ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Yes I’ve bitched about Technorati, but as with most customer complaints it’s because I care, I want them to do better. Kind of like the report card I used to get at school “karl could do much better if he just applied himself”, I feel the same way about Technorati. After writing my article about Technorati I started coming across others in similar veins, Read/WriteWeb’s was particularly insightful and poignant. Now some people think it’s over and google has won, but I don’t believe the market is that small, and I think there are enough bloggers out there that want and need a service like Technorati, so I thought it appropriate to try and start a meme that goes beyond the usual minutae of 7 random things about you, and focused on what Technorati could do right, and what would you pay for.

A couple of people have raised the $20+ per year pro-account model that Flickr uses, so what would you like to see in a Technorati Pro-Account?

Here are mine:

• Merging domain names of claimed blogs, I’m sick of having two scores for experiencecurve.com and blog.experiencecurve.com and i’m sure any wordpress and typepad folks would appreciate that one
• A more meaningful multi-metric “authority” measure, who cares how many linked in the last 6 months, all that measures is link baiting
• Real blog categorization and vertical blog scoreboards, Boing Boing is not in the same ball park as TechCrunch, or Web-Strategist, or Marketing Profs Daily fix, so lets move on from the top 10K
• If I have a pro account my blog should get priority indexing
• Track comments as well as trackbacks
• Take the lead in establishing engagement metrics
• Help people build “top ten blog” lists save everyone reinventing it all the time

Those are my suggestions, so if you had a Pro-Technorati account what features would you like to see? If you do respond to this post use the tag “save-technorati”. So i’ll just tag a few instigators and see if this has any legs, how about it David Armano, Joseph Jaffe, Robert Scoble, Hugh MacLeod, Greg Verdino, Danial Rivong, Rohit Bhargava, Mack Collier.

Hey you don’t have to agree either, if you think it’s over for Technorati I’d be interested in that perspective as well, was it a bubble popping or a company that can do better.

UPDATE:

• Here’s Kris Hoet’s list on his blog ‘Cross The Breeze

Whatever you want it to be.

Both Jeremiah and Dave Winer have proposed that Facebook could potentially become the universal ID system on the web, as opposed to the open source OpenID system, which is being adopted very slowly. When I just came across this new feature on twitter that enabled me to search my gmail inbox for contacts that might be twittering, and consequently found 130+ people, I thought maybe Gmail could become the universal ID. The good thing about Gmail contacts is they are automatically generated based on who you email, which is great for someone like me who is pretty bad at maintaining lists of anything, including contacts. I was also thinking that Spock.com might become quite a widely used system as well, especially as people have to sign up for an account to edit their identity there.

Courtesy of Laughing Squid

A week or so ago there were some announcements that Technorati CEO Dave Sifry had resigned and they had laid off about 8 people. I think I mentioned at that time that I would want to comment more on this later, and that’s because i’m pissed off that Technorati, a service that I am a big fan of, has not been able to capitalize on it’s early success. Maybe disappointed is a better way to put it but we’ve all had those interactions with startups where you thought you saw great potential, signed up and tried to participate in it’s success only to get let down by the decisions the company makes… Dodgeball anyone?

IMHO Technorati is a very interesting example/case study of the phenomenon known as Crossing the Chasm, which is you create a product that appeals to early adopters (because you need them to get it going), but you then fail to move the product beyond the early adopters into the mass market. In this case technorati appealed to bloggers (or to bloggers vanity if you like), but they never figure out how to make your product now appeal to the mass market.

Now it seems that Technorati made the decision to actually try and cross the chasm to the mass market though by moving away from blogs and starting to track popular videos, popular posts, and what was happening now. In doing so they managed to become less relevant to their core audience of early adopters, and providing a sort of watered down, less dynamic version of reddit or digg.

Now the interesting thing about Technorati of course is that it didn’t necessarily need to cross the chasm at all, and could have built a very successful product and service that primarily served the blogging community. Technorati could have easily taken the lead in blog metrics, blog measurement, and analyzing the blogosphere, things that the community were crying out for. There was such a need for blog measurement people like ToddAnd with the Ad Age power 150, Mack Collier and Peter Kim all created their own “metrics” to measure blogs in particular verticals, a concept that Technorati could have totally owned.

It appears to me that Technorati ended up losing it’s way in an effort to become more popular itself, oh the irony. Of course they had investors pouring money into the business so I imagine the pressure to turn a profit was inordinate and led to adding more populist features. I think there are a lot of Web2.0/social media companies that are going have similar dilemmas, moving from this focus on early adopters to the mass market.

On a related note check out Read/WriteWeb’s article on rethinking crossing the chasm

and my other post Geeks Are Not The Mass Market

UPDATE: Another brilliant article from Read/WriteWeb “can the good guys really finish first, all I can say is…What he said, i’d pay for a pro-technocrati account. Technorati should emulate Fickr and charge the early adopters for what they love and let that fund attracting the mass market.

Forrester Research have just added another strong player to their social media practice with the hiring of notable web strategist blogger Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah announced this today on twitter and followed up with a blog post. This is a great example of how Forrester is really embracing the power of blogging and bloggers, and knowing the research biz a little I think it’s quite an achievement for Jeremiah to enter Forrester as a Senior Analyst.

Research companies like Jupiter and Forrester have been put in a bit of a tough position with the rise of blogs and social media because it undermines one of their main value propositions, that is access to analysts. Often when you buy research your are buying access to analysts which means companies like to manage very tightly analysts communication. With the rise of blogging and the transparency that comes with that the ivory tower that analysts had been kept in was challenged.

Forrester it seems has really allowed it’s analysts to take to blogging now it’s analysts have got quite a reputation of their own like Charline Li and Peter Kim. Now building on that philosophy they have actually started hiring bloggers into their analyst ranks, they are if you like hiring the digital natives.

When it comes to user generated content in social networks, video sites, blogs, wiki’s podcasts etc. I have often made the comment that motivation is probably the most important, and least understood aspect of the whole social media phenomenon. Often sites roll out features to try and keep up with the 2.0 Joneses without looking at their entire eco-system and understanding why people will be motivated to contribute or not. Wether it’s tagging on flickr, or adding bookmarks to delicious, or writing reviews on yelp the users are doing it because they get a benefit, and the companies get a huge benefit as well, in the form of free intellectual capital. On a side note that hidden intellectual capital is probably one of the most undervalued assets in the web2.0 world, which is again why “audience” doesn’t matter as much as the relatively small number of creators, the 1 percenters.

Anyway, McKinsey the renowned strategy consultancy recently posted an article called “How companies can make the most of user-generated content” (free registration) and i’m extremely pleased to see that they have also discovered that motivation is the secret sauce of User Generated Content.

Related:

• Seven Building Blocks Of The Social Web
• Attract and Motivate through Customer Experience
• Tweaking the Music Business Model So People Get Paid
• Motivation Behind The Peer Production phenomenon

The term Lifestreaming has been popping up a hell of a lot, and last week for me it seemed to come to a crescendo with Steve Rubel twittering about it pointing to a dedicated blog on the topic, to David Armano’s recent post about it.

The idea behind lifestreaming is fairly simple, it’s really a way of pulling together all the desperate things we publish online into one site. For anyone that is actively publishing online it’s likely they have lots of different sites they use for different types of media (or social media), like delicious for bookmarks, flickr for photos, twitter for short text snippets, youtube for video, various blogs for blog etc. Some people use Tumblr, others use Facebook, and I myself use Jaiku (as you can see from the “karl aggregated” badge on the side there, and for a lot of Nokia phones you have Lifeblog.

Which gets me in a round about way to my topic, The Other Side Of Lifestreaming, which is the publishing and distribution of my media. You see Lifestreaming does a good job of aggregating and pulling together my media from a lot of different places, but there are very few services out there that actually help me publish the way I want. For instance right now when I upload a photograph I want it to go to flickr, zooomr, and potentially to one or more blogs. Not only that i’d like an aggregate view of how that media has been consumed, and where it was consumed. Same thing for posts, video, text messages. Right now I want my short text messages to go to twitter, jaiku, and pownce. So for me aggregation is not the problem, but distribution.

This problem is really well demonstrated, and solved in the context of video by Tubemogul which provides a one stop shop for video publishing. Not only does it distribute your one video to 10+ services, it also pulls together all your statistics in one place. For me this is almost the killer app, it just needs to do the same thing for pictures, video, text, blog posts, and any other social detritus that I can fire off into the ether

UPDATE: Perez Hilton’s site is not following up on this story at all which in all likelyhood means it’s not true. Boy, if you can’t trust a gossip blogger who can you trust!

Just heard via twitter that Castro is dead, not only that but Perez Hilton, famed hollywood gossip blogger broke the story. This may be a seminal moment in blogging/social media history.

Thanks Fimoculous

I read a great article in the SF Bay Guardian written by Annalee Newitz who blogs at techsploitation.com (awesome name). Anyway, the article is called And the real anonymous trolls online are . . . . In this article she skewers the very un-anonymous troll Andrew Keen, who’s been crying about how the internets is undermining his word view of authority and modernity (maybe he should check out Bioshock). Anyway, this is a rather round about way to talk about a tool called wikiscanner which basically looks up the ip address of any anonymous edits on wikipedia and then looks up what organization owns that ip address. The result, lots of egg on government and corporation faces. With Pepsi editing some of the negative health effects of diet pepsi, to exxon adjusting the size of past oil spills, or wal-mart changing facts about their wages. Some of these edits actually reveal some stewardship of course like Pixar editing the Shrek 4 entry to reflect that it was a Dreamworks Animation and not Pixar.

All of these gems were taken from the Wired reddit list of most salacious wikipedia anonymous edits

If you’re a company that doesn’t have a wikipedia policy get one now.

Relate see my article on uncommon uses for the wiki

When I did my MBA I specialized in “Design Management”, this is sometimes a fact I leave off in casual conversation because I get the inevitable question, “design management, what does that mean?” Well I often mumble something about design being a strategic resource etc. but I’ve never really developed a good explanation. The word design itself is an extremely broad term that can mean a multitude of things. I was just thinking about this today as I walked past the San Francisco Design Center… Guess what they do there? That’s right they sell furniture.

Anyway, a Stanford student put together this fun little video to explain a bit about design, I particularly liked his point about bad design is easy to point out.

For more on bad design you should check out “this is broken“, where Mark Hurst collects all kinds of images of bad design. it’s like Engrish for the design world.

Tip of the hat to David Armano at Logic+Emotion