Web’s Best Blog

If you’re looking for hard core facts, then it’s not always best to follow the crowd. But if you want to gage sentiment, then crowd behavior should give you a good idea of how the masses feel. It’s not an exact science, but it’s emerging rapidly as a very important discipline. Even the venerable CNN is looking for more user-generated content. It makes complete sense. When they’re reporting on an event like war, footable from locals who are actually witnessing the fighting could make great additions to the overall archive.

Ultimately, the crowds should make any news story better by their participation. The static way of reporting on events has its’ advantages to be sure, but not from a standpoint of timeliness. If users are part of the “news data stream” and they’re adding input to it as it evolves, then you can’t help but think that in a sense news is evolving on the internet. Is it getting better? It’s tough to judge, but I’d have to insist it’s getting a lot more comprehensive.

The web, in general, has added so much to the corpus of human knowledge, that it’s not surprising that a great number of industries have been completely altered by its’ emergence. But it seems more likely every day, that the old order way of doing business is in trouble if the business owners don’t adapt to a whole new way of doing business.

The emphasis now is on setting up websites where a ton of user-generated content is made. This can be a great thing, for a number of reasons, but with user generated content comes certain responsibilities. When people are allowed to generate their own HTML, potential pitfalls include:

1) Users self-promoting – the normal obnoxious self-promotions – you generally shouldn’t have to do much with this type of post, it should fall on its’ own weight
2) People doing illegal things – these will need to be dealt with much quicker and harsher, because they threaten the whole system
3) Copyright violations – there’s no good reason to encourage copyright violations – although many places do because it’s the most popular content.

All of these situations, and others will arise with a “Web 2.0″ website where users are generating much of the content. So any emphasis on building the community also involves building tools which can detect and punish the “bad users”, or at least the people who can topple the entire system. It’s important to set a policy early on and to stay on top of it.

99% of your visitors will never do anything wrong, and for that reason, you don’t want to offend them with policies designed to affect a very small portion of the website population. Keeping a powerful toolset in the hands of a group of SuperUsers who care most about the community just might be the best policy.

I’ve been running content websites for awhile, and they’re tough to promote. People read content, sure, but it doesn’t always make them stick around to do more. Take a look around at the strategy of every company now on the web and it’s to try and engage users. The huge success of sites like MySpace are the main reason for this. They taught everyone that the only way to get huge is to get people to join your website virally.

It’s easier said than done. It’s common advice to “go viral”, but it’s not always clear how to do it. But that’s the Holy Grail of web marketing. People coming in from word of mouth advertising that you don’t pay a penny for is the greatest thing of all. And getting them to become frequent users and contributors is the challenge. If you can, your battle is won.

My goal in the coming months is to experiment with usability as much as I can. I have a few expensive books I bought about the subject that I plan on looking at. I’m sure the key is to make a website easy to use, but that’s not always clear how to do. Either way, through constant experimentation I plan on finding out what people really like.

I realized that I’m always talking about Web 2.0 in this blog, so it’s high time I got in the game. That’s why I founded my newest website today. thumbd is the newest social website to hit the internet.

The premise is simple: it will be a news rating system, but with a twist. It will also be an Open Source project, so the code will be released to the public. I hope to be able to create a collaborative community effort from the start. I’m looking for any and all volunteers who would like to contribute to the project. Contributors will receive credit on the contributors page. This might not seem like much at the start, but it could be a very well-linked website in the final run.

Please stop by and take a look at the initial “alpha” version. It’s only had about 1 hour of total development time, so expect it to tighten up quickly. Anyone who would like to pitch in an become part of a winning team, hit me up at the email on thumbd.net.

The new Technorati is cool. I happened upon it this morning, and I was shocked to see I had made the main page. Not once but 5 times Then I realized the website looked completely different than it used to and that the stories on the main page were there as a part of personalization effort the old website had.

The information is well laid out and easy to navigate.

I’d have to say I like this design over the old one. What do you think of the new Technorati?

Myspace is having image problems. Now they’re getting worse. Myspace served up hacked ads to a million people. The folks ended up having spyware installed instead:

Using software that captures and analyzes Web traffic, La Pilla found that the installation program contacted a Russian-language Web server in Turkey that tracks how many times the program was installed, presumably because most of this adware is installed by third parties who get paid for each installation. The data there indicate that the adware was installed on 1.07 million computers, La Pilla said, adding that all seven of the Internet addresses contacted by the downloader Trojan appear to be inactive at this time.

Myspace keeps on running into troubles over their internal controls, or their lack thereof. Hackers are continously targeting high traffic websites, looking for a mass audience to infect.

One more reason to use Firefox is also what this story tell us.

Recent events at Netscape have made it look like the decision to turn the Netscape portal into a Digg-style clone have failed. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch made one of his more coherent posts today when he outlined the potential red flags concerning the new Netscape. At first I supported the new Netscape because of what I felt was a better user interface, but the way the Old Netscapers reacted to the change made me reconsider.

They’re still out there. They want to Bring back the old Netscape and they’ve even petitioned AOL VP Jason Calacanis to do it. So far, Netscape has turned a blind eye to the shrill complaints, but it’s gone on long enough now that it’s attracting negative attention even in the MSM. The SS Netscape is taking on water, and it looks like they can’t bail the water fast enough now to stop from drowning.

Calacanis has had a very successful career, but he seems to be handling the apparent woes by hiring Digg power users to edit the New Netscape page. To me this reads: “we aren’t getting enough news submissions and the ones we’re getting are spam”. But wooing away pimple-faced eggheads from Digg? It seems much more promotional in nature than a real attempt at upping the quality of “the News”. Most Digg users wouldn’t know a quality story if it jumped up and bit them in the ass.

Can the SS Netscape steer its’ way back to clear sailing? They’ll need to, all the while seemingly ignoring the “user-generated feedback” that they’re creating daily. Since so much of it is negative, you’d have to think they’ll have to take some of it into account at some point.

It was tough to miss this news. I saw it in my Feedburner account, and then saw it mentioned by Problogger and TechCrunch. Word travels fast in the blogosphere. The acquisition looks good for FeedBurner, who is really on a roll. They have a ton of great stats features for RSS feed management, and now they’re going a bit further into the whole realm of blog stats.

The whole realm of blog stats seems open. The new FeedBurner Stats offering actually sound fairly robust.

This looks like a good move out of an excellent company. I love their RSS tools, and I’m using them to monetize the RSS Feeds for additional income. They’re worth checking into, if you haven’t already today.

I think almost any idea can. People are desperate to invest in the next cool thing, and “Web 2.0″ is capturing their fancy. This opens up some serious website possibilities. Sure, maybe a bubble is forming. Because at the core of business is the dramatic need to earn money. Some of the business models being floated now for investment ideas appear to be written on the back of a business card. People are going for the capital, figuring they’ll “flesh in the details” later.

Well that means we need to get creative. The dumb money is dying to pay the “smart crowd”. Alright, how about:

• My sex history.com – you can enter the names of all of your lovers. The site will use a Yahoo Maps mashup to show geo-location information. You can actually see, by percentage, what portion of the world you slept with in an extremly Ajax-y interface
• Anything to do with the words “photo sharing” or “video sharing”. In other words, tell people you’re “the Next Youtube” and you might get serious interest
• “Smash Maps” – another geo-targeted mashup. Keep a detailed map of every place you’ve ever been hammered out of your gord in. (What is a gord anyway?)

I’m sure I can think of more. It’s only been about 15 seconds of creative time put in so far, but I think that might be common enough these days. I guess I should ask the question: “how will this make money?”. Advertisers, is the one word response. The only problem is, not all advertisers are stupid. If they don’t make money, neither will the website.

It might be time for a “Stupidest Web 2.0 idea to get funded” contest. There are more contestants all the time.

MySpace keeps on getting bigger. This should mean that everyday in the world, someone excitedly joins up to MySpace and becomes a member of the community. And we’re not talking about one person joining daily. Rather, there are tons of people joining every second of every day. But are all these people really there to take place in the community building aspects of Myspace?

I don’t think they all are. In fact, there’s a burgeoning industy of “fake Myspacers” joining each and every day, and now they’re even automating. Being popular is cool, and you can fake it, that’s even cooler. So what happens if you’re in serious search of popularity on MySpace? Well then you need to automate your popularity efforts. In the old days this might mean politicking door to door. Nowadays, you can use a solution like AutoAdder – who’s tagline is “More Friends than you can count”.

I’m not sure how legal this is, but it has my head spinning a bit. Imagine if you had 10 PCs running, adding friends all day. You’d get quite popular. Depending on your landing page, you just might end up making a lot of money.

I’m sure there are plenty of people operating in the cottage industry of making MySpace friends. I bet the percentage is even higher than we think.