DISQUS

Its funny: Ning always lacked the spark that would light a fire in my mind - it never seemed to have a focus that would provide a call to action to drive usage. Of course, its an infrastructure provider, but to me anyway, the concept of social network infrastructure is a little to "big" for mainstream adoption.

Wordpress, however, provides a simple-to-understand focal point (blogging) around which the social networking component can revolve. Wordpress blogs provide a gateway into the wider social networking offering - just the kind of conceptual bridge to enable it to take off. So -- good luck to them!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the semantic web depends upon the meta data needed to connect disparate bits of information. What you're saying is true - the infrastructure to share and store that meta data may well be ready to go - but where does the data itself come from?

Unfortunately, the answer is "people" - people being notoriously inconsistent in naming, tagging, storing, and sharing their digital assets. FWIW, I don't think we'll have a truly semantic web app until there's good enough AI to understand digital assets and add consistent metadata.

Dear LocalHero: you'll find *not* slagging your competitors to be much more effective at spreading the word about your service.

Mathew: thanks for mentioning my thoughts. One example of such a phenomenon was the EveryBlock tribeca page, which had some articles about a museum being threatened or some such thing. I'd say that the interest group for such a news item draws from a much larger catchment area than tribeca, and that given its niche nature probably has few people in any given district of the city, but a reasonably sized population overall. Point being: hyper-localization has yet to prove itself.

You know what would be a worthy experiment? How about nyc.digg.com or sf.digg.com? You'd need the built in population of a popular social news site like digg to kickstart it, but then rock & roll.

Making attribution more visible sounds like a pretty simple task to me. Your writers should be able to figure out how to wrap a link around some decent keywords without too much in the way of "guidlines" I would think. Good judgment and a community focus should be core attributes of a good blogger, not rules that need to be enforced.

Here's an invitation: schedule a few weeks off in Feb. and meet my wife and I in Bangladesh:

http://www.hodr.org/index.php/2007/12/13/bangla...

That would be some footage to remember, and if you ever wanted a case study in grass roots technology use, Bangladesh in general and HODR.org in specfic would be perfect material.

From my blog post on the topic:

One fascinating thing about this trip already is the how deeply intertwined it is with technology. The volunteer group? Found via digg and a YouTube video. The bulk of my communication with friends in Singapore has been via SMS. My wife and I are packing a laptop, several digital cameras, and signing up for a Flickr Pro account. We’ll be staying in touch via VOIP calls via laptop, email, Facebook, and SMS. We’ve got generally awesome hands-on accounts of everywhere were headed from the thousands of travel blog posts that have been written.

The inclusion of a book in a school's reference library doesn't convey any more about its credibility than does google about the inclusion of a page in its index.

Thus the question is one of teaching research skills - which should be applied equally to books found in the stacks, wikipedia pages, or google results.

And here I was thinking that blogging was about the conversation (which sites like Techmeme and my own TechWatching facilitate), instead of ivory tower, deep thinking proclamations. Certainly one needs to strike a balance between writing your own mind and providing commentary on the daily gestalt, but I don't see any problem inherent in both coexisting.

I actually thought that it might be real; conducting a sure-to-be-hated legal campaign over the period where bloggers are likely to be otherwise occupied (and thus unable to mount a concentrated PR counterstrike) struck me as a particularly devious, apple-esque move.

But, who knows with FSJ.

I think I agree with both Zoli's! SMB is where Google has historically shown that it wants to be, and snapping up an incumbent is (IMHO) the best way to get there in the accounting space.

Specficially, I have one incumbent in mind: FreshBooks.
http://techfold.com/2007/12/13/watch-google-buy...

"So, when Read/Write Web and Jay Eye Sea suggest that Google has the motivation, resources, and market opportunity to get into online accounting, I say they’re going to pull a Feedburner/YouTube and just buy the best-of-breed that’s out there already. In doing so, they’ll get a great product, and great team, and a revenue stream."

Check out this post:

http://blog.persai.com/2007/12/6/what-is-persai...

Then check out a site that's fuelled by the persai engine:
http://www.eyeonfacebook.com/

Seems like a pretty mundane news scanner so far, but I understand that its supposed to be packaged in a habit-learning reader.

No worries, just checking - safe skies!

I dropped you an email a while ago asking if you had your OPML available anywhere for grabbing; any chance that you do?

If you'd like an alternative to TechMeme, take a look at http://techwatching.com/

(disclaimer: its mine)

TechWatching is an algorithmic curator in the style of TechMeme, but with a few tweaks. TW places less emphasis on newswires and msm publications, for instance, and adds an element of randomization as to which story in a topical cluster is the "lead" - meaning that its not always going to be TechCrunch on top - the goal was to offer an alternative that was more likely to surface smaller blogs while not missing the important topics of the moment.

At the moment, TW is still in shakedown mode, refreshing only hourly, and with regular tweaks to the algorithm - so please be patient if it breaks or seems to get stuck in a rut for a time.

Interestingly enough, the process of stitching together the front page creates a great keyword index of blog posts - I'm thinking about opening up that data set as a standalone vertical blog search engine as well. I'm not an architect, however, so I'm a little daunted by the scale of the data repository required compared to the relatively minor needs of the rolling 7 day snapshot that TW uses.

I've also deployed an instance of the TW system at http://wheelscore.com - which targets the automotive industry.

Anyway - thanks for sharing your thoughts on TechMeme - groupthink is an interesting social phenomenon to observe.

Regards,
-R

I don't know... 7M users is 14% of Facebook's userbase - not exactly a drop in the bucket. More than the userbase, I think they'd be trying to acquire the team - i.e.: the on-the-ground, culturally plugged in expertise that makes entering the CN market a challenge for N/A firms.

So what - google wanted to pay for technology and team, not users. What's the big deal? Google's got the reach; if they wanted to blow away twitter's numbers with Jaiku, they could do so in a week.

The real question in all of this is why dodgeball was allowed to wither on the vine, and whether Jaiku will get any better treatment.

I wish you'd break the tinyURL rule and try http://rwurl.com instead. Pick your own shortlinks lets you max out your characters, and track your clickthrough volume for maximum popularity gloating - rwurl was made to complement your tweets.

Yay, another property for Yahoo to not integrate. Prepare to watch Buzztracker do more or less the same thing it always has for the next three years!

Technorati is a total basket case. For the life of me, I can't understand why they can't seem to get their act together on basic functionality after being in the business for years.

A timely post! I'm also working like nuts on transitioning a different CMS-based site to WordPress, and documenting the process - part one is here:

http://techfold.com/2007/07/12/part-one-dissect...

Anyway - good luck with it! Looks like its coming along nicely so far.

Gabe and Robert --- my thoughts and a fun suggestion!

http://techfold.com/2007/05/29/a-suggestion-for...

Martin: I think its because Google's market power puts in a position to weild undue influence on the net. Its shaping up to be a nice replay of MSFT's desktop OS monopoly experience from years gone by.

Hmmm -- a nice competitor to Phozi:

http://techfold.com/2007/05/10/phozi-the-online...

I just wanted to point readers to a suggestion I made about a month ago that pertains to Robert's timely post. In a nutshell, the suggestion is that Google allow webmasters to make public a subset of their Analytics information.

http://techfold.com/2007/04/03/how-google-can-k...

"Adding a “Sharing” option to Google Analytics and surfacing stats in “site:” searches (for those site owners who have elected the sharing option in their Analytics account) would do the job nicely. Let site owners control the degree of information shared, keep everything opt-in, and rock and roll. I know I’d share my high-level views & visits stats in a second. In addition to providing all of the value Alexa does, it would also add a layer of transparency to making ad-buys - something else I would appreciate."

I wrote an extensive review of SwitchPlanet a few weeks ago:

http://techfold.com/2007/04/30/switchplanetcom-...

Its a great site with lots of potential.

Congrats Robert - that's a big feather in anyone's cap!

As for Google's impact: its made me expect simplicity in execution, tools that "just work", and shortshortshort update cycles in all aspects of my life.

The only other company that's been able to consistently deliver on those expectations to this point has been Apple.

Google changed by online world, but has impacted the offline as well.