Joho the Blog
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May 16, 2006
"Conferences suck..." is Jeff's opening slide at his opening keynote at Syndicate. He's going to let us talk about what we want to talk about. But for this we have to figure out what we mean by "syndication." He gives us three choices. Syndication is about: 1. Media; 2. Media; 3. 3. Technology. We choose money and syndication as our topic. Jeff kicks it off. RSS is a great way of distributing stuff, he says. To monetize RSS, we need metrics: How many views, how many users, etc. Bittorrent has put a wrapper on torrents so they can be sold. Can we put a similar wrapper on feeds, Jeff asks. He also talks about an open source ad marketplace for blogs that he wrote about in AdAge last week. Advertisers want to advertise through blogs. For this we need metrics and a marketplace. Next he wonders whether there's a place for paid, subscription-based feeds. Finally, he raises the issue of DRM. Person: People steal my feed. they put it on their sites. So I put ads in my feed. Person: If you have an open source ad marketplace and open source metadata, then how about open source algorithms for filtering what we get? BlogPulse: What kind of data about bloggers do you need? Content? Keywords? Traffic? etc. Eric Norlin: Marketers don't know what they want because their model is that they capture something about the users and then blast something to them when they don't want it. Jeff: We could look at who initiates conversations. The demographics of the authors matter... Doc: You can't measure everything that matters. Me: The static maps of links that establish "authority" miss the flow of ideas and conversation that may start on low-ranked sites, flow across, up and back. The static maps overemphasize that type of authority. Jeff: Flickr's "interestingness" works without dealing with popularity (because the nudies would always be the most popular). Instead Flickr looks at the social relationships — especially when people look at photos outside of their social group. Not the wisdom of the crowd but the taste of the crowd. Scott Abel: We should be selective about what we syndicate. I want to make people come to my site where the ads are. I'll syndicate some little things. Most people in the room provide full text. The guy from USA Today only provides headlines. People in the audience don't like this. USA Today is looking at how to provide full text with ads. Jeff: We want to be able to subscribe to a tag within a blog. jeff talks about Edgeio which lets you tag an item for sale, or a job posting, etc., so you can have a decentralized marketplace. Likewise, we should be able to find restaurant reviews by looking for items tagged "restaurant," "mexico" and "nyc." [How structured does this metadata need to be? Microformats? Semantic Web?] Person: More metadata on feeds? Person: Is there info about how many people read feeds only in their aggregator. Feedburner1: There's no material difference in clickthroughs for full and partial feeds. [Surprising!] Feedburner2: We provide data on subscribers, views, clicks and a measure of reads. Jeff: I wish my aggregator would tell me which ones I'm not reading. Also, I'd like temporary feeds: A World Cup feed that dies. Jeff: I use tags for internal navigation. Others use them to indicate for others what a post is about. I want both. And then I'll be over-tagged like I'm over-bookmarked. Person: Technorati tags suck. They don't show up. Dave Sifry (technorati): Sorry! We're not perfect. I'm sorry we missed your tags. Talk with me later... Person: Why are the same blogs featured on Technorati all the time? Sifry: If you claim your blog and put in your photo, you should be featured...And about tag spam: Spam only becomes a problem when it has no accountability. One person's Spam is another person's dinner. The key question is whether it's accountable. [No, the question is whether it shows up when I don't want to see it.] Jeff: How about the machine-generated spam blogs? Sifry: That's solvable. We'll talk... Person: There's not enough metadata. Dave Winer doesn't even put titles on his posts, so why do you think people will put tags on their posts? Person: Technorati doesn't fit in with Delicious, etc... Me: We need an open source tag namespace innstead of having to use the Technorati url... Sifry: You are wrong, sir! You can use any namespace you want. [Yay!] [That is: Instead of <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/sampletag" rel="tag"> sampletag</a> You can use whatever url you want, e.g., <a href="http://www.somewhere.com/sampletag" rel="tag"> sampletag</a>] Person: Technorati didn't pick up any of my tags... Sifry: I'll be right there... [Tags: syndicate jeff_jarvis tags technorati] Posted
by D. Weinberger at May 16, 2006 09:40 AM
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Comments
I'm not at the conference so I was little confused by the title of the conference topic, syndication, in your post and what is exactly meant by that word. The conference site sounds like it's referring to how to get a message out to as many people as possible in the best way possible (i.e. the experience of communications). Instead it sounds like a bunch of people talking more about ads than the best way to communicate and share information. Again I'm not there, so maybe it was different than the highlights you're providing.
If it isn't though, and that's what a lot of people are talking about, I have to laugh. I mean this is simple really. People are coming for your content, not your ads. If all you have is ads everywhere and very little content, don't expect people to stick around much.
"People steal my feeds"? Is he saying it's a bad thing that you're getting more awareness of yourself out there and getting people interested in what you have to say??? I don't get it. Yet similiar people and companies seem more than willing to pay someone else to advertise on another site.
I honestly believe the trick is to make your content the ad itself which in turn makes ads disappear. For example, if I'm talking about a book I just read, I'd provide a link to Amazon.com with my Associate ID. Thus if people are interested in what I have to say, it can actually help sustain my site and online endeavors. Even more so, you'll want your content on as many sites as possible because the more eyeballs reading your content, the more chance someone will purchase the book using your Amazon Associate ID link.
Jeff's comments seem to be the most interesting so far, especially his example of restaurant reviews. Back during the Katrina disaster I wished people had gotten together and cooperated on a similar approach to tagging people and events during the crisis.
When Hurrican Rita was heading in, I even suggested to Technorati that they might suggest some tags to people ahead of time to help share information better. The response I got was "tagging is a bottom-up activity and not top-down". This made me sick considering that Technorati is more than happy to suggest things like "new years resolution" tags and crap like that but not wanting to suggest tags that could actually save peoples lives. Go figure.
In Technorati's defense though, I don't even use tags on my site and yet lots of my content shows up on their site. For example, if I say "Web 2.0" in a journal entry, it will show up in their service without me having to do anything. Therefore, not sure why people are saying they can't get their content on Technorati when I'm not even trying and it gets on it.
Posted by: Nollind Whachell | May 16, 2006 11:14 AM
Nollind, great suggestion to Technorati about tags in a crisis. I'm disappointed they didn't take you up on it.
"Syndication" is what RSS looks like from the commercial content provider's point of view. Advertising keeps coming up because syndication breaks their existing business model of showing ads on their site. If we read in our aggregators, how do they make money? Hence, advertising keeps coming up.
Posted by: David Weinberger | May 16, 2006 12:11 PM
Hm, I'm amazed that someone at Technorati was so insensitive to you, Nollind. It's a great idea to suggest tags, and in the future, I think you'll see more of it...
Dave
Posted by: David Sifry | May 16, 2006 01:52 PM
"If we read in our aggregators, how do they make money? Hence, advertising keeps coming up."
Ah ok, I get what you mean. Again if your content is the actually advertisement though (i.e. talking in a human voice about something), then no worries, as the content can be anywhere (which is the goal of Web 2.0 right? Information everywhere?). Or did they recently reword that to "Web 2.0: Ads Everywhere" now? :)
"Hm, I'm amazed that someone at Technorati was so insensitive to you, Nollind."
Dave, I don't think they were being insensitive. It just seemed like a typical corporate response which I wouldn't have expected from Technorati. If you want you can look at my journal entry on it back on Sept 21, 2005 entitled Recovery 1.5 vs Hurricane Rita. My apologies for my passionate and vehement response in the entry but I was just quite upset that a company who has the potential to easily do something like this (and possible help many people in the process) wouldn't.
Doh, just noticed my two followup updates in that entry are in reverse order for some reason as well.
Posted by: Nollind Whachell | May 17, 2006 05:10 PM