Archive for the ‘Social’ category

Radio advertisements for gold

February 13th, 2009

I’ve been hearing radio ads for gold for some time now.  The basic premise and message is something like

The dollar is going down the tubes.  It’s lost 40% of its value in the last few years, and we’ll be facing massive inflation soon.  You need to own GOLD!  Buy our GOLD COINS NOW!

What do they want you to buy the gold coins with?  Your dollars!  That’s right!  The dollar is such a lousy investment to have that these companies will take it on themselves to burden themselves with *your dollars* to give you access to those oh-so-valuable GOLD COINS!

Whatever. 

If the economic woes of the past few years have taught us anything is that very little of anything has any intrinsic value (food?  basic shelter?)  Value is defined as what all concerned parties agree on – nothing more.  When everyone stopped believe in tech stocks, they didn’t have any value.  When everyone stopped believing in the myth that “real estate always goes up”, it stopped.  Yes, I’m simplifying this perhaps more than I should.  Someone will fight me regardless of how detailed I went anyway.  Flame away.

Having gold coins will only be valuable as long as everyone agrees that they’re valuable.  If people stop believing that gold is valuable, it will be worthless. 

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Posted in Finance, Social, Society

A few people I follow on Twitter (and who else should *I* follow?)

May 5th, 2008

I’ve been asked a couple time recently for a list of ‘web’ people that would be useful to follow.  Here’s a partial list of some people off the top of my head.  If you’re not on the list, and I follow you, and you’d like to be, just add yourself and what sort of stuff you twitter about (webwise).

For PHP stuff, following @phpdeveloper and @calevans you’ll get a good gateway in to the community. Cal put together a list of PHP Twitterers here.

For .NET stuff, I follow @shanselman, @joshholmes, @keithelder

For Flash stuff – I know there’s a few names I’ve followed, but I can’t recall who they were.

For Ruby stuff – @ntalbott and @averyj, but they don’t twitter enough about web stuff (come on guys!)

For Python stuff – I don’t have any that I know of – who should I follow?

For Groovy – @galaforge and @dima767 are two I follow to keep up on Groovy

Java – I used to know some, but again, I don’t see enough Java tweets to keep them top of mind.

For other web stuff – who should I follow?  Who else should I follow for various web technologies?

2 comments »

Posted in PHP, Social, Web

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Was Social Media killed?

April 4th, 2008

IttyBiz has an insightful-yet-still-just-commonsense view of what’s happening with Social Media.  The insightful aspect is that someone’s actually got the clarity to recognize the shift right now, and the commonsense aspect is “of course, what did we expect?”

I don’t have much to say explicitly about that article, but it’s made me think a bit about the current state of web technology and ‘Social Media’.  Social Media (note the caps) is getting a lot of play these day, and seemed to be everyone’s ‘secret’ for a while.  I still get people sending me emails saying ‘please digg my article so I can get on the front page’.  Perhaps they’re doing it for their own content, or for the content of a client.  However, the days when you could just ask a few people to digg something and have it go to the front page are, for the most part, long gone.  People will try to tell you they can do it for you, for a fee.  Sounds remarkably like SEO snake-oil from the late 90s, no?  MAN! THAT WAS 10 YEARS AGO!  We’re going through the same stuff as 10 years ago, but with rounded corners, trackbacks, RSS, digging, shared bookmarks and other ‘web 2.0′ technologies.

There’ll be something else which will be the next wave of innovation and everyone’ll game that system for awhile, then it’ll hit mainstream, won’t work anymore, and we’ll reinvent the cycle all over again and again.  :)

Note, I’m not overtly negative about this, it seems almost a natural evolution of the state of things, likely mostly due to the influx of ‘new’ generations of people on the web.  Many ‘web 2.0′ entrepreneurs of today were probably not even in grade school when I was first doing websites back in 1996, and they’re now bringing a new perspective on society, cultures and technology which will bring up new spins on old problems.  And ultimately that’s good, but it does feel a bit like dejavu sometimes.  :)

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Posted in Blogging, Social

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New podcast up

April 3rd, 2008

This is just a short one from Chicago, talking some about the upcoming interview with Patrick O’Keefe about his new book, Managing Online Forums.  I’ve got a copy to give away, as well as a copy of “Dreamweaver 8 – The Missing Manual”.  To enter in to the drawing for the book, send in a question about online forums or community building for Patrick for my interview with him next week.  One entrant (selected at random) will win Patrick’s new book, and the second entrant (selected at random) will win the Dreamweaver 8 book.

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Posted in Blogging, Social, Software, Web

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Social filters on your inbox

March 23rd, 2008

Michael Arrington posted a fresh lament about the state of his inbox. He’s got 2400+ emails in his inbox right now, and he will likely nuke them all and start over (yet again) shortly. This got me to thinking (yet again!) about email/spam/inboxes. The article rightly pointed out that right now we only have ‘spam’ and ‘not spam’ in most email filters. Perhaps some systems like I’m about to describe already exist, but I haven’t seen them yet, or heard of them.

In a nutshell, I’m envisioning a filtering system that would apply filters based on the ‘from’ email (validated to whatever extent you can with SPF-type systems). The filter would consult your address book and analyze your behaviour with that person before. If you routinely reply to bob@aol.com within a few minutes of receiving emails from bob, the filter would apply certain flags/labels to that email, perhaps things like “urgent” or “frequent contact” or something like that. Your email program would then allow you to construct views based on those labels.

However, I’m envisioning taking that a step further, as most email systems have a rather limited view of your ‘address book’. Merge in your social media contacts via their feeds, and you have another set of data to filter against. If I get an email (or generic incoming message routed through this ‘system’) from someone I follow on Twitter, then a ‘someone I follow’ flag/label is applied to the message. If I’m following a corporate blog and get email from someone at that company, it gets another flag/label, and so on…

There are likely a dozen or more logical holes in this I might be missing, but at a conceptual level this sort of thing will eventually be built, I’m pretty sure. We’ve only seen ‘social media’ *really* take hold in the last couple of year, so I’m not too surprised that this concept hasn’t gone mainstream, but I do think it will. And it might not end up being applied *just* to email – the ‘inbox of the future’ might end up looking something like friendfeed.com (I hope not from a visual standpoint) for a majority of people.

What do you think?

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Posted in Design, Ideas, Social, Society, Software, Web

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FriendFeed prediction – clustered feed data

March 18th, 2008

Robert Scoble just switched his home pages from TechMeme to FriendFeed.

“So what?” is likely what you’re thinking. Yeah, big deal, right? Well, TechMeme had a clustering algorithm which would group together news articles of related content, and give you a good idea of the ‘hot topics’ of the day. It did this in a completely automated way.

I predict that FriendFeed (or another social network aggregator) will introduce topic clustering, based on the keywords and topics of people you follow. Clusty.com has done topic clustering for years, though it’s not something that is of great use to ‘general’ searching (at least, not in many cases). Carrot2, an open source clustering engine, also provides this sort of functionality.

I took a first stab at clustering my feed data with carrot2. I’m not sure I had enough data to draw useful conclusions yet – it might need a larger body of a group of people’s tweets (for example) which I just didn’t have at the time.

For people who follow thousands of users, it would obviously be useful to have a ‘big picture’ view of the hottest topics being twittered/blogged/etc about. But take it one step beyond that. Being able to look at *other peoples’* topic clusters would give you an instant view as to whether they have people worth following.

When I look at twitter, I can look at other people’s followers. Great concept, but it doesn’t tell me anything about the topics those people tend to twitter about, so I’m never sure if it’s worth following them. Nor do I get any notion of how those people are related. Marrying facebook or plaxo data against twitter feeds would be useful, no? Or just letting me add my own relationship metadata in to twitter itself.

Getting a high level view of peoples’ topiclusters would be incredibly useful. “Topiclusters” – yeah, I just made up that word and yeah, it’s lame. “Topsters”? “Substers?” (subject clusters?).

2 comments »

Posted in Blogging, Ideas, Search, Social, Software, Web, opensource

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Yahoo supports more semantic web standards

March 13th, 2008

There’s an article on TechCrunch about Yahoo offering support for a number of microformat standards.

They are saying that they will support a number of microformats at the start: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN. They will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others. They will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, Yahoo will support the Amazon A9 OpenSearch specification with extensions for structured queries to deep web data.

I replied to the post at techcrunch and will repost it here – I thought I’d change something, but I’ll just throw it out here for now for discussion.

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I’m a bit more reluctant to believe the hype or promise of this. There are technical and human hurdles to deal with – semantically marking up data is hard, and humans can still get things wrong. Yahoo will still need to put in ‘best guess’ algorithms and such to compensate.

But the bigger issue is why would someone like linkedin semantically mark up all their profile pages, at least for public consumption? It makes it that much easier for competitors to come and take away the one set of data that makes linkedin unique – the relationship data they have about their users. For me, what makes linkedin linkedin is the set of relationships (and to a lesser extent, what tools linkedin provides to exploit those relationships).

Adding semantic markup to linkedin profile pages will make it easier for Yahoo to show more information. Great. But it also makes it easier for everyone, including Linkedin and Yahoo’s competitors, to scrape intelligently, and offer bigger/better/faster/cheaper.

Now, there are certainly other benefits regarding cross-domain info linking – being able to better know the relationships between data across multiple data sets, for example. Again, good, but not great, imo.

It’s certainly a chicken/egg situation, but I’m also not sure that’ll we have the same incentives that we did 10 years ago before the massive commercialization. For every argument for semantic markup, there’s gotta be at least one competing commercial interest against it.

That’s my 2 cents as to why this will be an uphill battle.

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Any thoughts?

3 comments »

Posted in Ideas, Social, Society, Software, Tools, Web, Yahoo, opensource

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Tagging evolved

January 10th, 2008

I was having an interesting conversation with Joe Brinkman from the DotNetNuke project this evening, and he got to talking about the ‘social networking’ focus in the next DNN release.  I had a small brainwave and suggested something to him, but the implications might be larger than I originally considered.

He mentioned that they’d be looking at providing the capability to ‘tag’ every piece of content in the system, instead of just a few item types which can be tagged currently in DNN.  Their focus will be on the business/enterprise aspect of tagging and the social features in DNN, and given this I suggested that the tags have timestamps associated with them.  When doing a search through tags (which itself often isn’t done – it’s just a blind SQL SELECT triggered from a REST URL), giving tags with older dates less weight in the final results will likely make sense.  You could even implement a cutoff.  If a document was tagged ‘vacationpolicy’ 6 years ago, it’s very likely it’s not the vacation policy you’re looking for today.

I realize that tagging isn’t the only way to categorize data, but it’s another piece of data which will need to be considered when searching.  Using that extra metadata about the tag should be a factor in search results.  Storing ‘who’ tagged something would also be useful for influencing search results, as my ‘friends’ (people in my department, or people with my interests, or whatever) who tag something as ‘foo’ should result in things they tagged as ‘foo’ being rated higher than items tagged ‘foo’ by people I don’t know, or actively dislike for some reason.

I have to imagine that sites like Flickr, which have built a huge collection of tag data, have much of this tag meta information on hand, and could easily use it to influence results.  Introducing new behaviour on public sites for something which is already expected behaviour might not on the cards anytime soon, but I have to imagine these sorts of filters and weighting structures will make their way in to tag search algorithms (if such things even exist right now – I bet they don’t yet).

What do you think?

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Posted in Codemash, Development, Ideas, Search, Social, Web, opensource

SocialCarolina.org launched

November 20th, 2007

Some area tech guys put together SocialCarolina.org, a site which maps what’s going on across the various social networks in the RTP/RDCH area.  At least, that’s what I think it does, and if it’s not doing that, it should :)   In any event, it’s a slick looking site with some definite potential.  Check it out!

1 comment »

Posted in Blogging, Conferences, Design, Social, Web