The Community Engine

Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Open Peer Review of Scientific Articles

We're all very conservative when it comes to our life's bread. I suspect that is why it is frequently the case that old industries must be swept aside by new.

Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Open Peer Review of Scientific Articles
I'm looking forward to what is learned in this trial for Nature. I'm also looking forward for what it stimulates in the scientific community about the possibilities of openness. To move away from the publish or perish model, or to reimagine it to support cross boundary collaboration where the public good can be served, is a huge change. It would rattle down to the tiny bones of every organization. It would change donor and funding streams. It would change higher education.

I like the attitude of collaboration here. I'm just not sure it's practicable. Being inside academia, a clear issue is measurement. So much depends on getting certain kinds of counts.

Well, you might say, just count differently. The problem with that is that "differently" implies "different". Can I justify rewards that I gave based on set of counts using another set of counts? Can I give lifetime employment based on the new counts? There will be a lot of hesitancy around that because once you open debate on the basis of reward, you effectively open debate on the nature and extent of the reward itself. People who have already gained the rewards do not want that.

And it's not because people are reward grubbing or selfish necessarily. In the vast majority of cases, you're talking about people's life's bread. All of us are very conservative when it comes to life's bread.

I suspect that what will ultimately have to happen is that a new system will have to come up to replace the old. Disruptive forces like wikipedia might help with that. Can current academia be replaced by a creative commons?

Bud posted this on June 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Relearning Less Is More for the 100th Time

Bottom line, least common denominator messages demonstrate you know something to a wider group of people than the specialist stuff you probably like best.

Measuring your site visitors is eye-opening. For instance, you find the site you are empassioned about is pulling in 40 visitors per day, 56% of those from search. Hmmm, could this be a full time activity? Well, not at those levels. But as Darren Rowse points out, maybe the better lessons come from looking at what makes people suddenly start to come visit you.

Recently, we began to start releasing some of our podcast videos from MuscleVentures onto the popular service, youtube as well as google video. By far our biggest hits are coming from footage of a bodybuilding show. Why? Well, I suspect it is a least common denominator effect. People can look at it and appreciate it without really having to have any particular, arcane knowledge or exerting much effort to understand.

You might be tempted to recoil at that, but in almost all activities, only a few people have time to become experts. If you want to make money in your area of expertise, you have to find ways to immediately make people see the value of what you are doing without having to think a lot.

Bud posted this on May 31, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Search and video

Media search seems wide open for anyone with even mediocre search optimization skills. maybe people who produce media just don't like to write metadata.

Back last August, I wrote about our business blogging bootcamp and the various techniques we used to gain search visibility for local searches. I've done two bootcamps since, and those basic lessons still hold. In later bootcamps, we stressed community development and building networks of sites based on students' interests. About that time, I developed a personal blog about fitness.

One thing I noticed in that exercise was that when I posted video clips, those posts would immediately gain more visibility for relevant search terms. Well, if that wasn't proof enough that video was hot, services like youtube and google video kept on popping up, with Om Malik reporting on constant venture money coming into the category

These services are like little walled communities unto themselves. That changes the dynamics of search a bit. If you just follow the basics of metadata and target areas that are less well covered, you win bigger right away with good search rankings on terms like bodybuilding that are maxed out by optimizers in the regular index. Further, with Google Video, these rankings seem to translate into better search placement in the overall index.

For instance, click on this search for my training partner Nancy Arnold. As of today, this google video and this second google video occupy positions 14 and 15 with 469 and 250 views each in addition to being linked from our video blog.

The key lesson here is that the space is wide open for anyone with even mediocre search optimization skills. Maybe people who produce media just don't like to write metadata. Metadata in these video services doesn't come for free like it does with regular blogging.

Bud posted this on May 25, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Identity

There are starting to be building blocks for distributed identity, but you still have to put a lot of pieces together to get it to work.

I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.

I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.

Continue reading "Identity"

Bud posted this on May 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A podcast community

We've started a podcasting site, Muscle Ventures. The local community seems to be working. Let's see what we can do for the distributed Internet community.

For some time, I've been wanting to create a video podcast site and see if I could get a community going around it. Based on things I've learned from blogging bootcamps and dealing with consulting clients, I'm convinced most successful communities have to have some real world basis. It's not that purely online communities cannot thrive, it's just that they tend to be composed of true topic devotees who are also facile with computers and use them as a principal means of accessing information. That tends to limit the possibilities of what can work.

By the way, by community, I don't just mean site visitors but rather people who are aware of each other and care what each other is doing. So, I'm not just talking about pulling in readers with adwords and getting them to convert.

So, what we have done is put together a site called Muscle Ventures. It offers text content, exercise analysis videos, and podcasts. The site seems to be working for the local community. We'll see what we can do for the Internet community. I'll be writing more on this topic as the situation evolves.

Bud posted this on May 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I'm Back

SPAM was driving me crazy. Maybe it's fixed now.

I have been doing a lot of things. I had not updated this blog in a while because maintenance had become close to impossible with a deluge of hundreds of SPAMS per day with at least 30 breaking through the SPAM filters and me having to go through and clean it on a blog by blog basis. I had considered updating to MT 3.2 for its vaunted SPAM fighting features but had been slowed by customizations I had done on some parts of this site and that were still being used by various parties.

Finally, there was a little break in the clouds, and I upgraded. Let's see how SPAM fighting works. At least there will only be one place to blat it out. Further, whatever I did to put myself on the SPAM blacklist has hopefully gone away making it possible to respond in commments again.

Bud posted this on May 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Moving Forward

We've got a whole host of new initiatives going on.

I've been buried with work and obligations. There is much to report. Expect to hear more here soon about veg-o-matic, blogging bootcamps, and new initiatives.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

IA Summit Presentation

A quick link to presentation slides

I gave a talk at IA Summit yesterday on the work we have been doing on architecting self-organizing knowledge communities. Just a quick link here.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

In the Tail of the Long Tail

Blogging is about communicating with specific audiences. In and of itself, it is not really a commercial proposition.

In January, I wrote a note regarding the long tail, in which I said the whole notion of people writing blogs to hit it big at the scale of mass media is crap. After completing the last formal session of a recent Web 2.0 Business Bootcamp at Michigan's Ross School of Business, I think that even more (see participant blogs aggregated here). Participants created blogging projects to communicate with other, well-defined groups of people. Some of them absolutely did not want to hit it big, but all were thrilled by interaction with a previously unknown audience. In other words, the motivation seemed to be primarily social and communicative.

So, how do you make this kind of activity economically sustainable? Research shows that attempts to monetize individual content through ads and other promotion make it less credible. People wonder if they aren't being spammed, and bloggers themselves feel the pressure to conform with the advertiser's wishes. That kills the advertising revenue model. The subscription model is also probably dead since it runs counter to a small-scale blogger's desire to be heard.

The remaining revenue model is ecommerce. Believe it or not, I suspect many bloggers are missing out on affinity products. Scoble has it somewhat with his Channel 9 guy, but what he really needs is a scobleizer t-shirt. Perhaps more in line with many bloggers self-perception, the other version of this opportunity is sales of professional services and other products such as online courses. So, maybe Dave Winer is right, blogging is really just advertising for the other stuff you do. Make money using your blog to sell that.

Bud posted this on February 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Why can't you just produce and consume interaction streams?

I want to see the interaction going on at your site. That way, I'll know whether to give you my attention.

So, I read with interest Matt McCallister's plaint last week about how long it is taking RSS to reach the mainstream. The weird thing is that by many measures, RSS is mainstream but just not widely recognized as such. After all, 31% of the online population use it, it's just that 90% of this group don't know they are doing it.

Given the gnarly technical nature of RSS, Matt wonders, rightly I think, what the sales pitch is to the average user. Why is it useful? Well, it's clear that the idea of being able to subscribe to the sites you want in your portal page is taking off. That's where the 31% comes from. But, it could be better. Instead of treating blogs and other small publishers as junior content producers for aggregation by the monetizing big boys, why not make it just as easy to subscribe to a small site's stream of interaction. I get the site-owner's data as well as the site's stream of comments and trackbacks. That's really where it's at for many small sites I deal with.

Sixapart and Blogger, two of the biggest blog providers could easily provide these streams. Their SPAM controls are adequate that the signal-to-noise ratio on interaction streams should be quite good. That way, as a consumer, I'm free to join community as I see fit without having to visit the site every day. Portal publishers should love it because it is yet more free content. Maybe their allied community sites won't though because it breaks their ownership of the community space.

Bud posted this on February 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

live.com superior to google personal home page

Live.com wins hands-down when it comes to tracking smaller blogs.

I started off liking Google personal home page. It's neat. You can load RSS feeds and have your gmail account right there. Gmail is the best webmail client I have ever used, though Yahoo Mail Beta comes in a pretty good second.

When live.com came out, I dismissed it. Would it conform with web standards? Would it work on non-Microsoft browsers? The answer to both these questions is yes. Further, live.com performs much better with individual blogs than google.

To see this, look at the following two screen grabs.

Continue reading "live.com superior to google personal home page"

Bud posted this on January 31, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Small Business: The Internet Value Proposition

For most small businesses, I think the Internet is ancillary to their central economic activity. It's easy to know what to do in that case, outsource.

Ken Yarmosh, Oliver Thylmann, and I have been having a nice distributed conversation about the value of the Internet and, a bit more specifically, blogging to small businesses. Cutting directly to the chase, I think Ken's central point is that Internet visibility is important to small businesses largely because Internet search drives sales. Further, Internet communication can be much more efficient. Oliver and I have countered that learning the Internet can just be too costly in time for people scrambling to make a buck, and actually Ken's original post gives us some credence. He was describing accessing some material about the Internet and small business that he had just not had time for up till then.

Let me state for the record that I pretty much agree with what I have outlined as Ken's value proposition of the Internet for small business. The real question in my mind is how to achieve it.

Continue reading "Small Business: The Internet Value Proposition"

Bud posted this on January 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

How much Internet can small businesses digest?

A problem that most Internet cognoscente face is that they don't realize the difficulties others have in keeping up.

With limited resources, small businesses seriously need to harness the Internet. The web gives small businesses more bang for their buck. As is the point with this particular teleseminar, the Internet can provide a system to help small businesses be more efficient, productive, and strategic with their time. Definitely worth the investment.
Ken Yarmosh - TECHNOSIGHT » Small Businesses Need to Harness the Internet

At first blush, it's hard not to agree with this sentiment. But, if you deal with real small businesses where owners are time-constrained and chasing to make a buck, you start to wonder.

Continue reading "How much Internet can small businesses digest?"

Bud posted this on January 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Mass Conversation Tracking Just Doesn't Work

Sites that tell you they will help you follow conversations just don't have the coverage of the web to do so. A practical solution is to focus on a small community and use the larger services to catch general mentions.

We're in the third week of the latest blogging bootcamp, and we're just about to cover how to track conversations. In the process, I've come to the conclusion that mass conversation tracking just doesn't work. It's pretty easy to see why.

Just consider technorati. They track 26.3 million sites and 1.9 billion links. That's less than 75 links per site. In a good month of blogging, I can generate that on one site. So, technorati's coverage is not adequate to the task of tracking every link. The same is true of icerocket and Google blog search.

Continue reading "Mass Conversation Tracking Just Doesn't Work"

Bud posted this on January 24, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

I quit using my feedreader for a month, but I've started again

I'm back to using a feedreader instead of just simple aggregation sites. We'll see how long that lasts.

So, I quit using NetNewswire, my main feedreader for a month. Why, well as one of the students in our current business blogging bootcamp said, “What about information overload?”

What I had taken to doing instead was setting up aggregation sites. That way, I can share the information with the world easily. Hey, just go to this or that site, grab a feed or an OPML file if you want, but you're not required to know all that stuff. Your plain old browser will pick it up fine. Those aggregation sites also tend to be focused.

What convinced me to start back up with a feedreader? John Nardini, EVP of Marketing at Denali Flavors, makers of moosetracks ice cream came to give a lecture in the bootcamp. He showed how he was tracking competitors in his reader and basically using it to manage his own information space. Well, sounds good. My information space needs cleaning out, though.

Bud posted this on January 23, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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