Lately, I’ve found that Technorati searches to find who’s responded to my posts have become unbearably slow. Often it takes a few searches in a row for results to show up.
A Technorati employee explained that they’ve got a problem in the queue to fix that affects only midlist blogs. Currently, searches are more efficient for blogs with a great many links, and those with only one or two links. Searches are painfully slow in the middle.
This makes Technorati less useful for conversation discovery, particularly for the people who desire it most. Will Wheaton is a celebrity with high link rank from adoring fans. He probably isn’t interested in talking back to all the fans who write about him, except in a selective “fan letter quote” manner. He’s probably most concerned with the size of the audience, because that helps drive the audience and word of mounth for his books and television shows.
Midlist bloggers probably care most about conversation discovery — they are blogging in order to participate in a conversation, and each cogent reference is valuable.
Whether the segment is valuable to Technorati depends on their business model. Niche blogs with subcommunity connections ought to have value — more value than can be unlocked yet. The question is whether Technorati’s customers are marketers and advertisers to whom they simply sell metrics — in which case it doesnt’ matter if the system performs poorly for the midlist. Or whether there’s value with those users directly, by showing ads to them or providing paid services.
Conversation, not rank
In Mary Hodder’s roundup of comments on the discussion of community metrics, I agree wholeheardedly with Dina Mehta. Dina says that the value of Technorati to her is conversation discovery.
For instance, I have no interest in what my ranking on Technorati is, but I do visit it daily to see who is linking to me and how they might have progressed a thought. Yet, I’m not so happy when these get transformed into lists, ratings and rankings. Are you merely well-known, or well-read?
Yes, exactly. I use Technorati to see who responded to what I wrote, to discover distributed comments. I also use Technorati to find out who’s written about something I’m interested in at the moment. Then (if I have something to say), I’ll comment on their blog or link to them. Technorati is for discovering and continuing conversation.
Link rank is a not-so-interesting byproduct.
Exburb power and oil
Michael Lind wrote a post on TPM Cafe with a seriously problematic argument that cities are parasitic on suburbs. The article was roundly criticized in comments and follow-up posts. But there’s a grain of truth about the political and economic power of the far suburbs. That power (among other things) is threatened by the rise in gas prices.
An Associated Press poll reveals that surburbanites are starting to worry.
The poll conducted for The Associated Press and AOL News found that 64 percent say gas prices will cause money problems for them in the next six months. In April, 51 percent expressed such concerns. Those most likely to be worried are people with low incomes, the unemployed and minorities. However, the level of concern was rising fastest among women, retirees, married people and those living in the suburbs.
The phone companies entering the cable business
The phone companies are spending large amounts of money, in business investment and lobbying in order to enter the video business. In Texas, SBC just won a victory that lowers their cost compared to cable television by allowing them to start out with statewide franchises, instead of negotiating with each city.
The phone companies have been eyeing ways to diversify away from phone service for decades. In the 80s and early 90s, AT&T made a series of disastrous attempts to enter the computer business after the anti-trust settlement with the US department of Justice.
Video distribution seems a better fit than PCs. It’s a familiar business model, where where a being an oligopoly owner of a distribution channel makes you the leading provider of a service. Owning big servers and pipes is surely a competitive advantage, as is managing an itemized billing service.
The phone companies know they need to slug it out with the cable companies with price wars and features. But cable won’t be the only competition. The market is also seeing entrants with new distribution models.”Long-tail” business like Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Google have the ability to leverage big servers, ecommerce and ad platforms, search and recommendation engines to become major distribution channels. Peer to peer distribution is becoming a notable alternative to get video, and ad models are emerging for p2p. Content providers like the Comedy Channel can host Daily Show clips themselves. The low cost of video is starting to create a generation of video podcasters. Services like Ourmediaare emerging to host amateur audiovisional content.
This is going to make the video business much less of a comfy oligopoly. The phone company will have to fight for the market.
The Broadcast Niche
Broadcast contains two kinds of content — things the people really want to watch at the same time, and things that people would rather watch on their own schedule. So broadcast won’t die. It will be contrained to events that a great many people want to watch at the same time, like the Superbowl, or a newscast of a major breaking story.
Shawn makes this insightful point in a comment to Mark Cuban’s blog. Cuban post focused on technology — he argued that broadcast has better performance than internet, and that multi-cast technology isn’t being developed aggressively enough. Other readers take Cuban up on the technical points, but Shawn nails the market evolution.
The video market has been migrating to “personal schedule” for decades. But there are two things that kept “event” and “program” content together. First is a lucrative advertising business model that applied only to broadcast. Second is capital-intensive distribution. It was expensive to distribute broadcast content, so the market became was an oligopoly. That oligopoly was able to create “pseudo-events” — broadcasting episodes of the Sopranos, and only distributing DVDs to BlockBuster video later.
Both of these things are changing. The cost of distribution is decliningAd models are evolving for peer-to-peer distributed content. Mark Pesce’s post from May of this year chronicles how peer to peer distribution of television has become a commercial force in the last year, starting with the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon. Pesce’s article speculates about a number of ways that advertisers will sponsor peer to peer content.
The net result is that the niche for pre-recorded broadcast — whether over-the-air, or on cable — gets smaller. The superbowl will still generate large ad revenues, but programming will keep migrating away.
Steve Hannaford’s Oligopolywatch
OligopolyWatch covers the business news and underlying business trends of industry consolidation. Nice stuff for market research geeks.
On prejudice against southern white people
This from Boing Boing, a crew that would be offended by stereotypes against black people, gay people, Jews, asians.
On the one hand, there’s a bit of a hesitation for a liberal to fight cultural stereotypes of uneducated southern white people, because of the risks of the opposite stereotype. In the wrong places, one might run the risk of insult or even violence for being: liberal, non-christian,
gay, asian, black. It’s hard to immediately defend people you imagine might beat you or your friends up.
On the other hand, the “coastal elite” / “redneck” stereotype wars are counterproductive, create personal offense, provide opportunities for destructive “wedge” politics. Some friends of mine have strong southern accents, and report that they are treated like idiots when they travel North.
Criticizing intolerant and ignorant actions, absolutely. Ethnic stereotypes, not so good.
MSN Filters: blogging as mass media
Ross is scathing about MSN’s new “Filters” project, a commercial group blog in the business niche that Weblogs Inc occupies.
Ross argues that by creating a blog zine with paid writers, MSN Filter is competing with its customers. That implies that blogging is a mass-medium with limited channels. During the height of the portal frenzy, there were stats suggesting that the Web was consolidating to three home pages. The “Long Tail” discussion and Google Adsense have put that to bed.
To the extent that part of blogging joins the mass media, more power to them. MSN and AOL already have portal home pages with pictures of celebrities and celebrity gossip. I don’t care, and I don’t have to care. Radio is a top-40 wasteland, but satellite and internet offer diversity. As long as I can find and read the blogs I care about, they are welcome to compete with Gossipster.
I suppose it’s competing with those customers who are doing blogging for money. If MSN had social smarts, they’d be looking for the popular bloggers on their service, and promoting them onto the portal for extra traffic, and compensating them. Given their terms of service, they could just take the content and not compensate the customers, which would be legal but reprehensible.
Purple pro and con: the insight and the argument
Chris Dent writesin praise of purple numbers. These paragraph-level identifiers enable re-use of content. Chunks of good ideas are locked inside larger units, within documents and discussion threads.
The benefit of purple numbers is that they unlock insights, increasing the liquidity and flow of ideas. The drawback is that they break apart arguments. Insights may be captured in paragraphs. But arguments are conveyed across multiple paragraphs. You need more than one paragraph to provide context, to set up a contrast, or to draw a causal connection.
Sometimes, picking apart the individual points is what’s needed to find the holes and strengthen understanding. Sometimes, picking at individual points is a sign of a flamewar — people are searching for points of disagreement. Picking at points can increase the quality of thought, or reduce the quality of thought by reducing the incentive to build toward a larger theme.
In general, the wiki form is conducive to concensus, by bringing people literally on the same page. It will be interesting to see how wiki+purple affects the quality of thought and level of agreement.
Information service, communication service, and bad law
The FCC exempted phone companies from having to lease lines to internet service providers. They did this by re-classifying broadband as an “information service”, which was ruled not to be subject to line-sharing.
In the words of Light reading the FCC ruled that the physical facilities that deliver broadband, and the broadband service itself are indistinguishable and inseparable. The two things together — the facility and the service — are now called an