The blogosphere is not a geekfest

I came across this when reading feeds today:

A relatively small number of web-savvy geeks are determining what gets to the top of the Google food chain. These folks are dedicated participants in the way of the (social) network, and they determine what everyone else is most likely to find on a particular topic

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and sigh! This couldn't be further from the truth. I'll leave the source of the quote anonymous in this instance-- I don't mix work and blogging, and the rest of the article is not really that germane to the point I'm wanting to make. (Plus I know that you can find it in a second if you really care.)

The blogosphere is not inhabited by a bunch of geeks determining what everyone else gets to see through search. I don't doubt for a minute that well intentioned people think this is out it works, but this is just plain inaccurate. I attend a lot of general type blogging conferences. A lot of meet-ups. And my share of geek centric events. I can say without any question that the blogosphere is absolutely not a geekfest. In fact, I'm often shocked at the lack of technical acumen exhibited by my blogging friends. They basically know how to use their tools of choice, and not a whole lot more. They do know a lot about the subjects that they write, and the overwhelming majority of these have nothing to do with technology.

For anyone who read the quote above and thought, "Yeah those geeks..." I hereby sentence you to read Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Cause it's not geeks-- it's everyone, and participating is not a choice if you want to be a part of the public discourse.

Do domain names even matter anymore?

I was reading this article in the NY Times this morning: Expanding the Internet Well Beyond .com, and I got to wondering...

An Internet oversight agency is considering the first sweeping changes in the network’s addressing system since its creation 25 years ago.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, closing weeklong meetings in Paris, was scheduled Thursday to consider proposals for streamlining new domain name suffixes.

The new guidelines could lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Internet addresses to join “.com,” including “.lat” for Latin America and a Bulgarian address in the Cyrillic script. New names will not start appearing for at least several months, and the Internet agency, called Icann, will not be deciding on specific ones quite yet.

Does the URL or domain name even matter anymore? With the number of people coming to sites directly down in the single digits and shrinking, maybe all that money people spent purchasing domain names was unnecessary? We are seeing the marketing of URLs coming to an end./p>

Might be hard for the small sites who don't command any unique keywords-- but that's the new reality. Maybe it's time to just start using IP numbers and forget domain names altogether?

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...

Ballmer on the death of media

From an interview with Steve Ballmer in the Washington Post: Microsoft's Ballmer on Yahoo and the Future

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down -- my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

Where I think big media is in serious trouble I don't think he's right that they are going to go completely away. There will be some serious contraction though. (That one was easy-- there already has been serious contraction. :))

The bigger question- which newspaper will survive? Seriously, we may go down to one. I'm putting my money on the Guardian as the sole surviving English language newspaper. Could be the NY Times, but if I were a betting man...

Japan Broadcasting Corporation and Twitter...

Joi Ito had this on NHK: The Japan Broadcasting Corportation:

NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster and the largest broadcaster in Asia, will use Twitter for a live TV special called "SAVE THE FUTURE". Twitter will be used to connect the studio and the viewing public.

Just another example of taking your conversations to where the people are already at as opposed to expecting them to come to you. As we all know, people are coming together around conversation and community. NHK has obviously figured that out.

Their presence on YouTube is also impressive.

The dominance of search

From the BBC on Jakob Nielsen's 2008 Web report: Web users 'getting more selfish'

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or desination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

Of course, this is nothing new. Anyone who has a Web site that isn't a blog or social media site already knows this. This is a big change in user behavior in just four years, and the trend is accelerating. Which begs the question: Why build any navigation or menus at all? The only links that people will be following before too long are the direct hyperlinks found within each piece of information.

If every piece of content needs to stand alone-- then why not design that into your architecture from the get-go, and save yourself all kinds of time and money in the process?

Television following the music and newspaper industry trends

Television is headed the same direction as other media. The industry still wants to blame the writers strike, but they are in serious denial-- May Sweeps Sees Record Low Ratings: Strike Seems to Have Altered Viewing Habits

Low ratings during the February sweeps may have been a fluke due to the writers strike, but the May sweeps period is painting a picture of viewers out of sync with broadcast television: Shows across multiple networks rang up series lows during a time that historically lures in the viewers.

On average, the networks are off the mark by 10% from last year in total viewers and off 17% in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

Just more evidence that one-way, push technology is falling out of favor. Where the industry is wrong is to assume that the viewers will return:

Viewers out of the habit of watching broadcast TV might not return until fall...

That's not going to happen. People are wanting to have conversations. It's yet another example of the long tail. "The People Formerly Known as the Audience..."

Over 100 Federal agencies working on virtual worlds?

I'd missed this earlier from NextGov-- Agencies getting serious about virtual worlds:

The National Defense University is building a 600-seat auditorium above an island in a virtual world. Ten days ago, the Air Force put out a call to gauge companies’ interest in prototyping a virtual base. The Transportation Department has constructed a synthetic world with IBM. Last year, the State Department held an eight-hour jazz fest for 300 avatars and chatted in Second Life with 20 others from Canada and Poland about student visas.

It’s time to start getting real about the virtual work world. In less than nine months, the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds has grown from a handful of agencies to more than 100.

It's a good read. It has some interesting things about how agencies are working to get around Federal regulations not prepared to handle something like this. For example, to get around the security issues of a .mil domain:

The Air Force training command created a .edu domain to get around the proscription, as did, reportedly, the Defense Acquisition University.

That's interesting. I thought that the .edu domain was reserved for accredited four year universities-- no exceptions? Guess that isn't true, or it depends on who is asking.

There's some other interesting things in the article about the difficulty of procuring space in digital worlds that I could relate to. When I first "purchased" an island in Second Life (for an educational project) I was surprised that it had been placed in our accounting system as a "land rental" fee. I laughed pretty hard at that until I had to suffer the pain of getting it fixed. After much effort we were able to get it categorized as a hosted service, and treated as an outsourced IT expense. But that wasn't the end of it. Just this week I was asked to explain to our granting source just what exactly it was we had purchased. Sigh! So it was nice to read in this article that there are others sharing in my pain.

Top 10 Tech Trends: 4/10 are mobile

From the Churchill Clubs Top 10 Tech Trends Dinner. Six pundits-- 10 trends. Interesting that four of the trends concern mobile:

1. The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer.
2. Betting on smart phones: The mobile device migration to smart phones from features phones will produce even greater disruption than PC industry moving from character mode to graphical interface.
3. Within 5 years, everything that matters to you will be available to you on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse.
4. 80% of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within 5-10 years.

Even though I agree with all of these predictions they still got my attention.

Scientific American on open-access science

Great read at Scientific American: Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?

A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.

It's full of some really good stuff on the growing open-science movement with pointers to the same sort of hyper-productivity we've seen from the adoption of open-practices in other walks of society.

It was this, however, that caught my attention:

One early success is the OpenWetWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Launched in 2005 by graduate students working in the laboratories of M.I.T. biological engineers Drew Endy and Thomas Knight, the project was originally seen as just a better way to keep the two lab Web sites up-to-date. OpenWetWare is a wiki—a collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone who has access...

Yep, yet another MediaWiki site. You can run but you can't hide.

Is knowing Mediawiki an essential skill for academics?

While reading my feeds this morning I have already encountered three MediaWiki installs. Two of the three were sites where software documentation was maintained. The last, was the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) which is funded by the National Science Foundation.

The purpose of the NSDL wiki is to provide resources that support learning innovation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The site maintains a digital repository of high quality materials for use in classrooms and research for K-12, higher education, and libraries. It is a very impressive effort.

This is yet another example of MediaWiki being used to foster the work of scientific communities. You see it being used everywhere. (What do these medical wikis have in common?) I'm starting to wonder how you can be a scientist, engineer, physician, or teacher without having basic MediaWiki skills? If you don't know how it works you have effectively removed yourself from the conversation.

The network effect around MediaWiki is so strong that it can't be ignored.

Who is sending traffic to video sites?

Heather Dougherty at Hitwise has this interesting post on search vs social networking driving traffic to video sites: Search & Social Networks neck & neck for video referrals

It's obvious that search is on a trajectory that will soon surpass social. Some of this must be due to improvements in video metadata allowing it to be more easily found? Universal search might be another factor? I have to admit, however, that I'm mostly confused by this graph. A plausible explanation escapes me. Translation: This isn't what I would expect to see. Ideas?

sarahintampa's unknow list: I'm famous

You can imagine my surprise this evening when my vanity search returned this zinger from sarahintampa: Welcome Unknowns! Yep, I made the list of "unknowns". How cool is that?

HighTouch - no about page, how mysterious!

Which is exactly the reaction I was after when I removed every single widget from the site. I started to remove the widgets that no one used, and before I knew it I'd removed them all. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do. Let's take it widget-by-widget starting with Sarah's keen observation about the missing profile:

• About - my name is attached to every post. Want to know who I am? Google it... I will also note that my link to claimid.com was clicked once about every 400,000 visitors.
• Search - no one ever did any local searches. Well, a person used it once and they should be embarrassed. I was embarrassed for them. Regardless, I know a few things about y'all from Google Analytics, and search isn't something you need. You know how to do site:blah.blah.com And quite honestly the best site search is to just type: hightouch andsomeothersearchterm. I felt terrible about cutting out that Lijit search box. I did mention the woman from Lijit who sang for me while she fixed my problem at the Defrag conference? That alone made it a tough widget to delete.
  
• Tag cloud - dang I loved that tag cloud. People did occasionally click on tags, but they mostly did it within the context of a recent post. So the cloud was totally unnecessary. Which is too bad cause that was one nice cloud.
  
• Twitter - there are 10 times more people subscribed to my Twitter feed than this blog. You can read my tweets there.
• Social bookmarking - del.icio.us and now ma.gnolia. Almost never used--poof.
• Second Life land pricing trends - I don't think I need to explain this one--snip.
• Copyright - everything is licensed, "Use it any damned way you choose." Like you're going to look for a license or ask before you take it anyway.

Were there some widgets that I missed? Regardless, removing all those widgets let the posts spread-out a bit more across the page, and I think they are much more readable. Which reminds me, no one ever comes to the site to read anyway. Y'all read this in your feed readers. I was discussing this with one of my most loyal readers tonight. She said, "I can't remember the last time I actually visited your site." Exactly, none of this site stuff is needed. Maybe I should remove the header too?

The high schoolification of higher education: Chicago Law School edition

The Chicago Law School continues the trend: U of C Law School Takes Classrooms Out of the Internet Age

The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most of its classrooms because of a growing problem of students surfing the Web on laptops during lectures.

The reason cited was that students surfing the Web weren't learning as much. Of course, if learning was really ths issue they might had better banned professors from lecturing, and insisted on more appropriate methods of instruction.

Classfying search behavior

Researchers at Penn State have analyzed actual search data and have found a very familiar pattern: IST researchers classify Web searches:

The research was the first published work of its kind done using actual searching data, with the aim of real-time classification. Researchers analyzed more than 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engines users. Findings showed that about 80 percent of queries are informational and about 10 percent each are for navigational and transactional purposes.

The results match pretty closely with what we see in user behavior from analyzing the metrics for content rich sites, i.e. not social sites. What will be interesting is to see how these results change over time. Will we eventually see navigation disappear entirely? I'm thinking so. Searchable wads of of content; it makes Google's Knol strategy look all the more brilliant.

The adoption of syndication feeds: some numbers

While doing some further reading concerning my earlier post on the impact of syndication feeds on site traffic, I came across this post from last October on TechCrunch. It lists the top sites by number of Google Reader subscribers: Top Blogs On Google Reader.

I decided to do some checking on the growth over the last six months (actually five months and 3 weeks) to see how things have changed. I only did the first thirty as I thought that was enough to make the point. (And I was bored with it.) Now I know that some of these numbers are skewed tremendously by the bundled feeds offered by Google, but there's no denying that there is something big going on here. These numbers get your attention. You also have to keep-in-mind that Google Reader is just one tool, albeit a big dog, that people use to consume feeds.

QOTD: Tom Watson on the Power of Information Report

I found this via Jeff Jarvis, and it's good stuff: Power of Information: New taskforce and speech:

The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.

The report is about the role of the UK government (and by extension all governments) in the new information economy. The report, although long, is chock-full of insight-- you might even call it a road-map.

The full report: The Power of Information.

Going to them in yet another way...

John Battelle has been discussing branding and has several examples that make a familiar point-- The Rise of Independent Media Brands Online:

To keep building our brands, we have to go where the audience has gone. And every month, according to Comscore, 600 million people visit conversational media sites – foreign lands when it comes to brand marketing. Or ….are they?

His posts are worth checking out. He's got some great examples to help make the case. I know I'm a bit of a broken record on this strategy of going to the communities, rather than expecting them to come to you. It's a difficult concept to grok. It's that be-the ball thing. Bottom-line, if you build it they will not come. It's no longer the internet 0f 2004.

IBM to host private Second Life regions

Reuters is reporting that IBM and Linden Labs have struck a deal that lets IBM host its own Second Life regions:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

The project is in testing and will go live within several weeks. It marks a new focus by Second Life's parent company, Linden Lab, on providing software and services to corporate customers who want to use the virtual world for collaboration and teleconferencing.

This is bigger news than it might appear on the surface. This is the beginning of creating a grid of interconnected and interoperable servers. Just like the Web. The World Wide Web consists of 165 million servers, and continues to grow. If virtual worlds are to follow the same path, and I believe they will, then today's move by Linden and IBM is a significant step in that direction.

Linden has already open-sourced the client-- think Firefox. They have indicated their intentions to open-source the server software-- think Apache. This move today is a massive step towards solving the interoperability issues, and is a first move towards massive scaling. When these two issues are solved, the demand for virtual worlds is going to explode to a level comparable to what we have seen with the Web. This agreement between Linden Labs and IBM is a big deal.

QOTD: Terry Heaton on “Finding” news consumers

From Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog:

You can’t “find” anybody by insisting they come to you. Old meet new.

The blog post discusses changes in media consumption and the QOTD from a few days ago, "If the news is that important, it will find me.”

If you're building a destination web site you are more than likely going to fail. You can build it, but they won't come.