broadstuff

....I like this one by Lynette Webb..an interactive chart that could be updateable like a wiki. (If you follow the link to the original you will see that you can roll over the datapoints, and Lynette asks for people to submit data as it comes in).

It also plots Flickr's hockey-stick in mirrorvision...

For those who are Powerpoint-weary yet get fed up with the vacuity of the "loads of media and fanny all content" approach, this is quite a useful take on gettinng data across.

A lot of the original academic work on how social networks actually work was done on the spread of sexually trasmitted diseases, so there is a certain delicious irony in sex being transmitted by online social networks.

Twitter is the (predictable) latest one to be infected, as Nic Brisbourne reports......

Of course, some people got there already - check out Twatter, which asks the far more interesting question - who are you doing

Still eagerly awaiting Belle de Jour on eBay......

There is a conflict of interest at the heart of the whole digital media / webservice business model.

Fundamentally, service providers want to rent assets to users, because that gives them most of the market power.

Users are not dumb however, and prefer to own the asset wherever they can.

(this is not just in the digital world, it would appear to hold in most arenas, especially if there is any sign of abuse of power by the renter)

DRM is - looked at in this light - an attempt to transform an owned asset (a song I bought for eg) into a rented asset.

Users will do anything in their power to avoid this scenario, as it is fundamentally an abuse of power from the user's point of view.

And its users who give you money...without users, you have no business. The whole point of the towers of song, the film factories, the marketing, the artists even - is to delight users.

DRM promoters will kick and scream, but the innate illlogic of a system that "screws over" the people who are its own customers will eventually cause its demise.

QED end of DRM

(Seems like its finally dawning on a number of Meedja people too...)

From today's Official Google Blog....your choice of Zeitgeists....

For more than six years, we have compiled a regular list of popular searches called the Google Zeitgeist. This has been our way to highlight the sorts of queries people type into the Google search box every day. More recently, we unveiled Google Trends to show the popularity of search terms in relation to each other overtime, and how different cities or regions may care (or not) about the trends.

And today we're introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now?

So finally a system that:

analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

Blimey, what took you so long, guys...not exactly rocket science

The Hot Trends sounds like Google has blinked and finally followed Technorati's WTF (stands for Wheres the Fire - allegedly). We want our Zeitgeists and we want 'em NOW !!!

Unfortunately,

With the release of Hot Trends, we're retiring the weekly Zeitgest list, but we will still compile monthly lists for each country, and will continue our annual year-end roll-ups too.

So.........no demand for weekly Zeitgeists then....better tell that to the weeklies like the Economist etc etc.

So, we can track our traffic on Alexa and our own Blogsite's analytics...and its a tale of two different Blogs.

According to our own site, our traffic is rising by about 20% per month (excepting April which was flat owing to Easter week).

According to Alexa we have descended from a New Year high to the sloughs of "not in the top 100,000" blogs....these guys have had a similar experience and show similar graphs to ours:

What gives?

While snouting around I found this:

One of the two breakdowns of traffic is the Alexa Reach Rank, which purports to show the number of users per 1 million that access the site in a given period. Alexa provides reach rank data for the day, previous week, and previous three months.

It is the daily Reach Rank that provides an easy method of determining the number of users. In 1908, the physicist Robert Millikan performed a classic experiment to measure the charge of the electron, one of the fundamental physical constants in the universe. He did so by determining at what charges individual oil drops would "float" in an electrical field. Those charges at which particles were observed to float were all multiples of the charge of a single electron. For this insight, Millikan received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Millikan's methodology is easy to use to tell the size of the Alexa sample on a given day. Just look at the daily reach rank for a large number of sites with ranks below 20,000. Those sites that were not visited in a given day have no Reach Rank for that day. A large number of sites will be visited only once, or twice. Find the reach rank of sites that are visited just once. Then divide one million by that number. The result is the Alexa sample size for a given day.

On a recent day I checked, and found that the Alexa sample size was 180,000. This makes it likely that, if you are a heavy Alexa Toolbar user, and you have a site of your own, your own browsing on your own site and others you pay attention to will bias Alexa's results significantly.

I could provide some personal anecdotal information about this, but I don't want to identify my site here and cause my results to become biased. Instead, I am linking my name to a good page on the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment. My advice is, if you need accurate ranking results, keep the Alexa browser off your own computer. Comments are welcome.

Not the most ringing of endorsements......and that was 2003. Was there anything more recent?

Turns out 4 years later the song is much the same...2007 and its a note from seologs.com

According to Alexa, as of right now, out of all the sites on the web, seologs.com is the 7,306th most popular site. That’s pretty impressive if I do say so myself, but (that’s right, there’s a but, and it’s a really huge one), unfortunately, it’s no where near accurate. Not even close. The reason being is that users who visit this site (those interested in SEO and SEM) are much more likely to have the Alexa tracker installed on their browsers. (Alexa tracking can be installed in Firefox extensions as well as other toolbars).

So just how inflated is that ranking of 7,306 for seologs.com? Well, another site I have access to, but is nowhere close to the topic of SEO (can’t name specifically), has an Alexa rank of about 15,000. That’s a lot lower than seologs right? Well that site gets an average of about 45,000 unique visitors per day (that’s right, per day), so you would expect that seologs.com would get at least that many daily visits right? I wish. Seologs.com gets an average of 1,700 unique visitors per day.

So does this mean that Alexa rank is completely useless? Not really. In fact it can be extremely useful, but (*** another big but) in my experience, only if the 3 month average rank is 100,000 or higher. Anything below that is just too easy to fake with just one person.

Bluddyell...our average is c 900..( we loves ya, mwaaah ) yet our Alexa ranking is in the 700,000's right now - thats some power law !!!!

The jaw droppeth...how the FAQ can anyone take a system this flawed with anything other than an extremely large pinch of salt?

Seems like its OK for big sites as they say, but it is extraordinary that "The Web" is still to an extent reliant on such poor analysis tools...

Out of curiosity we have set up Broadstuff on Facebook...very simple to do, and you can import one blog feed into the Notes section. We'll add to Broadstuff on Facebook over the weeks just to see what is possible for a blog / social media interface.

For the past 4 weeks or so Technocrapi has counted no links for us (and not just us, see this), even though we could see 'em coming in day by day.

Links are of course a blog's oxygen, so we wondered what we had done to be so blighted....anyway, last night we were put out of purdah and we are now more authoritative again

I'm tempted to link to all the others who got nailed to help 'em make up for lost links!

Postscript...following the suggestion above, one of the other blogs impacted (Republican National Convention Blog NYC 2004) wrote this script for us all to include to link to each other, so I have, link-lout that I am - here it is:

Webtalks, The Augmented Reality, Divorced Dads Matter, Popular Fiction, Republican National Convention Blog NYC 2004, Love and Terrorism, Hi3B附設Blog, Anil Gupte's Video Blog, A Billion Monkeys Can’t Be Wrong, Threat Assessment and Management, The Preachers Wife, Amberwood Ambrosia, TIBET DZI BEADS, A Yoga Coffee Outlook, broadstuff, buensancho, Pilates & Reiki In Paradise Blog, Lines from a Floating Life

A postscript...according to Forbes, Technorati is in fairly dire straits....

Sam Sethi reports today (aka fans the rumour) that Google will buy Feedburner (rumoured price $100m)

Why?

According to Sam:

Therefore I think it would be a smart move by Google to acquire FeedBurner, simply because Google could then start to serve their own ads (Adsense or DoubleClick) into the RSS stream.

I remember when people first started talking about advertising appearing within RSS feeds and the enormous backlash but slowly over time I have begun to notice more and more RSS feeds appearing in my reader with supporting adverts.

Slowly over time I have been getting more irritated by RSS feeds with Ads...let me be clear - any RSS feed I get with Ads in it gets turned off, (unless it pays me lots of money of course

Actually, Feedburner started serving Google AdSense in trial mode awhile back, see here for some of the issues today..

Valleywag sees Google's reasoning a bit differently

So, why would Google pay such a high multiple, about 10 times revenues, for the startup? Probably, for the same reason it has developed Google Analytics: it is another way for Google to tie in independent online publishers. Feedburner provides an array of services to sites, such as email newsletter publishing, and the integration of external news and photos. It is more valuable as a publishing service than an ad broker.

This makes more sense to me....irritating readers by pushing anwanted Ads on them has not shown iitself to be a viable strategy online so far (remeber popups....)

Now we use Feedburner (see right column by Feed Me Seymour), and I am saddened by all this....what I want is to serve our content cleanly to our readers, without other people putting their 2p worth of sponsors messages into it!

Prize for the first person to find us a "clean" Feedburner lookalike in that case

And of course whatever one in the GYM club has, the others want one too....Microsoft bought Acquantive for a cool $6bn.

I've added this on after reflecting on Sam's comment and my reply in the comments below. There are really 2 questions here:

1. Will ads be served via RSS distribution medium term?

2. If Google wants to get into rss distribution, should they buy Feedburner - for $100m - now when the answer to (1) is unclear

Firstly, will ads be served via rss - undoubtedly the distributors want to do this, but it will stand or fall on the user experience. In essence the history of the 'net (and most media) to date is that people have tended to avoid unwanted and intrusive ads. Irritating the reader is not an option medium term - its worth always bearing in mind that without the reader, the Ad is useless.

Secondly, should Google buy these guys for $100m? They have 3 other options, i.e. (i) "Do it Yourself", (ii) Buy someone else for less and strap them into the Google Machine, and (iii) buy Feedburner for less.

Technically it's probably an order of magnitude of cost less to build such a system. and Google's market power should (one would think) be enough to drive them into the market fairly quickly - so why not Do it Yourself, or just buy someone small who has already done this?

But for Google, $100m is spare change in the scheme of things, so they are not the company most likely to look at the price's implied business case too closely.

The real issue here is how sustainable is the Feedburner model...and that is the $100m+ question

I attended the Chinwag event on Widgetisation last night, very interesting it was too, and for a number of reasons.

The format was firstly some brief talks, and then interesting questions and comments, from a good cross section of speakers:

- Mark Taylor - Head of Content, Eircom

- George Berkowski - Head of Internet Strategy, BT Retail

- Fergus Burns - CEO & Founder, nooked

- Jonathan Gabbai - Solutions Manager, eBay

- Kaj Häggman - Business Development Manager & Inventor, WidSets (WidSets was born out of the Nokia Emerging Business Unit)

- Chair: Steve Bowbrick

The "Entropyneurs" bit comes from Steve's Intro where he noted that creative destruction was the interaction of the forces of entropy and enthalpy and the entrepreneurs on the panel tonight were on the destructive end (hence Entropyneurs - geddit ? .

I took some notes, will transcribe later (later note...naaah, two excellent writeups already here and here) but the really interesting things happened after the main sessions, during the Q&A and the apres-speeches - but there was one very interesting point raised, which was that a widget has an optimal (small) size and probably cannot be too big or it in turn will be widgetised. (I also think there is a minimum size or else its nothing but a popup 2.0)

There were three other main things that interested me about the whole evening:

Firstly, the speakers at one point were asked to define a widget - there were 5 different definitions, and the floor came up with a whole lot more. As a public service, here is Wikipedia:

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake.

It is interesting however that there is such disagreement.

One also assumes the word "mobile" replaces "web" for mobile widgets? (Wikipedia has no section on mobile widgets, which probably says a lot in itself - will add some of the notes from mobile monday's wiget event later on)

(Postscript - Tim Ellis posted a link on mobile monday group to this widget industry map)

Secondly, there are apparently 25+ different widget platforms, none of which really inter-operate, and thats not counting mobile platform differences. This is not exactly a recipe for mass adoption and scaling (more on this later)

Thirdly, no one really had a clue about how the commercial models may work...the standard advertising / data capture / value sharing models were all advanced, but (in my humble opinion) pretty half heartedly.

From that point of view, widgets are still by and large entropic, as they destroy things before they allow new value to be created. In fact, at one point one of the speakers proposed "Symbiotic" and "Parasitic" as ways of classifying different widgets.

I happened to be standing next to a chap and started bandying some comments with him, he turned out to be Stowe Boyd - a blogger of some renown . its always good to put faces to the blogs, and I asked him his views re widgets. Stowe noted that:

- firstly, that widgets were probably a very temporary part of the Web evolution, rather than an objective in themselves.

- secondly, that scaling was going to be very troublesome...one widget is one thing, every single company trying to fling widgets around embedding on each other was another.

I'd agree with this. Stowe also felt there was too much attention on commercial models and that user experience will drive widget adoption. I'd agree sycophantically re users, but we disagreed re how many widgets can dance on a website...my view is that a "useful" website can't take too many widgets and remain functional - though the idea of a "wigdet carrier" website is fascinating.

In my defence I cite the following witnesses

(i) Jakob Nielsen, arguing that Web 2 sites are being peppered with personalisation tools and were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

(ii) Vodafone's Steve Devo, who eerily echoed my concern in a post on mobile monday group today when he noted that:

Then this leads me to a worry about the UE and IA of widgets. Supposing I have a lot of really good widgets, what's the best way to organise them on screen, so that i
can find/use them easily, and not forget about those residing in the corners as it were.
[out of sight, out of mind]
Perhaps a tag cloud might work with colour and size used to reflect the popularity or
pertinence of the widget ?

Piers Jones comes to a fairly similar set of thoughts too...

As always a great evening, ably operated behind the scenes by Deirdre "She Who Must Be Obeyed" Molloy, who also has a very useful blog here

In theory one is supposed to blend in with ones clients, to an extent anyway. It was so easy in Web 1.0...polo shirt, blazer and chinos...you knew where you were

But now......

Yesterday is a case in point...morning meeting - financial institution in City of London - pinstripe suit, matching tie and handkerchief de rigeur. Afternoon with New Media Co in Soho, T shirts (with suitable ironic icon), jeans and designer stubble are de rigeur.

As you can see, this is a key strategic question to address!!!