The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the increasing attention crisis facing many of us as we work to find relevant and beneficial content from the many different sources that are challenging us for our time and energy. The gist? More content is being created in more places and "can't miss" content is increasing at the same rate, making many of us feel we are constantly in a state of missing things, forced to chew through the noise to find the best updates, but still falling short. I believe we are on the cusp of a massive change and opportunity on the Web today - one that will no doubt be debated, but one that I am seeing morph in front of us, as the Web evolves, and initial problems are considered solved, while new ones crop up.
The First Wave: Information and Access While it may initially have seemed the "winners" of this game would be those providing access to the Web, including ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, browser providers like Netscape, portals, such as Yahoo! The Second Wave: Social. Chris dixon's blog / Graphs. A graph consists of a set of nodes connected by edges. The original internet graph is the web itself, where webpages are nodes and links are edges. In social graphs, the nodes are people and the edges friendship. Edges are what mathematicians call relations. Two important properties that relations can either have or not have are symmetry (if A ~ B then B ~ A) and transitivity (if A ~ B and B ~ C then A ~ C).
Facebook’s social graph is symmetric (if I am friends with you then you are friends with me) but not transitive (I can be friends with you without being friends with your friend). You could say friendship is probabilistically transitive in the sense that I am more likely to like someone who is a friend’s friend then I am a user chosen at random. Twitter’s graph is probably best thought of as an interest graph. Graphs can be implicitly or explicitly created by users. Over the next few years we’ll see the rising importance of other types of graphs. Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders.
Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information. But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way. But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko.
Why the Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish. Tommy Swanson is the Social Media Specialist at KMA (A Pursuant Company), a full-service fundraising company. Swanson is in charge of SEO and social media for numerous nationally recognized non-profit organizations. He is also a serial online entrepreneur who has built and sold several large businesses since his early teens.
Type a query into Google and, nine times out of ten, you’ll find a result that does not seem right. It’s not a bug or a website getting a lucky break from the Google gods — it’s the result of savvy manipulation by a group of Internet hustlers known as search engine optimizers (SEOs). I know because I am one. For the last few years, I’ve been pushing websites to the top of search engine results — websites that don’t necessarily belong there in the eyes of Google. As of recently, Google’s algorithms are on the move. A Brief History In the early days, Google would scrape a webpage looking for keywords on the actual site to determine its ranking. A New Model Social Media. Serendipity is unexpected relevance « BuzzMachine. Serendipity is not randomness. It is unexpected relevance. I constantly hear the fear that serendipity is among the many things we’re supposedly set to lose as news moves out of newsrooms and off print to online. Serendipity, says The New York Times, is lost in the digital age.
Serendipity, it is said, is something we get from that story we happen upon as we flip pages, the story we never would have searched for but find only or best in print. A few days ago, a Guardian guy, inspired by Clay Shirky hacked together a serendipity generator: just a random story served up on a click. What is serendipity? Can that relevance be analyzed and served? Can an algorithm serve us serendipity?
MORE: See also Chris Anderson and Matthew Ingram on serendipity. Subscriptions are the New BLACK. (+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015. I'm on a redeye to NYC, supposed to be working on a presentation i'm giving in a few hours... but fuck it, i can't get this outta my head, so here we go. (note: extremely raw, uneven, long, 1st draft publish & shoot; will revise l8r) ASSERTION #1: The default startup business model from 2000-2009 was based on growth (aka acquisition) and CPM- or CPC-advertising Over the past 10 years, we have seen a massive shift in advertising from CPM to CPC-based advertising.
This basically started happening when the 2000-2001 dotcom implosion blew the market cap of Yahoo to smithereens, and display advertising went into the shitter. Altho CPM subsequently recovered, Google's IPO and the gradual emergence of CPC as a higher-quality advertising medium has been the dominant story of the first half of the last decade. Let me say that again with emphasis so you don't miss it. Google's ABSOLUTE FRIGGIN' SEARCH DOMINANCE has made CPC advertising the defacto monetization standard for the web. The Age Of Relevance. Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter. What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking? This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years.
I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content. The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it. Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload. The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time. "Serendipity" – en slags griseflaks - Newton. Engelskmennene har en god del festlige ord som ikke vi kan. Ett av dem er "serendipity", som betyr noe sånt som "tilfeldig griseflaks som fører til en oppdagelse".
Det aller morsomste er at temmelig mange store oppdagelser og oppfinnelser skyldes slike tilfeldigheter. Men for at merkelige sammentreff skal bli til nye oppfinnelser er det et par saker som er ganske viktige: 1 Noe nytt og nyttig må skje helt tilfeldig. 2 Noen i nærheten må være smarte nok til å skjønne hvor nyttig det egentlig er. Penicillin Bakterier er noen artige, encellede vesener som kan stelle i stand en hel del ubehageligheter inne i menneskekroppen, og før i tiden kunne de godt ta kverken på en før man fikk sukk for seg. Riktig mugg i rett skål Alexander drev og forsket på bakterier, som han dyrket i små skåler i laboratoriet sitt. En viktig tåre Men Alexander selv hadde nok ikke tenkt noe særlig over flekken i bakterieskåla hvis det ikke hadde vært for enda en tilfeldighet som skjedde seks år tidligere. Sikkerhetsglass. Building Better Social Graphs. I'll say right upfront that this may be a feature that many people don't need.
But I need it so I thought I'd post it anyway. As software becomes social, the creation of the social graph on each web service becomes a chore. I do not believe that you simply want to port your social graph from Facebook and Twitter into new web services. I believe you want to curate the social graph for each and every web service. And that's how I try to do it on each new social web service I encounter. The people I want to follow on Etsy are not the same people I want to follow on Twitter. The people I want to follow on Svpply are not my Facebook friends. I am slowly but surely building social graphs on Etsy, Svpply, and Foursquare (and many other services but I thought I would focus on these three for this post). So here is the feature I want. I don't want to get emailed everytime someone follows me or friends me.