Connecting the dots ...
The O’Reilly Meme Map reworked:
…and now that I had a healthy laugh to start the day off, I’m looking forward to the Bubble Web 2.0 TechCrunch Party tonight.
Update (10/22) The Meme Map has been unavailably for periods of time today … I wonder if it gets too much traffic now that Om Malik posted it?
Update (10/24) Bubble 2.0 on the VentureBlog.
Bubblop by Ross.
Tags: Web 2.0, Bubble 2.0, Bubble, Startup, Entrepreneurship, TechCrunch, Venture Capital
The other they I posted a hack to represent the Visitors’ Map (Gvisit) recommended by Steve Rubel buy a cute button instead of the clumsy list provided buy this Google Maps mash-up service.
Well, you don’t need all those steps: MapStats
provides the button by default, and it also
superseeds Gvisit in every possible way, providing not just a
map, but fairly comprehensive statistics. Oh, have I mentioned
it’s updated every 2 minutes vs. hourly at Gvisit?
Check out the difference yourself: for a while I will leave both buttons on the right sidebar.
Update (10/13): Interview on eHub.
Update (10.24) I’ve taken the Visitor Map (Gvisit) off. MapStats is the clear winner.
Tags: Visitor Map, Google Maps, mash-up, Google mash-up, Blogs, Blogging
A hack to the hack: Steve Rubel reported on yet another Goggle Maps mash-up displaying the location of your blog-readers. I like the functionality, hate the appearance, so here are the steps to improve it:
your blog. You’ll probably dislike the big block of city listings..
that’s fine, just click on the list, it will take you to the gvisit
site and display the map. (If your list is empty, relax, come back
later, gvisit updates hourly)
Voila! Now you have a cool button that takes you to the Visitor Map directly, like mine does:
Update (10.24) I’ve taken the Visitor Map (Gvisit) off. MapStats is the clear winner. See here.
Tags: Visitor Map, Google Maps, mash-up, Google mash-up, Blogs, Blogging
is now a proud co-patron of the Web 2.1 BrainJam along with Kron 4, D-BAM, and TechCrunch.
A BrainJam is a new type of event (inspired by BarCamp, Gnomedex, TechCrunch BBQ and WebZine2005) that brings people from diverse backgrounds together to focus on a few key questions, sharing knowledge, collaborating, solving problems, demonstrating cool tools, networking and hopefully making the world a better place while having fun. You only need to bring your mind, your past experience, some new Insytes and something for note taking. The event coordinators supply you with a general direction for the conversation, WiFi access, some collaboration tools and an opportunity to create magic.
It will take place this Friday, October 7th, and registration is open now at a hefty $2.80. That is not $2.80 per minute, but the full price 🙂 But should you not be able to afford it, Scholarships are available: all you need to do is write and explain why you are deserve a scholarship in 1,000 words or less, or under 2 minutes in audio/visual length. (You have to appreciate the Organizer’s humor…)
Talk about Organizer, he needs help, please check out the Wiki.
See You there!
Tags: Web2.1BrainJam, Web 2.1, BrainJam, Web 2.0, Web 2, SQLFusion
The announcement of Google Blog Search prompted Steve Rubel to set up a test blog to compare several Blog Search tools. But what exactly is the objective of the comparison?
Steve’s original definition: “ Let’s see how quickly/well they work “ Then, in the test blog itself he talks about testing “the different engines’ ability to spider the full-text of a blog “.
Well, there’s not much to test there, we already know from the announcement that “Bloogle” only indexes feeds, so that’s a given. Nevertheless, Steve picks a search term ( “ms. mxyzptlk” ) that is AFTER the extract Blogger uses for the Atom feed. No wonder the search term produces no results – it’s not supposed to.
However, when Steve declares Technorati a winner, he clearly characterizes it as a test on timeliness: “ Only Technorati indexed my blog search post from yesterday so far, nearly 18 hours after I posted it “
There is a small problem though: Steve’s post is already indexed on Google at the time of his second post, but of course one can only find it by searching for a text-string BEFORE the feed cutoff (like i did in the above link).
Conclusion: this “test” is irrelevant to the speed of the search engines, all it did was confirm that Bloogle indeed performs as stated.
Of course one can debate whether searching feeds instead of the original html is a good idea or not, but that’s a completely different issue. And, perhaps the right question to ask is just how we should manage our feeds?
I have previously argued that it’s a better practice to publish full feeds anyway. At least for people who care more about their message getting out, than click-throughs on ads on their site.
On the other hand, indexing full content seems to be a bit shaky, at least for Technorati: they admittedly “get lost” and mix up post body, title, tags from different posts in their index. If parsing full html is so difficult (not that I agree with that), than perhaps using the feed is a safer bet (?)
Tags: Google, Google Blog Search, Bloogle, Technorati, Blogs, Blogging, Search, Search Wars, Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion
(updated)
“Is this the death knell for Technorati, et. al? “ – asks Charlene about Google’s entry to the Blog Search space.
I suspect I know the long-term answer for that, but for now let’s look at what Technorati’s own Niall Kennedy thinks:
“Google is specifically restricting its search to feeds, and not using the HTML
of the blog. Why? Googlebot is designed to swallow a page whole and not
break the page up into individual entries or items. Feeds come
prepackaged as individual items or entries allowing for easy digestion
by parsers and indexers. Google would need to overhaul its indexer or
design a new and separate indexer specific to blog posts if it would
like to include more post content than it is currently pulling down
from a page’s link alternate declared feed (this is based on a
conversation I had with Google engineers in February about the indexer,
I won’t blog the details, and things may have changed). Technorati
indexes a blog’s HTML assisted by the declared RSS and Atom feed, so I am admittedly a bit biased.”
Well,
I’m not sure I’d consider Google’s using feeds a disadvantage/weakness:
the fact is, reading the entire HTML may very well be the cause of some
i.e. their parser getting “lost”, not finding post boundaries,
associating posts with the titles and tags of the neighboring posts..
etc. (the previous link provides more details as well as a
collection of other blogger’s experience with Technorati). If
it’s so difficult to index the entire blog right, we might actually be
better off with a feed-based search.
Which takes us to Jeff Clavier’s conclusion: “… bloggers publishing only a partial feed will be partially indexed (Aha, would that be the reason for full feeds to become the standard ?) “
I
could not agree more. Unless your blog is all about ad-revenue
generation, in which case you need to attract readers to your
site, there is no reason to not serve up the entire post
in your feed. It’s really simple: in this world of
infoglut either you make reading your blog convenient, or expect
to lose subscribers who are fed up with clicking and waiting.
Submitting a ‘bait’ in your feed defeats the purpose of RSS Readers.
That
brings me to a problem I find with my blog platform: there is not
enough control over the smart use of excerpts. My preference
would be:
My
platform (Blogware via Blogharbor) does not support such selective use
of excerpts, and I am not aware that others do it
(?). Oh, well, there is always a next
release.
Update (9/14) Google’s new service already has a nickname: Bloogle ( credit to BL Ochman).
“Its game over in the blog search space. “ declares Barry Ritholtz.
Update #2 (9/14) Steve Rubel‘s take, in his test blog: “I have a big concern. Namely, according to Search Engine Watch,
Google does not spider the full blog – only what’s in the site’s RSS
feed. This presents a problem since many bloggers only publish a
summary feed. As a result, the Google Blog Search engine may be missing
a ton of important content.” True…
but again, why look at the symptom, not the root cause: providing full
content in the feed takes care of the “problem” and keeps readers
happy.
Update #3 (9/15) Planet OZH shares my views: Five Reasons Why Partial Content Feeds Suck. (he’s got cute baby pics, too)
Update #4 (9/18): Business Blog Consulting agrees.
Tags: Google, Google Blog Search, Bloogle, Technorati, Blogs, Blogging, Search
I was reading yet another article about the Oracle-Siebel deal, and clicked on the “CRM company” link in the second line:
“So here we are, in the midst of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco, where the hosted CRM company today announced news of the release of its AppExchange sharing service…”
Considering the context, common sense would dictate the link goes either the Salesforce.com or perhaps another relevant article. To my greatest surprise I found myself at the homepage of NetSuite a direct Salesforce.com competitor! Now, I happen to like NetSuite, but even I don’t expect this… so let’s investigate:
John Battelle discussed IntelliTXT’s unfavorable reception when they launched last year:
“Hypertext links that appear within the editorial content of a site, including those within graphics, should be at the discretion of the editors. If links are paid for by advertisers, that should be disclosed to users.
All online pages should clearly distinguish between editorial and advertising or sponsored content. If any content comes from a source other than the editors, it should be clearly labeled. “
Absolutely. And NEVER, EVER hijack a URL to a direct competitor’s page.
Update (9/12) Apparently I am not the only one disliking IntelliTXT.
Tags: Advertising, Ads, Marketing, Journalism, Publishing, IntelliTXT, Hijacking, Linking, Hypertext, URL
It’s really funny to watch how a story reverberates. I’ve just read it thanks to Jeff Clavier, who links to the original story, clearly talking about ONE slice of pizza.
A few minutes later thanks to Steve Rubel I can read the AP story (it’s funny it’s under “Breaking News” … I mean it’s just as important as Katrina, Iran’s nuclear plans…etc), anyway, by the time it hit AP, they are talking about TWO slices of pizza.
I’m looking forward to a few more iterations, I’m sure before the day is over, we’ll know this guy was actually a robber who took all his company’s hi-tech equipment and emptied the entire kitchen along the way 🙂
Update: (9/5): I wonder if the contestants are real people here, or even if they are, did most of them submit fictional stories? Several userid’s on SimplyFired psted 10-20-40 entries, and the pizza story above is by simplyfiredcontestentries the “official Simply Fired contest entry ID” with 303 posts.
Tags: SimplyFired, SimplyHired
(Updates at the bottom)
Technorati is dressing up a dying sick body in fancy new clothes. Who cares, if the body fails it’s basic functions?
The latest new feature, Blog Finder meets more criticism than welcome: here, here, here, here, to list just a few, but it’s all so irrelevant. Let’s face it: it really does not matter, whether this latest feature works or not. There’s an old IT axiom: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you have the wrong data to begin with, it really does not matter how many layers of extra services you put on it, the output is still worthless.
Everybody seems to be talking about performance problems; for example here, here, here, here, here and here, but IMHO not getting data out of Technorati is by far not the worst; getting the WRONG information is far, far worse. Techorati has major problems parsing the main pages of blogs built on standard templates of major bog platforms, and the result is the result is entries in their metadata where:
I myself, and other bloggers documented this before: here, here, here and here again just giving a sample, and here’s a little gem of a title and article that have nothing to do with each other:
Now, let’s talk about communication: emailing techorati support is a complete dead end. Bloggers quickly learned the trick: emailing Dave Sifry (CEO), or perhaps Kevin Marks, or tagging blog entries with their names used to result in a response, and sometimes even corrective action. That’s no longer the case. I understand. The CEO personally emailing back is not exactly scalable communication. But why doesn’t Technorati have a searchable Knowledge Base, or at least a FAQ of known issues and solutions? This is really Customer Service 101.
The SiliconBeat, Joi Ito, and many others welcome Dave Sifry’s post discussing the problems: “ Once we got our keyword search infrastructure back on track, our infrastructure team has been working 100% on fixing Cosmos search. Our current plan is to have Cosmos search back up and running by the end of September .“
Sorry, Dave, but your keyword search is far from fixed, it still results in timeout in more than half the cases.. in fact the Technorati homepage is often unaccessible. On this chart a response time above 3 seconds is considered critical – wow, I am generally happy getting anything below 30 seconds, if at all. On the input side, Technorati claims to index posts within minutes, yet several influential bloggers complain they have not been indexed for weeks. Dave strikes an honest tone and discusses some of the issues, but frankly, I doubt he really knows the status of his own business.
All this makes me wonder if Technorati is an “idea company” – they truly are Innovators of the Blogosphere, just can’t execute. This makes me wish BL Ochman’s recent “hot tip” about an imminent buyout were true.
Update (9/10) This is pathetic: New Orleans is listed as #6 on the Tehcnorati Top Search list, yet clicking on it results in this:
Update (9/11) Can’t log in to Technorati account, infinite loop asking to log in again and again …
Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Technorati, Technorati Bugs, Tags, Tagging, Sifry, Customer Service, Customer Disservice
I don’t want to write a part 3., but this is getting ridiculous, please see updates at the bottom.
Seth Godin explains what he meant in his previous post that I cited here.
Well, that’s not the only unfortunate ad placement – how about this, from my yahoo home page:
No, I am not blaming Yahoo for being insensitive – this is just technology without human feelings after all.
Update (8/31). Check out Michael’s post about juxtaposed ads.
Update 2. (8/31) Stephen Baker at Blogspotting: “Feel-good ads feel weird on hurricane coverage”
Update 3. (9/5) Another example via Jeff Clavier:
Update 4. (9/7) I wanted to give these guys the benefit of doubt, and considered the above ad a simple case of carelessness, but, boy, was I wrong! This company sets a new record of intentionally tasteless, exploitative advertising. The proof is in the date (8/2, Friday AFTER Katrina) of this job post on craigslist. I don’t expect the link to last long, they will probably delete the ad soon, so here’s the full quote:
New Orleans Own – Southern Comfort – Needs Models
Reply to: job-88476604@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-08-02, 12:02PM CDT
Born in New Orleans, Southern Comfort is seeking spirited girls to promote the brand around town! Must be attractive, willing to mingle, 21+, and have reliable transportation to get to promotions.
This job is all about having fun and involves no shot serving. Promotions will take place at local bars, conventions, music venues, and events such as Voodoofest.
“Southern Comfort – Born In New Orleans Where Anything Can Happen”
Job location is New Orleans, LA
Compensation: $20-$25 depending on experience / leadership
Hat tip to Jeff Clavier and I am joining him in linking to the call to boycott of Southern Comfort’s products until they abandon this tasteless campaign.
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