Content Curation: It's Going to Be HUGE It's counter-intuitive--especially to Americans. But often less is more. When Erin Scime wrote a blog titled: "Content Strategist as Digital Curator", it's pretty clear that she didn't expect to stir up a whole lot of emotions and anger. Yet, that's what she did--at least in part. "I feel like there are a lot of bitter librarians out there," Scime told me. It's ironic, in part, because all her early training was in library sciences. But the buzz around curation threatens more than librarians--there's a posse of PhD's with pitchforks and torches that didn't much like what Scime had to say. What heresy did Scime actual dare to blog about? Scime today is the Content Strategy Lead at HUGE in Brooklyn--whose clients include CNN IKEA, Pepsi, Jet Blue, IVillage, and Penton Media. For a former student of Curatorial studies and information sciences to embrace the democratization of the word "curation" rattled some cages. One example Scime points to is the relaunch of iVilliage.
The Startup Pyramid Every six months I rethink the optimal startup go to market approach based on new insights gained at recent startups. Lately I’ve been using a pyramid to represent the process I’m using. Startups require a solid foundation of product/market fit before progressing up the pyramid and scaling the business. Achieving Product/Market Fit Product/market fit has always been a fairly abstract concept making it difficult to know when you have actually achieved it. Yet many entrepreneurs have highlighted the importance of creating a product that resonates with the target market: I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product/market fit. You should measure your product/market fit as soon as possible because it will significantly impact how you operate your startup. Race up the Pyramid Once you have achieved product/market fit, it’s time to accelerate through the next steps of the pyramid and then begin scaling your business.
» Designing Social Tools Around User Interests Johnny Holland The key to designing social media well lies in designing it for a user’s social interests. Conventional software addresses the user’s task-oriented needs and objectives. But social media succeed when they engage the user’s social interests. Social interests involve two psychological insights: that users are interested in others generally (social activities, or what’s going on); and users are interested in others particularly (another user). Each of these is doubled up by the self-reflexivity of social action: users are interested in how they themselves appear to others in general (one’s self image, impressions made, the stuff of “self-presentation” common in social media); and another particular user’s relationship to him or her (e.g. their interest in us). From this we can quickly see that social media are not a matter of straightforward goal-oriented interaction design. Thus the interest captivated by social media is twofold: it’s a self-interest and an Other-interest.
How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup Odysseus resisting the Sirens Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. On my three year startup journey that lead to Yipit, I had over 30 other completely unrelated ideas. Each time I got the idea, I would immediately start sweating profusely for three straight hours in a ridiculous state of unbridled excitement and optimism. To be clear, the “ideas” I’m referring to are the ones that have nothing to do with your current startup. In our case, Yipit had always been about organizing local information and we had been working on it for a while. Social version of delicious (summer of 2007)Tool to recommend the best version of the online video you were currently watching (spring 2008)140it.com: Bookmarklett that smartly shortens your tweet to less than 140 characters. I now think of these new ideas as the Sirens of the startup journey. The Temptation
Marti Hearst Predicts the Future of Search User Interfaces School of Information professor Marti Hearst predicts the future of online search interfaces in an article in this month’s edition of the Communications of the ACM. “The future of user interfaces will involve support for natural human interaction,” says Hearst. A scholar of search-engine technologies for the past two decades, Hearst believes today’s technologies are finally catching up with the long-time goal of search designers. “More-natural modes of interaction have long been goals of interface design,” says Hearst, “but recent developments have brought them closer to reality.” The article makes several specific predictions about the development of online search. Firstly, Hearst sees an increase in speech-based search interfaces, with Apple’s Siri as the latest step in this direction. Heast’s complete analysis can be found in the November 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM.
Six strategies for overcoming “chicken and egg” problems cdixon. Products with so-called networks effects get more valuable when more people use them. Famous examples are telephones and social networks. “Complementary network effects” refer to situations where a product gets more valuable as more people use the product’s complement(s). Two products are complementary when they are more (or only) useful together – for example, a video game and video game console, or an OS and an application for that OS. Microsoft Windows gets more valuable the more apps are made for it, which in turn makes Windows more popular, which in turn leads to more apps, and so on. Microsoft Windows is not more valuable simply because there are more copies of Microsoft Windows in the world, but because there are more complements to Windows in the world. Network effects can be your friend or your enemy depending on whether your product has reached critical mass. Here is a high level summary of the 6 strategies we describe with a few updated examples. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
SearchUpTicious » Blog Archive » User-Generated Query Suggestions Found to be Better than Machine-Generated At SIGIR 2009, an excellent paper was presented by Diane Kelly, Karl Gyllstrom, and Earl W. Bailey that compares user-generated versus algorithmically-generated query suggestions. As far as I know, this is the first paper to do such a comparison within a usability study. With a healthy-sized pool of 55 participants and 20 TREC topics, they found that query reformulation suggestions derived from human-issued search logs performed better than system-generated queries (at least using their system), in terms of number of suggestions used, number of relevant documents saved, and a precision score (although the latter was not a statistically significant difference). The reference is: Kelly, Gyllstrom, Bailey, A Comparison of Query and Term Suggestion Features for Interactive Searching , proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2009 (no link available yet). This is relevant to Section 6.3: Automated Term Suggestions
Web services should be both federated and extensible cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog One of the most important developments of the web 2.0 era is the proliferation of full featured, bidirectional APIs. APIs provide a way to “federate” web services from a single website to a distributed network of 3rd party sites. Another important web 2.0 development is the proliferation of web Apps (e.g. The next step in this evolution is to create web services that are both federated (APIs) and extensible (Apps). In my ideal world, the social graph would not be controlled by a private company. Consider the following scenario. With today’s APIs, if, say, Gowalla wanted to integrate Facebook plus SimpleGeo into their app*, they would basically have 3 choices: 1) Embed Facebook widgets in Gowalla. 2) Pre-import SimpleGeo data. 3) Host an instance of SimpleGeo’s servers internally. In a world of extensible APIs (or “API Apps”), Gowalla could instead send Facebook data back to SimpleGeo. (Note how there are three parties involved – @peretti calls this a “data threesome”).
Key Elements of a Massively Scalable Startup VC backed startups generally aspire to valuations in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, but very few really consider all of the elements they’ll need to make it happen. After analyzing several startups I’ve worked with that have reached or are approaching these valuations I’ve boiled it down to four interdependent commonalities that always seem to exist. While they are easy to describe, they are of course very difficult to achieve. Element 1: Gratification engine Your gratification engine is the repeatable process of turning cold prospects into highly gratified customers. Element 2: Economic engine Once you have figured out how to gratify prospects, your next challenge is creating a viable economic engine. Element 3: Growth engine Your growth engine is very dependent on your economic engine. Element 4: Huge addressable market The best opportunities generally have the hardest markets to accurately size. Start with a Hypothesis for Each Element
Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry cdix With the introduction of the iPhone, Steve Jobs achieved something that might be unique in the history of business: he single-handedly upended the power structure of a major industry. In the US, before the iPhone, the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) had an ironclad grip on the rest of the value chain – particularly, handset makers and app makers. Ask anyone who ran or invested in a mobile app startup pre-iPhone (I invested in one myself). Since the carriers had all the power, getting any distribution (which usually meant getting on the handset “deck”) meant doing a business development deal with the carriers. Business development in this case meant finding the right people at those companies, sending them iPods, taking them to baseball games, and basically figuring out ways to convince them to work with you instead of the 5,000 other people sending them iPods and baseball tickets. The basis of competition was salesmanship and capital, not innovation or quality.