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Archives for September 2006

Is Your Community Legal? Xanga Fined For Under Age Users

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If you run a community one of the tricky tightropes to walk is that of data protection and privacy. All to often communities fall foul of this, finding out their seemingly industry standard approach has dropped them in hot water, as Xanga found out.

Check out the story at MSNBC.com

Xanga.com, a rival to the popular MySpace.com, allegedly permitted creation of 1.7 million accounts by users who submitted birthdays indicating they were under 13.

It seems most pundits are focussing on the fact they do ask a persons age so ignorance is in no way a defence here.

“COPPA requires all commercial Web sites, including operators of social networking sites like Xanga, to give parents notice and obtain their consent before collecting personal information from kids they know are under 13. A million-dollar penalty should make that obligation crystal clear.”

I wonder had they not had the date of birth field (and bizarrely a separate “are you over 13?” tickbox) would they have gotten into this mess?

Obviously that particular community was a huge target to be made an example of, but if you do run a community of any scale it is worth checking you are not breaking any laws in your region. It is a lot more expensive to put right after the fact.

Is the Digg Community Its Own Worst Enemy?

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In all online communities there is a point, somewhere north of “critical mass” that marks a transition from benevolent community fluffiness to evil dictatorship in the eyes of a voiciferous minority of it’s top contributors. I think Digg may have reached that point if the rant, and subsequent uproar of it’s former top users leaving remarks are anything to judge by.

Get a load of this:

And for all of you that do nothing but bitch about your being PREVENTED from getting your stories dugg – here’s your chance! Now YOU can spend all the time, all the effort and get stabbed in the back by fellow Diggers (aptly named) and then tossed to the side by a Digg team that values toilet paper with more worth than the core users that feed this site it’s content every day.

Didn’t he do well? There’s a ton more like that, and it’s an absolute corker of a tantrum post.

Having made no small number of noisey exits myself, being a consumate community tantrum thrower, I can understand what this users going through. But having run a few communities aswell, I can also sympathize with the dillemas the Digg management are facing right now..

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Clay Shirkey’s A Group is its Own Worst Enemy which seem relevant at this time:

The problem of size

The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

Gaming and Policing

So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can’t be ignored, and it can’t be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that’s worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.

Users, ownership and rights

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

Sheesh, i could quote from that all day, it’s all relevant to scaling communties and Digg is scaling very very rapidly, and clearly experiencing some growing pains.

What Should Digg Do?

To a certain extent, you have to accept an amount of rotation of top users. And also except that often they don’t go quietly. But these things absolutely do blow over. Other users take over from the old, and cycle rinses and repeats.

A stagnant community can be pretty boring, so you can view the loss of members and an inevitalbe consequence of scale and handle any problems it causes as and when they occur.

Now im not saying top users dont deserve respect and consideration. Far from it in fact, if you disrespect and undervalue your top users you’ll have more noisey exits and administrative headaches than need be, and the whole group will suffer more. But there is a limit to how far you should go to appease the core groups wishes and whims.

In summary, I’d be in favor of acceptng a few casualties as par for the course, but also it seems (and i dont know enough to comment with authority here) that the Digg management are making the situation worse than it needs to be — the galvanizing effect of Jason Calacanisis Netscape shinanigans is being counteracted by a lack of respect for core Digg users.

Still, it’s easy to sit here and comment. Dont forget, Digg has half a million users, and it’s surely no easy task managing them, and you just cant always get it right.

Either way, it’s pretty interesting and educational to watch. Let’s hope Digg manages to work through the blips and come out on top.

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Audio: Monetizing Your Blog

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Paula B of the Writing Show has just published our third podcast together: Monetizing Your Blog. It’s completely unrehearsed, but Paula does a good job of getting me to cover a lot of ground in a short space of time so if you have some time to spare, get the mp3 here.

Some subjects covered include:

  • What options are available for making income from blogs and Web sites
  • Why affiliate schemes (cost per acquisition) have been slow to take off in the blogosphere
  • Where to place ads for best results
  • What some of the pros and cons of the various options are
  • Why people click on ads
  • What you can do to get higher-quality ads
  • Which strategy is best for most people
  • How readers feel about Web ads
  • Which sorts of visitors are likely to click on ads
  • How to evaluate blog topics for their financial potential
  • Why selling a blog is tricky
  • Whether it’s possible to make a living from your blog
  • What Performancing is planning in the way of an ad network for bloggers.

Thanks once more to Palula,it’s always a fun experience doing these shows!

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How to add MicroFormats And Why You Should

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Are you still writing your articles as simple plain text? There is a hidden trend going on which is not obvious by looking at a page but which allows your content to be spread in a much more qualified way then the good old plain text. Use microformats as hidden structure in your content.

What are microformats? Luckily we have a nice website for that. Microformats.org explain in in their Wiki: . Every Microformat is simple and an element of meaningful XHTML. Everybody should be able to handle these little creatures 🙂

Setting up a new site without a microformat concept might be a bad idea!

John Allsopp has published a nice article about The Big Picture on Microformats:

Few really dispute the potential of microformats, but all technologies, no matter their promise, live and die by their adoption. So, how are microformats faring a year or so after their coming-out party? Since microformats are markup, their impact is less obvious than, say, AJAX—whose dynamic visual effects are usually a bit of a giveaway.

He gives a qualified status overview about how microformats are developing and what they are used for. Like the Technorati tag search which checks and indexes web pages for links with the markup rel=”tag” (which you can add i.e. with Performancing for Firefox to your article) and more.

But he goes further. John recommends to use microformats because they will enable your content to travel to new sorts of aggregation services independently. You, the author, will not have to submit your data to the new sites. Instead the new services will come and fetch your data contained in the microformats like rel-tag, rel-license, XFN, hCalendar, hReview, hListing or hCard.

Let’s practise …

How to create that mysterious microformat?

One big question is always how the microformats should be created. As a first step there is who offer web forms to create the entries for you
.

hCard Creator, hCalendar Creator, and hReview Creator allow you to develop complex microformats – simply enter the necessary information into a web form, and then paste the output right into your source code.

Having an existing blog or CMS system means that you should do a search for a plug-in which will help you create the microformats you need. If you are doing reviews i.e. you should add reviews to your page in the hReview microformat. If you don’t find a plug-in then you still can create your own article form template for this (Textpattern speak) or insert the code directly into your editor form.

Example microformat hReview code created with the hReview tool from Microformats.org:

Server based statistics package from performancing.com (Javascript required)

Sep 4, 2006 by

Markus Merz

PMetrics from performancing.com

????? Performancing .com delivers a free and very powerful statistics package, a so called 'counter', with the name to monitor the traffic on your blog or website. The outstanding feature is that data is kept on the performancing.com servers 'forever' and that this feature is free of costs for you.

The installation requires write access to you page templates and that you can insert a small peace of Javascript code into the template.

And so on and so on ...

This
hReview brought to you by the
hReview Creator.

Note: I added a rel=”tag” microformat to the link inside the review. The review URL is linked to the original PMetrics start URL but it can of course link elsewhere i.e. your article page or homepage. As I understand it you can put any content you like into that description.

This will look like this (not sure what p.com makes of it :). I only had to add the abbreviation for the rating:

Server based statistics package from performancing.com (Javascript required)

Sep 4, 2006 by

Markus Merz

PMetrics from performancing.com

Very recommended Performancing .com delivers a free and very powerful statistics package, a so called ‘counter’, with the name to monitor the traffic on your blog or website. The outstanding feature is that data is kept on the performancing.com servers ‘forever’ and that this feature is free of costs for you.

The installation requires write access to you page templates and that you can insert a small peace of Javascript code into the template.

And so on and so on …

This
hReview brought to you by the
hReview Creator.

That markup is very easy to design with CSS and every service understanding this microformat hReview is now able to take that review and put it into a database in pieces and not only as a.chunk of plain text.

Working with a classical Blog/CMS it means to create an article template from this code structure where all contents will be variables introduced to you by a plug-in or through custom fields.

In Textpattern I would use custom fields and overwrite the default article form with a review form (or any other microformat template). The titles of the custom fields should mirror the relating multiple hWhatever content if you use more than only one hWhatever microformat.

If you are afraid that bad people rip your valuable content from your site then you can do the same as with RSS … simply put an excerpt into class=”description”and insert a “read more …” link.

Microformats – Interesting for you?

Technorati Tags: microformats, tagging, structure, promotion

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Search Engine Redundancy: The Final Countdown

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Until now, the process of consuming content was of a very primitive type – Search and consume. We searched for information using certain keywords and then converted it manually to knowledge. If we wanted to access the information at a later date, we simply printed it out. If we wanted to re-search it (pun unintended) we searched it again! There was no way of storing or retrieving this data for later usage.

Enter del.icio.us, one of the first social applications.

All of a sudden, you could bookmark pages you liked AND store them too! Searching for that page on Shark bites you saw two months ago simply transformed into searching through your list of bookmarks. Your bookmarks could now travel with you wherever you went!! The sharing feature meant that now your friend could easily send you that link to the direct downloads, bypassing all the popups and ads along the way. 😉

The process of consuming information now became three-tiered: Search, Store and Retrieve.

Somewhere between then and now, we instinctively developed a habit of consuming content, gaining knowledge, and stashing it away for further usage. A lot of Web purists call this approach as the River of News approach.

Drink hard, drink deep…

We live in a dynamic world that survives on a River of News.

The River of News concept, as described by Dave Winer, goes something like this:

Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It’s like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal.

… which is exactly how we parse our daily newspapers for news! If a story is interesting enough, it will be back again the next day. If it ain’t, down it goes…

The River of News concept assumes a relaxed outlook towards the consumption of content by any user. It relies on the fact that if an older item is to be revived, then it will be revived, no matter how or why*.

The only hitch to this concept is the duration of focus in an avergae human. Somehow, the concept of a limited attention span has seeped on to the Web. Conversations (a.k.a posts, articles, etc.) have a specific life span depending upon a variety of factors, ranging from authority to popularity. The previous post touched upon four of these factors that I personally belive to be important.

As the river of news concept washes the Webosphere, the content generated by users (erm, I mean, the knowledge shared by the netizens) becomes outdated as soon as the attention-span of the article ends. For some posts, the span is as short as 30 seconds, for others it might last for weeks.** The keep-alive time of the post is enriched by a variety of parameters, with the element of chance also playing a significant role, sometimes.

The Bottom-line: Find, not search

Traditional Search Engines search for content based upon classifications of keywords and various natively built algorithms. Earlier, when the internet was an array of ‘webmaster-maintained’ static displays, search engines had to be relevant. In the days to come, I foresee the River of News flooding the Blogosphere: Freshness of results will definitely be paramount, then.

The trade-off between freshness and relevancy is one of the factors that will see a good sound debate in the days to come. This, unless the Blogging trend tapers off suddenly instead of continuing to rise.***

One question I have purposefully (and successfully) avoided so far is this: Will we be able to match people to keywords?

A search engine will match content to your keywords. But there are three Shrikant Joshis and many Shrikants and many more Joshis who are regular bloggers. How do you differentiate them? Again, what happens when you are looking for a solution to a problem? Would search engines in the (near?) future also throw up results like:

“5 user(s) can solve your problem! Do you want to hire them?”

More importantly, if they did, would you believe them?

Footnotes:

*One of my reasons for posting this post so late (inspite of my previous assurances) was to check if there was any interest I could generate, and how it varied with time. However, I miscalculated one of the most important aspects. Subscriptions. Since I never had any audience to begin with, there was no way I could anticipate anything. That’s called counting your results before you have keywords. 🙂

** Wondering what category my posts fall into? Well, somewhere close to the 30 second limit.

***For more details read David Sifry of Technorati

Technorati Tags: Search Engines, Tags, River of News, Future

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The One Guaranteed Instant Cast Iron Indisputable Success Factor

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“If only I knew what that guy knows I would be an adsense millionaire.”
“With this ebook I will learn the secrets of SEO and will get to the first result of Google.”
“After this conference call my blog will be launched into the a-list.”

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it but people are suckered into this thinking every day. If you asked them to explain it logically they would probably admit it’s not guaranteed as such but this one piece of advise is all they need. 10 minutes with Matt Cutts and they will be a super-SEO.

Tara Hunt says it best …

What do the following books have in common?

Hint: they are all books that give easy answers to complex issues.

People love guaranteed, cast-iron “laws”, “secrets”, “unshakable advice”. Certainty makes people feel confident and secure, even when there is no certainty and everything is shades of grey. “Do this and definitely absolutely without question you will get what you want” always looks good in a sales pitch, funny how the actual product never works that way.

There are two things to understand here:

  1. It’s what people want – People love to be given promises of what they want given in absolutes or superlatives so these sorts of headlines work powerfully. Especially when combined with a list! (Sorry folks who don’t like lists, readers do and that is what matters, pffft). I guess peoples lives are so full of uncertainty that even when they know their chain is being yanked they play along. Check out how well “Great abs in a week” articles sell magazines.
  2. It’s rarely true – Sad but the more complex the subject the less certainty there is. When you are a toddler you get all sorts of absolute education. “Don’t touch the stove”, “Don’t eat the dogs food”, “Greens are good for you”. As you get older there seems to be less of it around, just a whole load of stuff to think about. The person giving you advice might be certain but that doesn’t mean you should be. One persons experience doesn’t always directly translate to work for you. Like the famous guy who makes millions out of adsense, he did that with a dating site and a lot of technical know-how for making it scale on his own. Launch a dating site today based exactly on his template and I am not so sure your millions will come quite as smoothly. We share our experience here on Performancing and all along we haven’t done anything different from what we tell you, but that isn’t to say if you followed what we did you would get identical results. You have to take on all the advice you are given, process it and make it work for you.

So what is the One Guaranteed Instant Cast Iron Indisputable Success Factor? “Doing it”.

People say to me “It’s all well and good ‘write killer headlines, linkbait, post great content’ but I am missing something fundamental, if only I knew the secret I am missing …” and I say “Go on, show me your linkbait, headlines, great content” and if by some chance they even have any of those things they are often half-hearted attempts at best, like they predict failure before trying so why bother. The “great content” I could usually find on any number of blogs or it is one or two good posts out of 100. This stuff is hard and it needs to be done consistently. Success for most people doesn’t fall from the sky, and it is even harder if your idea is unoriginal.  

Find out what it is you need to do, learn, experiment, practice then keep doing it until you can honestly say you have done everything you know you should be doing. That’s it. There are no secrets.

Obsessing Over Numbers

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Stats, numbers, high scores, weight lifting, golf handicap … the number doesn’t matter, it’s how well you improve.

I am hesitant to link to the post that inspired me to write this. Unfortunately the original thread is one of those name-calling-mud-slinging-blog-punch-ups that do nobody any good, least of all the readers. Inside the comments though there were one or two intelligent quotes, some sanity in a sea of bs.

The argument was about one party mentioning in passing their headline traffic figure and the other party calling them out on it. Party A obviously wanted to make an impression while basing the figure on a supportable stat taken from their (comprehensive) suite of measurement tools. And we all know how much stats packages can vary in their assessment. Fair enough right? Well the other guy decides he sees a flaw and uses other (dodgy) measures to point out what he considers … uh … an inaccuracy.

Lighten up guys! Web stat numbers matter when

  1. You are comparing your performance against your own performance
  2. You are attracting advertisers or considering advertising

They are not for competitors (regardless of if they consider you a competitor or not) to use as a club to beat you with and are not to be taken as gospel. There isn’t an IRS of web traffic, you do not need to be accurate down to the Nth visitor.

Concern with others traffic figures smacks of insecurity.

  • Where is your traffic relative to last month, last year?
  • What makes traffic increase, go down?
  • Is there anything that looks promising that we could do more of?
  • What aren’t we doing that might work?
  • How are we viewed outside of the echo-chamber?

Just like at the gym, it is your own performance you need to be concerned with, not the guy on the next rack who looks like Arnie.