Search Sense

I was using Facebook this morning to look at the new Facebook chat function and I started to think about data capture and the position of power that Facebook has attained. There is an underlying commercial exchange that occurs when we opt in as nodes in a network such as Facebook - in exchange for our position as a node we hand over personal data that can then be traded as a commodity by Facebook (Beacon).

I dont know if I like that, so I started to look for the ‘answer’. I came across an excellent post by Christoper Carfi on his blog The Social Customer Manifesto. He quoted his friend who had come out with a rather nice statement:

“Networks don’t have people. People have networks” - Demian Entrekin

These 7 words encapsulate how Carfi feels that the industry will evolve.

I think this is shaped and ratified by the concepts of web 3.0 and VRM. When I say Web3.0 I refer to the description put forward by Dave McClure as “the condition which exists when someone is always ‘logged in’ on the web, and can move from site to site without ever having to re-enter a username/password.”

This is a big step from web2.0 and is the most succinct description I have read to date.

If this is combined with VRM (Vendor Relationship Managment) where individuals choose what data they allow social networks to ingest then this may well result in a power shift. Instead of individuals having to enter relationships defined and controlled (sometimes from both sides) within each network controller’s silo, we can now become the point of integration. We reclaim personally controlled approaches to relationships, including the all important privacy variables. Sounds odd but is very simple when articulated by Carfi:

“Having my information (social network connections, preferences, purchase history, etc.) stored in someone else’s silo makes no sense. Having my information stored in (literally) dozens of silos makes even less sense. (Yes, dozens. Think about it. Your information is in Facebook, and LinkedIn, and innumerable CRM systems like Salesforce — one for each vendor you deal with — and in Visa’s systems, and in…you get the point.) The right point of integration is around the individual. Each of us is at the centre of our own universe!”

Here is a slick visualisation:

At the centre of our social universe (yes I am aware the image above is technically a solar system) we reposition ourselves as the gatekeepers of our data. We begin to reduce the power disparity and minimise the in your face commericialism that threatens to taint social media (until the next evil marketing scam….).

In theory this great, but it does come with some big buts (which I like):

- we can always just not use a site if we dont like its terms

- for this to work then social sites need to develop more efficient ways to monetize their offerings (if they dont have data collaterol and display isnt bringing in the bucks) - are the days of philanthropic networking sites behind us?

- does anyone care that people sell data other than when their mates find out what xmas gift they plan to buy them?

We’ve been talking a lot about the increasing importance of people to search, both directly through networks of people actively recommending & exchanging sites, and indirectly through search engines’ efforts to ape human wants.

Obviously, the same social thing has been happening with news via sites like Digg, del.icio.us and so-on, but it’s interesting to see it happening with news prediction, which is a new one on me.

Yahoo’s applied to patent a way to index and retrieve information alongside a related date. Searching for ’space’ events might produce a list of future events by year.

An example they give for 2034 would return:

A human base on the moon in operation

A couple of things occur to me about the usefulness of the approach when it comes to forecasting near-future events. It’s fine to have 100 results for 2034, but there might be 100,000,000 results for 2014. How does that help the user?

Also, the two examples above were sound predictions in 2005. By 2030 they may be laughable - Voyager 2 might in fact have been eaten by a huge alien that takes up residence on the moon. Fear him, puny humans.

The results need to be nimble enough to respond quickly when reality fails to follow the amassed weight of earlier expectations.

Which makes me wonder if a better way to forecast near-term events is just to let people do it based on their own knowledge, prejudices and gut feeling, as Hubdub attempts. You can bet ‘play money’ on the outcome of news stories, and the most successful news-guessers are ranked accordingly.

If early promise translates to later success, expect to see socially-generated news predictions creating or informing news stories. A combination, perhaps, of the unnamed “analysts” or “commentators” beloved of the journalist, with the way that journos already use Facebook and other social networks.

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IMAGE by Flickr user emdot, republished under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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I’m loving writing our news feed, for the simple reason that we now have the time to actually read about stuff that’s going on in and around journalism and marketing, and begin to make some sense out of the madness amid which we find ourselves.

Anyway, seen this in the Guardian. There’s another glimpse of the NUJ and where its thinking is at, and some relevance to us and what we’re doing.

Two interesting quotes:

“I don’t think most web users or Orange customers, for that matter, really want to get their news from Orange. They want established news brands.”

She may be right, and this is certainly one of the biggest challenges to overcome if we want the content we produce here to be successful…

“The news industry might not want to stoop to the lows of Hot or Not, but perhaps a little flexibility and creativity when it comes to new formats might just come up with some equally compelling - and underpin all that expensive journalism.”

…and this is our biggest opportunity.

Our What is Social Media?: now available in Chinese thanks to three strangers who met via a social network and went on to create an eBook publishing platform.

In September last year Jia Liu, an MA student of marketing in Boston put out a call on an incredible communtiy site Yeeyan.com for people to collaborate on a project to translate the eBook into Chinese. Zhifeng Sun from Shanghai and Xinyu Mao from Qingdao answered and over about a month they created a Chinese version of the What is Social Media?, complete with illustrations of Chinese blogs and social networks where it was appropriate.

So far there have been 2,000 downloads and following the project the three have created an eBook publishing venture/platform called Innobook and have published five freely available eBooks, by authors including Seth Godin and Richard Adler.

The translation and adaption of the eBook is possible for anyone in any language without permission from Spannerworks because we released it under a Creative Commons licence.

Everyone on the team that worked on the eBook are delighted to see it spread even further. It’s also added extra impetus to our work on its sequel - watch this space…

Finding out if pages on your site have been tagged on del.icio.us provides an excellent metric for measuring how useful your site is to your users. With the assumption being if they are tagging it, they are loving it!

You can check if a webpage has been tagged in delicious by visiting del.icio.us/url and typing in the webpage you want to check. The results show which pages have been tagged, by which users and using what tags. A RSS feed is also provided so that you can get notifications of when a particular page is tagged.

This information is great as it allows you to understand which pages are being useful to your website’s audience, but it’s only possible to manually check whether individual pages have been tagged. Del.icio.us provides no way to automatically check every page on a website.

Using Yahoo Pipes, however, we have created a tool that can check an entire site for del.iou.us tags, and provide an RSS feed to alert when new pages are tagged.

The pipe can be found here. Due to some of the limitations of yahoo pipes it will only work on sites that have fewer than 1,000 tags. For example it won’t work on bbc.co.uk.

We hope you find the tool useful - if you have any questions on how it works please send us an email or leave a comment below.