The Community Engine Blog: aggregation Archives

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)

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.

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Bud posted this on January 31, 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)

(almost) All blogging is local

The long tail is crap for most bloggers. They're happy enough just to communicate with micro-audiences.

Over the past month, I've come to the conclusion that all of this discussion of the long tail is crap. The idea of the long tail is that there are a few winner main stream sites that receive the lion's share of attention. However, there is hope for lesser niche sites because the Internet audience is large enough that they will still be economically viable. So, for instance, digg may be the winner for now in technology sites, but there is still room for specialized sites like the Corante web hub.

Well, maybe, but for the most part, I think it is the wrong point of departure. Most (real, not SPAM) people who write blogs are not writing them to capture some piece of a larger pie. Rather, their point of departure is to communicate with some local audience. Oh, it would be nice to gain greater general visibility, but that is not the motivator. In fact, it may be distracting from the real value creation process. Here are two illustrative cases:

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Bud posted this on January 5, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0

In the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp, we teach MBAs blogging as an interactive business process. MBAs, create blogs, find conversation partners, execute blogging strategies, and measure success.

Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

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Bud posted this on December 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Mashups are more than just using big company data

There is a real mashup business model in providing infrastructure for people to create their own ad hoc mashups. I agree that, if you are basing your business plan on a creative way to redisplay some large company's data, heaven help you.

A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:

On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?
There is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.
Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups

Data Mining: Greg on Mashups

But I think this misses a larger point.

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Bud posted this on December 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

SuprGlu — Corante Web Hub in a Box?

This may not be a Corante hub in a box, but it could be a cheap, quick way to set up a knowledge sharing, community site.

As readers of this blog are aware, I've been running a sort of mini version of a Corante hub in class at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our hub, which we call a “remix” is different because it is meant to serve as a distributed blog space for the class to see each other, share information, and interact. There is no editor, it's sort of self-editing.

Well, just the other day, Lindsay, one of the students, came up with a real coup when she discovered suprglu. My cut, it's the 15 minute facsimile to the class remix (one guy has actually done this with his creative writing class). I've also done one so my bodybuilding personal trainer friend can track some relevant blogs I have found.

It lacks some things though. Let me provide a quick list:

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Bud posted this on December 1, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network

The Community Engine played an important role in developing the new Corante hub network. In future posts, I'll be writing about the technology challenges we faced in bringing the network together. I also have some ideas for how to create bottom-up communities across network member blogs that I will share in future posts.

As Stowe Boyd mentioned yesterday, Corante has established a network of topical sites that re-aggregate content from “thought-leading” bloggers and provide editorial insight on emerging trends. I'm honored to note that this blog was chosen to be part of Corante's web hub. I'm also proud to announce that The Community Engine played a pivotal role in getting the technological infrastructure to work.

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Bud posted this on November 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Corante Symposium on Social Architecture Wrap-up

I'd like to see conferences like this make more use of the available social tools to create pre and post conference opportunities for interaction and learning.

It's probably best to just quickly state likes and dislikes about the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture:

Likes:
- The cocktail party the night before at the Harvard Faculty Club was great.
- Lunch was extremely good, a whole table of people who just wanted to talk on topics of interest.
- The general quality of attendees, in particular the people who were not speakers.
Dislikes:
- After lunch, I thought the explicit exclusion from participation of people sitting in the back section of the auditorium was ridiculous. The fact that the exclusion was repeated by two marquee speakers was just over the top.
- The level of audience participation was good, but might have been even better.

I really learned some things at lunch and the cocktail party. I really liked the people I talked to and their openness to conversation. Now, let me spend a moment detailing how I might fix some of the things I did not like.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

How Do We Scale Meaning

You don't scale meaning by putting an IRC chat window on the presentation screen during your talk. You ablate meaning.

Hosted by Kevin Marks and Mary Hodder. Kevin is making the case for why we have centralized top-down control in communications. There are just too many voices.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader 2: How I browse the web

Editing is the real trick to manage large volumes of information. To avoid bias, use multiple editing strategies with some referral to raw sources.

My little post on the Google reader prompted a couple of responses inspiring me to lay out how I browse the web. The Google reader is one of many offerings that allows you to follow web sites using their syndication feeds. Essentially, the reader gathers the feeds from each site and presents them to you in one single web page, making web surfing much more efficient because you now only have to go to one page.

If you think of feedreaders that way, then it's clear that the issue is how to construct the most efficient display. This screenshot illustrates my most recent strategy:

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Bud posted this on October 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader, I don't get it

Basically, Google portal beats Google reader as a feedreader.

I like Google's portal pictured on the left. Their new reader, announced at Web 2.0 today and pictured on the right, just does not compare. The portal outperforms the reader on all measures you would think the reader would be better at.

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Bud posted this on October 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Developing with Ning

Fred Wilson thinks Ning might lower the cost of entry for creating web applications designed to fulfill a specific need very well. Based on my experience, I don't think so, but I have a suggestion which might help.

Yesterday, I signed up for the Ning developer program, and today they accepted me. Ning is a platform for developing interactive web applications like this little bay area restaurant guide, an Ann Arbor version of which is depicted here:

Fred Wilson has suggested that Ning might lower the cost of entry for point web applications, i.e., those designed to fulfill a specific need very well. In its current state, I don't think so. In the example “Things around Ann Arbor” app I tried above, there were three items that were configurable without programming: the number of items to display on a page, the map image to show, and the google maps key. Everything else required modifying code intensive php pages. Examining these, it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to spend some time with the API documentation to make any real progress beyond showing Ann Arbor on the map.

Now, my work might lower the cost for someone who wants to simply copy my application (a process called cloning in Ning), but having to learn the Ning web app structure is a clear cost increase to me for just getting started. I have a recommendation that might help.

Continue reading "Developing with Ning"

Bud posted this on October 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Ning

Ning might fill a sweet spot where non-programmer entrepreneurs can create applications for groups of people who want to interact with each other. That's the missing link in today's social software value proposition.

I've been trying out Ning, which has been written about by many people. Ning is essentially a platform for creating interactive web apps. Here's one of them:

Dave Winer thinks it's a product that does not do anything original. I have a slightly different view. It's a product that has some potential if it can make developing and maintaining interactive web apps so easy that non-programmer community entrepreneurs can do it.

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Bud posted this on October 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

FeedDigest.com — Feed Remixing for Geeks & Resellers

FeedDigest seems to be one of the better services oriented towards geeks and designers for incorporating RSS feeds. I suspect there are still some holes to be filled in this market.

I discovered a service called FeedDigest today. Launched in July, 2005, it has over 10,000 users with each one generating approximately 3 “digests”. Digests are web pages or RSS feeds generated from aggregations of other RSS feeds. Currently users integrate digests into their sites either through javascript or PHP. There is no hosting of digest newspapers, likely due to load and bandwidth issues. The site blog has detailed how they are dealing with the capacity issues brought on by exponential growth over the last few months. Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment.

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Bud posted this on September 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

spam is automating the social without the social

It's interesting to me that you can set up a mechanism for social interaction, use it, and then discover that voila, you have search visibility.

Richard MacManus makes an interesting tie between blogging for business visibility and spam in referring to our recently reported bootcamp experience:

This is what could be termed The Good Side of blogs for businesses. The Dark Side is the spam and fake blogs I wrote about above. It seems to be relatively easy nowadays for both sides to gain search engine ascendancy over old-school websites.
Read/Write Web: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 8-14 August 2005

Well, I'm glad to be on the good side, but I wonder what that really means? Where did that comparison to spam come in?

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Bud posted this on August 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape

Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used Web 2.0 technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.

From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

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Bud posted this on August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Microformats and do-it-yourself vertical search aggregation

Vertical search aggregation allows sites to become known for particular topics and attain search engine visibility. To this end, it uses microformats as a glue to integrate blogging and folksonomy tagging.

Microformats are pre-agreed, human friendly ways of formatting web posts so that machines can process them. Microformats exist for calendar entries, reviews, tagging web posts, and tagging links in link blogs. In brief, microformats are like templates in Microsoft Word but aimed at the open format world-wide web.

It turns out that some arcane features of microformats can be quite determinant in creating search engine visibility. In particular, the reltag format (for tagging blog posts) requires that tags (labels you apply to posts so that people will know how you categorize them) point at a URL that acts as a repository or definition page for the tag. This requirement means that tag repositories are likely to receive a lot of links giving them high search visibility and effectively making tag pages aggregators for vertical search on specific topics.

As I mentioned last week, technorati seems to be one of the first organizations to actively build a business model around this phenomenon. A question raised in subsequent emails is how can an individual site or family of sites use tagging and microformats to get themselves on the map like technorati. In this post, I'd like to propose a light weight mechanism for doing just that.

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Bud posted this on June 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

West Coast Mini-Tour, June 26 – 30

If you'd like to meet me during the mini-tour, please drop me a line. Email link is in the post body.

June 26 – 30, I'm going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco, specifically) catching up with Tantek Çelik and “The” Ryan King on microformats, likely attending the Vertical Leap conference signaled to me by Dave McClure of simplyhired, and attending at least part of Where 2.0. It's going to be an exciting trip. As I signaled earlier this week, microformats have some real implications for distributed business models. Specialty search engines like technorati, simplyhired, and gataga would seem well positioned to take advantage of microformats in their business models.

If you would like to see me on this tour, drop me an email. I'm very interested in meeting readers. Please note that my geographic knowledge of the Bay Area is limited. For instance, I thought the SDForum where Vertical Leap will be held was in San Diego (SD, get it), so keep that in mind when suggesting meet-up locations. Fortunately, a quick phone call with Dave McClure cleared up the SDForum confusion before I booked a flight to San Diego.

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Bud posted this on June 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Folksonomy makes tag aggregators king of search rankings

Technorati tag aggregation pages are achieving top ten search results for significant, niche terms like podcasting, folksonomy, and blogosphere. Technorati's introduction of the seemingly obscure reltag microformat is at the root of its rise in the search rankings. Competitors seeking to duplicate technorati's results need only adapt the reltag or xFolk microformats to their own ends.

Current wisdom has it that, in web publishing, content is king. As the web has grown to upward of 11.5 billion pages, search has become the default way of navigating the web. Search engines determine a site's ranking based on indexable content, so content as seen by search engines had better be your king if you want to be found.

What current wisdom has not allowed for is the idea that folksonomy tag aggregators like technorati might form an intervening layer between content providers and search engines. There is evidence that this has started to occur in topics related to social software during the six short months since technorati began to aggregate weblog posts by tag.

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Bud posted this on June 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Review of Google Personalized Home Page

I like the Google Personalized Home Page, but it just provides an artificial sample of what I want to watch to anyone interested. Give me the ability to add my own RSS feeds, and you'll get a real picture of the top things I pay attention to. Oh, and by the way, throw in tagging too.

John Battelle reports on Google's new personalized home page which appears to be called just that, “Personalized Home Page”.

Google is launching the kind of personalized integration tool that many thought they'd never do. At first it was thought to be called iGoogle, but the name is uncertain at this point.
John Battelle's Searchblog: MyGoogle Is Coming Today

Well, I've tried it, and for a proof of concept, I think it is great. Basically, it lets you add a limited set of sources to your main Google search page including Google News, Slashdot, BBC, Wired News, Weather, GMail, and Driving Directions. These fit my “quick hit” information needs.

There are no ads!

But, I would like just one more thing.

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Bud posted this on May 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Community Engine

Creating Effective Information Communities

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