DISQUS

Definitely a functionality needed by Wolfram | Alpha (or any new site for that matter). But when you start navigating around the site, the page formatting is messed up.

The end of the world! Nope? How about TechCrunch is getting sold/bought?

If you type in a domain name, such as mashable.com, Wolfram|Alpha will give a bunch of stats such as registration info, visitor stats, site rank, date it came online, etc. Also a visitor stats timeline. It will give other free ranking/analysis tools (such as compete.com) a run for their money.

Good to bring this up. I have posted a detailed evaluation of three ways in which Twitter Trending Topics can be abused with use of hashtags. http://tinyurl.com/qhe2ba

If Twitter makes people pay, they will turn to other similar services. Twitter taps into an essential human need that goes way beyond one particular platform. But if one company chooses to charge, another will offer a free service as it too will search for ways to monetize.

Great post. Thanks Phil.

This is yet another example, to my mind, of how Twitter is going to impact how we manage our personal information management system. (This is a topic I have blogged on.) That is, microblogs and aggregators such as FriendFeed are going to be essential tools as social search provides more efficient ways (than search engines) of finding what we are looking for online.

Will Tumblr compete effectively with Twitter?

I've posted Affiliate links on Twitter, but only for products that I think will interest and be of benefit to my Twitter followers. I think it is in the gray area ethically, since Scoble is not making it clear he is linking to his affiliate account. So is Scoble endorsing Kindle? We do not know. All we can surmise is that he is trying to capitalize on his followers.

It's great to have an overview of the different types of Twitter users,
and helps people figure out the Twittersphere.

That said, I think new users need to understand that the benefit of Twitter
comes also from participating. It's not just that you can listen to the good
and the great, but also that you can speak to them (although some of those
who have thousands of followers may not respond).

But more to the point is that by becoming one of the Twitterati you get a chance
to be part of your OWN community. That is, you build your own unique demographic
of followers who you listen to, who listen to you and who can greatly expand
your online life.

Ultimately, I see one's Twitter community becoming part of our own personal
information management system -- an essential feature of managing the endless
sources of information online and elsewhere.

We're on the same page here. Basically, if you conduct yourself ethically there is no reason to fear your Twitter activity. The scaremongering of how Twitter can be harmful is Luddite thinking that does not develop the technology. We need positive models with best practices and recommended protocols rather than a list of don'ts.

These remarks don't seem at all outrageous.

Regarding the remarks, case in point:

"I’m so sold on Twitter." So are you, Robert, and me, and several million others and climbing.

"...the most powerful branding mechanism since television..."
I have dedicated a blog to Twitter (with some contextualizing to social media) where I advocate Twitter as a new paradigm in human consciousness -- maybe that's outrageous!

Sell GM to Toyota?
At least Toyota's making a profit and cars that people actually want. Let's get over our nationalistic pride and focus on the common good. Makes sense to me.

"Twitter should be bailed out by the government"
Does it need bailing out? Maybe it can serve a useful public service that deserves government money (unlike the auto and finance industries).

"drives your competition crazy"
If your success didn't, they wouldn't be much competition, would they?

"Twitter is more important than a cell phone."
I spend significantly more time on Twitter than on my cell phone. I'd happily give up my cell phone (it's not an iPhone mind you) for life. At least Twitter is free.

Roger, good post and great to know who to follow regarding social media.

It seems I didn't make your cut but I thought your readers might be interested in my blog content, and my Tweets which generally reflect my interests and perspectives on social media (not SEO so much).

In particular, my interests revolve around how social media can impact marketing and branding efforts, and also the broader, longer-term implications of social media's impact on society.

Another Roger

Good post John. Insightful and cogent.

My frustration with the car industry is that they bet wrong on SUVs and pickups, going for the quick easy cash, rather than putting money into R&D, as did foreign automakers.

It seems to me they just relied on branding and marketing to sell cars, eschewing true innovation. Trying something new? That takes guts. A quality in short supply in Detroit, it seems.

If they miscalculated back then (I'm not that cynical to believe they saw the writing on the wall and went ahead with their flawed strategy anyway), who's to believe they'll get it right this time? They're still miscalculating, witness the jet fiasco.

Crying wolf about a big scary depression just perpetuates the ills of the industry. Better to lance the boil and let the pus out.

The result might be a smaller auto industry, but it will be more efficient, and more responsive to the market.

To take an example from history, the UK auto industry was in much the same position in the 1970s. It was nationalized by the then socialist government, with huge injections of taxpayer money. The result? Even more bloated and inefficient companies, with massive losses annually, underwritten year after year by the UK taxpayer. It was not until the 1980s and Thatcher's reforms (I am not a Thatcherite BTW), that the axe fell, the government cut its losses, and got out of the car business.

So that was pretty much the end of the UK car industry, although some of the marques remain or have been resurrected (Mini, Jaguar, MG, etc.). But did the country suffer this dreadful depression? Not. The changes ushered in an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

Shame on the US auto industry for giving us cars that are crap and environmentally bankrupt, miscalculating the economic landscape and now begging for money they neither deserve nor will use wisely.

The debate is oversimplified. Why does it have to be will newspapers die, or not? Steve Ruble predicts all tangible media will be extinct by 2014. James Gleick believes that the printed book will always have
"value and relevance."

As I have blogged about, the reality will be more complicated. Chances are, technologies will emerge that will provide a solution for newspapers to have a tangible offline presence. With such technologies, we may well see the distinction between print and online blurring. Flexible electronic paper could be the disruptive technology that fills this role. (Unlike the e-paper in devices such as Kindle.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper

@Nicole Price A simple accounting of ROI might not yield positive results, especially since e-commerce for B2C transactions on mobile is in its infancy. But mobile is effectively a captive audience, so any ad campaign will build brand awareness, and the ROI is harder to measure. Yet, as other channels become ever more overcrowded, marketers will turn to media that offer a more targeted audience.

Roger's last blog post..Top 21 product brands on Facebook

Interesting post!

I wonder about your fear, "that we start to replace the truth with information."

Philosophers have long wrestled over the meaning of "truth" with perhaps the prevailing opinion that there is no absolute truth, but only subjective truth. What might be true to a Christian might not be true to a Muslim, for example.

Conversely, information is a well-defined concept rooted in scientific principles. Information is absolute and reflects reality.

Given the limits of our brains' abilities to interpret such information within the framework of subjective reality, people make the mistake of confusing truth with reality.

My fear would be the opposite: that we are trending to replace information with "truth".

Roger's last blog post..The naked cocktail party: documenting social online conversations

Definitely reaffirms the faith of all those early adopters who thought Twitter was the beginning of something big.

Now how about who posted the very first Tweet and what was it?

This is a bad idea. How will Twitter determine what constitutes commercial use and what is not?

Charging for commercial usage sounds good, but there is no bright line between a commercial user and a personal user.

Yes, it is easy when a company is using it for customer service, but what about a CEO who is using Twitter just to communicate with like-minded users?

"ultimately doomed" Perhaps it's a bit too early to write off Yahoo.

For one thing, they are consistently the second or third most visited Internet property. For another they have two properties that lead in their sector, and continue to evolve and grow despite competition: Flickr and Yahoo Finance.

Perhaps these will be spun off, but my guess is that Yahoo will find a way to leverage its assets and get a viable long term strategy in place.

Roger's last blog post..How to turn people off: sue your critics

Trade, commerce, business, what you will is based on human interaction. Relationships are the basis of human interaction. Ergo, relationships are the basis of trade.

It's really a no-brainer that marketers want to communicate one-on-one with their customer. But modern economic systems dictate that mass-marketing is profitable because of the economies of scale. But mass-marketing methods are by definition "de-humanizing" because they must appeal to the "average" consumer and, of course, there is no such thing.

That is the importance of social media to business. It allows the economies of scale of mass-marketing with the appeal of individual one-on-one interaction.

Thanks Adam & Sean. It's great to see your open and honest discussion about the downtime. As you can imagine many of us were rather traumatized after coming to rely on your wonderful app. I was a bit harsh on GoDaddy in my blog report on this, so I'll put a note linking to your blog post.

Hi Chris,

I'll avoid the pirate puns, not being able to outwit (literally) any of your previous commenters!

Just wanted to say congratulations on what seems like a smart and logical move.

It seems your new agency overlaps a lot of my interests, personal and professional, so I'd welcome networking with you some time. (@rharris on Twitter)

(Jolly) Roger Harris
Social Media Manager at Capstrat

Hi Jennifer,

Great post. I'd just like to let you know that I excerpted a piece from this post for TwitterThoughts' "Quote of the Day." You can check it out on the Quote of the Day for Oct 23.

Considering that the pirate flag is called the Jolly Roger, I've always had a soft spot for pirates!

One caveat is that pirates rarely came out ahead in the big scheme of things. Most of them ended up at the end of a rope or in Davy Jones' Locker. Unlike Pirates of the Caribbean, most pirates did not beat the big guys. So I think the analogy is fair, up to a point. If you're going to be a pirate in these particular seas, a good mix of strategy is needed.

Every now and then it might be appropriate to go in disguise and do business with the establishment (as pirates often did; a pirate in one country could be a bona fide "merchant-adventurer" in another).

Sure, the distinction between hobbyist and professional bloggers is important, but I think it's a false dichotomy. That is, there is a continuum from amateur to professional. Perhaps more cogently, the spectrum is multidimensional, viz. not only along the lines of income, but topic (personal, business, tech), contributors (one to many), etc. To my knowledge attempts at categorizing the blogosphere have hitherto failed miserably. Not to say such attempts do not have value, just that categorization cannot (yet) capture the multidimensionality adequately.

On another point, some bloggers are seeing the point of listening. This has been especially emphasized as a need for professional or commercial blogs to succeed: to listen, then respond.