Being found on the Web is getting tougher

More evidence that if you ever want someone to look at your Web site you had better be getting social. Unless you've got SEO down so pat that you can show up in the top three search results you are pretty much toast. In the old days (like last year) you just shot to make it to the first page of search results as your goal-- The short attention span of web searchers: most never read past 3 results

Google users want instant gratification when they’re searching. How instant? The top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks. The remaining 7 results share just 21% of the clicks. In other words, more than three quarters of Google users never click past the first three results.

And 90% never go past the first page? The mountain is getting taller. Then consider that 80% of content centric Web site visitors come from search.

If a tree falls in the forest...

Google Maps gets wikified

Google has opened Google Maps to the world to annotate: It's your world. Map it.

Now in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, you can log into your Google account to edit a place on the map. You can even mark that a business has closed to save someone an extra trip. Of course, we've taken steps to help protect accuracy -- for example, you'll still be able to see the original listing information along with the history of changes made.

That is so impressive. Google has taken a very successful product and turned it over to the people as a wiki. That takes guts. My hat is off to Google!

QOTD: Michael Idinopulos on publishing

From Michael Idinopulos's Transparent Office blog:

I think of this as the dawn of the "Work in Progress" culture. We no longer think that something has to be finished before we let strangers into the conversation.

Above the flow

I found a new blog through Andrew McAfee that I am rather liking: Transparent Office. The blogger, Michael Idinopulos, works at Socialtext, and the blog is focused on the use of social software in the enterprise. One of his very first posts addressed the concept of in-the flow versus above-the-flow kind of work.

In the old world of emails and knowledge management systems, our tools and processes force a rigid distinction between "doing your job" (i.e., in-the-flow activities, usually in email) and "giving back to the organization" (above-the-flow contributions to a knowledge management system). That framing of the issue ensures that people will spend almost all their time in email and very little time contributing knowledge--hence the "culture and incentives" problem that has bedeviled Knowledge Management since the very start.

Too often we approach knowledge management tasks from a naive perspective. We approach it as a Field of Dreams type of problem, if we build it they will come... The problem is, it doesn't matter what you build (i.e. what tools you use), because it's a far more complex problem than just providing the means to manage knowledge. You have to first address the will, the incentives, the really big questions.

Reading Michael reminded me of the Dave Snowden interview that I had posted about previously: The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and "Knowledge Management"

One of the things I've always argued very strongly is that you shouldn't provide any incentives to knowledge work because, for example, to reward people for contributing to a knowledge management database fails to understand the basic trust implications of the knowledge interaction. If you ask me for something that I need in the context of genuine need, very few people if anybody other than the obdurant is going to refuse to give it to you... but if you ask me to share my knowledge in anticipation of possible need in the future by somebody I don't know, then you're never going to get it. It's the immediacy of the context that matters.

Here we have three people (McAfee, Idinopulos, Snowden) with expertise in enterprise knowledge management telling us it's an almost impossible task to accomplish. It's a very complex issue that defies overly simplistic attempts to try to explain away failure. What makes it more difficult is trying to find some places where it has worked in order to try to replicate success. It's almost impossible to find above-the-flow success stories beyond the large scale open example of Wikipedia.

Content versus community

From David Wiley: Social Objects and Campfires:

If your educational materials are not “social objects” - in other words, if you don’t already understand that their main purpose is to bring people together so that social learning interactions can happen - why are you producing and sharing them? A relevant follow-up question is, if you are not providing the functional space for these social learning interactions to happen in (or at least pointing to a space where they can), why are you producing and sharing them? This is the key question for all OER and OCW projects.

The focus being on maximizing the opportunities for interaction, collaboration, and learning. It's not about content. Which is why content management systems and course management systems are the wrong tools for learning. These tools place the focus in the wrong place.

Email spam only getting worse

CNET is reporting on the Barracuda Networks' annual spam report: 95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam

Tell us something we didn't already know. Didn't Bill Gates tell us three years ago that we were close to solving the spam problem?

Two years from now, spam will be solved,” he told a select group of World Economic Forum participants at this Alpine ski resort. “And a lot of progress this year,” he added at the event late Friday, hosted by U.S. talk show host Charlie Rose.

Gates said Microsoft, where he has the title of chief software designer, is working on a solution based on the concept of “proof,” or identifying the sender of the e-mail.

Guess that didn't work out so well. Here's my solution to spam, outlaw the sending of email to more than one person at a time. Email should be used for one-to-one communication. As soon as you add a third person there is almost always a better way to accomplish the same thing.

Reasons for quitting Twitter

Scott Karp has an interesting post: Why I Stopped Using Twitter. I mostly disagree with him. I think you have to look at it like the blogosphere -- you can't read everything, but if you use feeds, filters, pipes... it's very manageable. It's a social medium and you have to let your network work.

He did have this one thing which caused me to scratch my head a tad:

An example of high noise to signal is the Twitter “half conversation” — where two user are talking to each other directly, but you only follow one of them. So you hear half the conversation, like listening to someone on their cell phone. It’s quasi-voyeuristically interesting sometimes, but mostly it’s just annoying

I'm thinking the half-conversation is one of Twitter's more interesting characteristics. I love seeing half conversations, and trying to decipher what they are about. They are entertaining. If something really peaks my curiosity I'll just click through to see the other half. That's how I found most of the people I now follow. Being that I almost always look at the blogs of those twitterers it's a great way to broaden your thinking and reading list. Half conversations are not an annoyance, they are to be enjoyed.