadays? Social networks seem to be sprouting like wild grass every week. Perhaps you even get tired looking at the numerous icons in the GoToWeb20 website (screenshot below), or simply reading the news? Are you like me, wishing that these legions of social networks (almost like towers of Babel) would simply consolidate into a few major players? OR at the very least, open up and make it possible for users to sign-in, post to, and maintain profiles easily from just one (or if desired, just a few) source?

“HOW DO WE KEEP UP?” is a question that has been bugging me over the past few years ever since I got hooked onto the fantastic potential of Web 2.0. So, this morning, was truly gratified to read Robert Scoble’s post (also entitled How do we keep up?):

“I got up early to read feeds and do email. I started at 5:45 a.m. and it’s now 7:26 a.m. and I still didn’t get through all my feeds. But, worse, is what I did find: dozens of new products, new companies, new phones… how do we keep up with this flow that is coming through the blogs? It’s much easier to build a company now than it was in the 1990s, plus access to capital is there again, so that leads to tons of new companies and a LOT of news. What does this lead to? Risk for new companies because the chances that a new company will be able to get adoption/build audience and community is very small. There’s simply too much out there to pay attention to.”

Following Scoble’s “flow”, I found that at Slashdot (in the “Typing it all again” category), kdawson wrote:

“mrspin offers the opinion of ZDNet blogger Steve O’Hear that users may soon tire of social networks — if they don’t open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks. O’Hear writes: “Unless the time required to sign-in, post to, and maintain profiles across each network is reduced, it will be impossible for most users to participate in multiple sites for very long. In an earlier post he went into more detail on the same subject, with extensive opinions from four creators of social networks.”

Following O’Hear’s “flow”, I found some weariness amidst the exciting 2007 Web predictions on the Read/Write Web blog:

“While social networks dominated 2006, we wonder if the amount of time an average user spends online will start to negatively impact on their social lives in 2007 and lead to a downturn. Could social networks prove to be anti-social? At the same time, social networks will probably also become more open – and data portability will start to occur, although MySpace will hold out…”

This is the beauty (and “ugliness”) of social networks: One article leads to another, yet another and another. After an hour or so, I believe I’ve done a quick survey, especially after doing a Google search on “fatigue, social networks, tired”. Even found a comic at Blaugh entitled “I Hate Social Networks”! I can safely infer that there IS indeed widespread social network fatigue.

Data portability had been on my mind. So, I couldn’t agree with O’Hear more. However, I wonder: Couldn’t ZDNet and the four social network leaders interviewed have set the ball rolling and start leading by example? You see, just to cast a vote and to add my opinion at ZDNet, I had to sign up and create yet another profile. Likewise, whenever I’m invited to join a new social network. As a result, I feel less and less inclined to join new social networks nowadays.

If only someone would create an easy-to-use standard-based app or widget that would enable users to keep their profiles and content on a single-source (say, on their desktop or website)! And if only all social networks would have a simple linking feature that works according to that standard!

For example, at Elgg.net, I can reap all the benefits of being in a social network while maintaining my current blog here. Reason: I can publish publish the same posts in Elgg through a feed. I can also have different levels of access restrictions for postings within Elgg. Although Elgg has/had some teething issues (e.g. duplicate/triplicate posts and disappearing media just because I tried to edit a published post), I’m sure they could be resolved eventually.

Truly looking forward to the day when I could join as many as social networks as I want with minimal effort: owning and maintaining all my profile(s) and content in one space, and merely linking them to various networks. Of course, my comments on different networks could be different…

Speaking of this, wouldn’t it be great if one could get wiki-like overviews of original information and the associated “enrichments” (Dion Hinchcliffe’s term for tags, ranks, reviews, comments, revisions, etc.) all on the same page?

Then, we the readers wouldn’t be wasting time reading Babel babble (rehashes, duplicates, triplicates, etcetera). And we the “publishers” wouldn’t be wasting time building towers of Babel — trying in vain to make a name for each of “us” separately. (Indeed, the proliferation of social networks has collectively and literally made us anti-social!)

Hopefully, by then, we’d be truly socializing and collaborating on a Valentine Day, and every other day!

Insight#1: To ‘Open’ or Not to ‘Open’?

J.K. — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:06:25 +0000

“The advances in all of the arts and sciences, indeed the sum total of human knowledge, are the result of the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies and research.” – Terry Vessels

FOR A LONG TIME, I’ve believed in the free culture espoused by Lawrence Lessig and the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies, research advocated by Terry Vessels (above). I’ve therefore downloaded and consumed (installed, used, read, watched, listened…) lots of free software, ebooks, video, podcasts, news reports, in-depth analyses, research studies, etc. on the Internet over the past few years.

Recently, however, I’m beginning to ask myself, “Do I really believe in free culture and free exchange of ideas? Have I’ve been more the taker than the giver?” Granted that I’m normally a frank and open person. Yes, my work has been almost invariably very demanding. And yes, I’ve been blogging from time to time, sharing new things that I’ve learnt. Still, there were times when I’ve hesitated and held back. For example, I’ve kept my research study (begun in 2005) under wraps on the Net until a few days ago. Another example, I’ve been adding lots of useful information to a wiki on a sub-domain for almost two years now. Yet so far, I have chosen not to link them from my blog.

PERHAPS MISTRUST FIRST set in when a Masters program classmate asked quite pertinently some time ago, “But how could we share our research ideas, especially in a public domain? What if someone else were to steal our ideas and claim them as his/her own?”

Our eminent Trade Minister George Yeo probably spoke for many among us when he said on BlogTV (Episode 12: Big Boys Blogging) a few days ago:

“If they expect me to say things which I’d only say very privately, then they will be very disappointed because the blogosphere is not private space… There are things which you will say to your wife which you would not say to your friends, there are things that you would confide in your teacher which you would not confide even in your classmates. That’s part of life, we all have circles of trust…”

The minister was answering young blogger Gayle Goh’s very frank comments that (1) people who read blogs want fresh new perspectives and a strong, personal voice; and (2) people might find it very difficult to trust what politicians have to say especially when they won’t deviate from the party line at all.

Gayle’s response? She looked quite skeptical, even a little disapproving.

At first, I smiled at her youthful audacity and seeming naivete. Upon reflection however, I think Gayle raised an excellent point. Yes, indeed. Just who, in their leisure, would be interested to read a party manifesto? Even though it comes in blog postings?

Jeremy Wright, in his book Blog Marketing, wrote (paraphrased initially, words in brackets below are mine):

“Most blogs are expected to have these qualities — an authentic voice, honesty, and authority… this holds true even more so for the corporate blog…. This presents unique challenges for business leaders who want to understand blogging (connect with readers), as the concepts of transparency and authencity are not often associated with corporate communications practices….

“Blogging is really about three things:

Information: Telling your customers what you’re doing and finding out what they are thinking.

Relationships: Building a solid base of positive experiences with your customers that changes them from plain-old consumers to evangelists for your company and products.

Knowledge management: Having the vast stores of knowledge within your company available to the right people at the right time.

“Without blogs, company messages can get so filtered by public relations or the media that CEOs and other senior management have decided to talk directly with customers — whether it be in the company’s stores, on the company’s airplanes, or at special events set up specifically for communicating with customers. The value of direct customer feedback is obvious, and blogs provide that [one-to-one and daily] on a global scale.”

In “Chapter 3: The Power of Blogs for Business”, Wright wrote:

Be Real: The Scoble Story

“…sometimes the most important person to be blogging in your company may not be an executive. For Microsoft… the most important blogger is arguably Robert Scoble… Scober started blogging before he joined Microsoft — his existing blog was actually a major force in landing him the job. In his role as a technical evangelist, Scoble has to be both authoritative and honest.

“One of Scoble’s rules is to tell the truth, even if it means admitting that a competitor’s product is better or if it means Microsoft is doing something wrong. This can be scary for an executive to do — though Sun’s Schwartz does it quite successfully (another story in the book). For Scoble, this comes naturally, and the net effect is that he has become one of the most influential people in a company with more than 55,000 employees. The external effect is that Microsoft now has a trusted voice who will give the straight and passionate answer to even the hardest questions.”

Finally, BG Yeo himself had observed in the first part of the BlogTV show:

“It’s strange. The emotion connected with blogging is very different from that connected with say, giving a speech or addressing an audience. For some reason, there’s an intimacy associated with going into the blogosphere which you don’t associate with a public meeting.”

Hmmm…. Can BG Yeo really maintain a public, party-line stance and yet achieve that “intimacy” with young people in Singapore? What do you think?