Every transition known to man

...can be seen here. It's the full catalog for video transitions. There's nothing like thoroughness to impress the viewer.

Google Talk: It's great but..

My work group is loving this, because we can use it talk and send files across lots of people, with different IM systems. But there is only one problem. Some of us are on macs, in fact the ones who tried this out first. In order to get all the windows people on it, we've had to go back to a windows person with Talk installed as an application, which has the only way to invite people who are not yet on Google Talk. If you are a mac user, you have to use a mac client with jabber support, but then you have no way to invite more people to use Google Talk, that we can find, and the Talk help section points to the windows Talk application in order to invite more people.

Very frustrating.

Bar Camp Vid

Check it out (35mbs). Well done!

oh, and my laptop cover has a cameo:

Micah Sifry Invites You to Participate in Supporting Andrew Rasiej

Updated: the call is now at 12:30 pm EST instead of 1pm EST.

...with this conference call for bloggers about Andrew Rasiej, who is running for Public Advocate in NYC:

From: info@rasiej.com
Subject: Barlow, Dyson, Hodder, Michalski, Newmark, Searls, Sifry, Trippi, Vos and Weinberger invite you to meet Andrew Rasiej
Date: August 24, 2005 2:37:37 PM EDT

Dear friend:

When someone who understands the democratizing forces of technologies like social networking, blogging, and p2p decides to enter the world of politics to shake things up, we should take heed and add our voices.

That's why we're writing you about Andrew Rasiej, candidate for New York City Public Advocate, and inviting you to join a national bloggers conference call next Tuesday August 30 from noon to 1:00pm EST to meet him and find out more.

At first glance, you're probably thinking, "Why should I pay attention to this race? It's not even the most powerful office in New York."

But Andrew is running to prove that the power of networked politics is real and can fundamentally alter not just campaigns, but also how citizens and elected officials engage in civic life and the results they achieve. It just so happens that the office of Public Advocate, which is the number-two elected position in the city, is perfect for this.

The Public Advocate has the power to introduce legislation, conduct investigations, and chairs an important--though neglected--commission on open public information. But the office is really only limited by its holder's imagination and ability to organize people and focus attention where it needs to be focused.

Andrew is also a candidate of new ideas, and here are his three most important proposals:

1. To make America's largest city a Wi-Fi hotzone, and to help close the digital divide by creating a low-cost, high-speed wireless mesh network for everyone in the city.
2. To use the ideas behind open-source and peer-to-peer networks to reinvent the Public Advocate's office, and turn it from being one person's modest soapbox into a sounding board, connecting hub and amplifying megaphone for all the people in the city.
3. To use technology to make city government more open, transparent and accountable.

Andrew's getting attention for his innovative and common-sense approach, as these articles by Thomas Friedman,
David Kirkpatrick,
and Stowe Boyd show. Joe Trippi says, "Andrew worked with me on the Dean campaign and I can honestly say that this is a brilliant man who can have a positive, real effect on New York City."

Moreover, Andrew's not just a idea guy; he has a track record of getting things done. From starting the rock club Irving Plaza to founding MOUSE.org, an education nonprofit that has trained thousands of NYC students to be their schools' own technologists, to advising top Democrats like Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean, to starting the Personal Democracy Forum—he is a doer, not just a talker.

You may not agree with everything he has to say, but we urge you to give him a listen—and we're sure he'll give you a listen, too. The conventional wisdom says he's a long-shot, but political change has to start somewhere.

To take part in the conference call, please RSVP to info@rasiej.com (hit reply) and you will be sent the call-in information. Feel free to share this invite widely.

Sincerely,

John Perry Barlow
Esther Dyson
Mary Hodder
Jerry Michalski
Craig Newmark
Doc Searls
Dave Sifry
Joe Trippi
Esme Vos
David Weinberger

p.s. While Andrew is running in the Democratic primary, what he represents ought to inspire Republicans, independents and creative thinkers of all stripes. As Phil Windley, the former CIO of the state of Utah and a Republican, recently wrote, "If we are not willing to support (vote and donate) to people who understand technology and what powers innovation, then we'll get the nation we deserve."

Advocates for Rasiej

Important Questions About What Matters as we make an Ad Hoc Community Algorithm to Describe Blog Communities and Weight Bloggers In Them...

J. LeRoy on Convergence and Procreation talking about ad hoc groups in the blogosphere:

To tie this into my recent posts about rankings and tracking of expertise on the net, I want to note the transience of thought on the individual, the right to multiple associations, and the healthy aspects of not being an expert.

Right on! Dynamically generated communities will be key to this process, because day-to-day, these communities shift, and yet, it is also important to see conversation over time. The blogosphere is often self correcting, and bad actors get modded down over time, with useful work modded up. So we must achieve a balance in this dichotomy.

These groups and communities on the net are well formed. And, yes, the conversation is well formed and on-going, but we should be wary of rankings that build up expert or superblogger status on given individuals.

Inherently:

1 Ad Hoc Groups are created to solve problems

2 Blogs' subject matter is transient

3 Community is fluid

This leads me to wonder how we would establish relevance of blog posters by community indicators when the communities themselves are in flux by design. Communities defined by a given area of interest will tend to highlight those who are perhaps overly focused on those areas of interest. It may yield a search of those who are tunnel visioned and not those who are innovative.

So what are the metrics that help balance tunnel vision with newness and interestingness in a community and the weighting of blogs, to discover innovation? Or do we use the metrics we have now, but tune them to balance these concerns?

Julie Leung in Now serving: Blogher Bouillabaisse:

Why do metrics matter? From dialogue I've read, it seems metrics matter because they matter to the media. The Top Whatever blogs are the ones that will be referenced and used to represent blogging to the majority of people in the world who don't blog. They in a sense become who we are. Yet as Staci Kramer pointed out in the discussion, not all journalists care about the Top lists either.

Why should metrics matter to a blogger like me? I've been taking a bit of my own Blogging 101 advice these past couple weeks and considering what it is I am trying to do here. Why am I blogging? Sure, I use Technorati. In fact on the Blogher survey before the conference, I checked that I do care about traffic. I've even cried over my Technorati ranking. But that was mostly because I wanted to be involved in conversations. I wanted to know that others were reading and responding. And I also had mistaken ideas about what my Technorati rating should be, after seeing my husband's statistics. I've now realized I'll never have the links and traffic he does. We are blogging for different - but overlapping - communities and in separate niches.

All I want to do is write well and have good conversations. As far as finding good blogs, rankings only reveal what lots of people who link like to link. They are not necessarily indicators of good writing or good blogging or even blogs I want to read. I use Technorati, Feedster and PubSub to know who is linking and talking to me. But as for my ranking, I don't need to know it in order to blog or to sense I am blogging successfully.

Asking ourselves why we blog is very important in this discussion. It can lead us to uncover some implicit motivations and activities we engage in, that might help us with this effort. On reason I blog is to create a knowledge management system for myself. Another is to point to things I'm interested in, sharing that with others. And I like having an opinion exposed now and then. Digging deeper will help expose the answer to the broader issue at hand: finding out who does what, and what is done by whom, and what and who matter.

Mathemagenic in Link love: lists, clouds and action points asks from 'what to how?" and wonders.. where to get the data:

But it starts with the data. And the data is not public.

I can not speak for others, but I can talk about problems we have with the data needed for our research (which addresses some of the "link love" aspects). What we need to develop algorithms and tools are pretty simple: blog content in "full-text RSS quality" via APIs...

We tried many of the current blog indexing tools: no luck (those that are pretty close to what we need, BlogPulse, Technorati and Bloglines are either consider the data they collect commercial or do not have APIs to access it). As a results Anjo is working on weblog spider instead of community discovery algorithm.

Data is an issue. However, we will ask companies collecting data to help us. Three have firmly committed to running a community algorithm against their data, along with a startup in stealth mode, that also has a complete database. We'd love to have as many blog search companies as possible on board for this ad hoc community experiment. I've seen this experiment as something of a partnership between companies who create blog search for readers, bloggers, PR people, advertisers, and marketers, and the blogging community that is talking about this effort. If others see problems with this, please tell us.

Interesting Ideas Afloat

...by people thinking about how to better understand the blogosphere, through topic clouds and weighting of bloggers. People are asking for things they are interested in seeing, expressing concerns and making great observations about the overall problem. This continues a discussion I started there, and continued there, there, there and there.

The del.icio.us tag for this meme is linklove.

Ericka Menchen Trevino/technology and the social on Blog Rankings:

It’s not surprising that there is no single way to determine ‘the best’ blogs, and any attempt to sort the mass of blogs will be threatened by SPAM and the preconceptions of the rank creators. Alternative metrics do need to be developed - the more the merrier, but what will be more informative is studying how real people find the blogs they read.

So should we have different metrics for different communities? Or is that too much? Maybe we think about including ratios of different metrics of participation, so that many kinds of social gestures can be included depending on styles of participation. A blog would still be weighted for some participation in a community? In other words, if someone comments a lot, and posts now and then, they might be as conversational as someone who comments little and posts a lot.

Ed Vielmetti in Yi-Tan: Jerry Michalski and Mary Hodder on "Link Love" (a post based on today's Yi-Tan call where I was a guest host talking about the problem of links as ranking mechanisms, and how we might find topic communities and weight things we value, like conversationalness):

The observation is that all of the sites that keep track of "top 100" lists or "top hits" scores for searches or weblogs have opaque algorithms for determining same, and what results as the lists are not very accurate once you exit the mass public Internet and get into more specialized fields or subfields.

...

...one really interesting salient point about the metrics used to compute influence and activity within the sadly named "blogosphere". (ugh) Most of the blog ranking tools use links as their proxy for love. In my experience, however, it's the good and useful comments and discussions that are a lot better reflection of whether someone really cares enough to click through and make a difference...

Comment discussions are important and if we can solve the comment spam issue, might be a great metric for folding into measures of conversation.

Ed also suggests we look at energy as a measure:

...people are differently influential in a network by the amount of energy they bring to others in their sphere. Should we be recasting our measures and metrics as "link energy" rather than "link love"?

J. LeRoy on Are You Really Atrios?

So the issue here is how do we invent metrics to judge the relative social worth of one blog post over another. The analysis needs to take into account the fact that gamers of this sytem are flooding the internet with content-free blog posts and web pages that contain key words and copious links. These sites are primarily aimed to get eyeballs to make money for the people putting up these sites. They are web spammers. Web spammers are very good at gaming rankings like these and defeating their purpose.

Community is measured differently by different people. Some measure it by the amount of participation in discussions. Some measure it by linking. Some measure it by blogrolling. But all these are, at best, indirect measures.

Direct measures may be no better. If our solution is merely to tag links by their relative importance, those tags are easy to spot and easy to fabricate for web spammers.

Peter Kaminski talks about the Network Map vs. Cocktail Party

This reminds me of Flickr's new interestingness feature, which can rank large sets of pictures by, well, interestingness, as demonstrated by more or less social cues. Social cues are key, because they illuminate what real people find interesting, instead of just statisticians (or marketers).

...

...there is lots of interesting stuff in any long tail. So while you may find a (biased) ranking scheme you like, and be happy with the top 100 most of the time, you (or the system you're using) also need to make sure you randomly see some of the long tail once in a while, to discover the interesting things your favored ranking system hasn't.

...

...a network graph that shows nodes and maybe does fancy node sizing based on rank and all that is cool, and fun to play with if it's interactive (in the same way sodaplay is fun to play with), but it doesn't tell me anything. It's hard for my monkey mind to parse the map.

A better metaphor, I think, is a cocktail party. I want to see faces, who's clustering with whom, and how the clusters evolve. Make me an animated picture of a cocktail party (or a tribal gathering, or a barn-raising), and that I'll get -- I've been evolved over thousnads of years to intuitively grok those kinds of social situations.

That's a very interesting idea.. what that would look like I don't know, and many bloggers are pseudominious and don't really want their pictures all online (not all of us are exhibitionists, in fact few of us are across 14m blogs).

Blog Business Summit: Metric Talk Slides

I was asked at the last minute to cover blog metrics at the Blog Business Summit on Friday, in place of Anil Dash, who had jury duty.

Here are slides from the presentation (ppt). The first 34 are Sally Falkow's, and the rest are my additions.

I did a basic presentation about metrics for describing and weighing blogs. These metrics are, as I've said before, very very alpha. Getting link counts or subscription numbers doesn't really show a blog's conversationalness in it's topic community. If a person is trying to get a sense of where an unfamiliar blogger is situated, and how involved they are in talking, those metrics just don't do much for you. They are measures of popularity.

Hopefully, the efforts to make a system of community clouds around topics, and weight participation, will help this problem of finding and contextualizing unknown bloggers.

Foo Bar Stuff

There is foo camp and there is bar camp. Feels like the adults are at foo camp, making deals, and the kids are at bar camp, making cool technology. Foo camp is by invite, for those who don't know, put on by O'Reilly as a business event for what appears to be deal making. Bar camp spontaneously ignited about a week ago making a place of anyone to show up and talk geek.

Bar camp has been really fun, energetic and free (donations by Dave Sifry and Stewart Butterfield for food and drinks, among other folks giving to the event, though Dave and Stewart are at foo camp). It's full of great ideas, great technology, enthusiasm, collaboration, the door is open and anyone can come in. It's spontaneous and youthful, exuberant, cutting edge, inclusive and very friendly.

A big thanks to Ross for playing janitor in the Socialtext offices. And to all the sponsors for their last minute donations. Nice!

I don't really care about this whole issue of who gets to go to foo camp, except to the extent that some bar campers have been upset by it. A few guys lashed out over the last few days on blogs and in conversations (those who feel strongly are all boys, whereas bar camp girls have barely noticed foo camp... it doesn't appear to exist for them... however, there are awesome girl geeks here, about 10 of whom are in the other room hacking together a new mobile app that totally rocks! And a bunch more in the back deconstructing drupal.) I don't think it's productive for the guys to complain, nor is it the point.

The issue was that Tim O'Reilly exposed his algorithm for selecting foo campers. The last part, called the bozo filter excludes people without telling them because they are annoying or possibly because another person complained about them in the past. It seems to have hit a nerve with a group of younger hackers, because they feel a sense of unfairness about it, as though it might get directed at them at some point. The other issue was the perceived threat to exclude anyone from future foo's for talking about the lack of invites. It just made a number of people feel badly.

The whole foo / bar rivalry is unfortunate and should fade away. Hopefully, next year's bar and foo will focus just on the opportunity to get together and have fun, hanging out with smart people and learning stuff, and for bar campers, hacking up some really great stuff.

Adina Levin on Conversation Clouds... And Mitch Ratcliffe responds with Cloudmakers R Us

Awesome stuff by Adina Levin on Conversation Clouds which I'm just going to repost:

The cloud would be a picture of a conversation surrounding a person or a topic. The picture would show the relationships between the participants in a conversation. The densest areas would represent people who frequently cross-reference each other over time.

You can start with a participant (the url of a person's weblog), or a search term (a word or tag) Nodes are clustered based on closeness, measured by number of links and reverse links over a period of time (comments, too, if you can measure them).

If the picture starts with a link, then that link is at the center of the picture. The picture shows the links between the first node and the other nodes, and between other nodes that are connected to each other.

If the picture starts with a word, topic, or tag search, then the cloud contains a cluster of blogs that include the term or tag in the last time period. The picture shows lines between blogs that link to each other. Unlinked blogs are thrown out.

The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month, six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps you re-center around that blog's conversations. If you click on a tag or topic, you search based on that. You'd need to experiment with several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud.

This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities.

Cloud-browsing represents a pattern of blogsurfing. A reader might start with Mary Hodder's post on blog metrics, and then traverse to Dina Mehta, danah boyd, Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield.

The cloud would show in graphical form what a Technorati or Blogpulse search would -- who linked to the post. And it would also illustrate the repeated links and cross-links as people reply. If you zoomed out the time horizon, you'd see some relationships become more obviously dense, with repeated patterns of links and counterlinks.

I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we're looking for -- a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation.

The results would be more interesting than a diagram of an email thread -- where participants already know who's talking to whom. It woudn't be particularly rankist, since webwide popularity isn't relevant to the picture. It would let you browse to related people, or related ideas that the same people are talking about.

The next step is to test this idea, maybe with a manually drawn picture, and then with a dataset and a toolkit like TouchGraph. This seems like a good experiment to me. It could be somebody's done this already. Or somebody's tried this and proved that it doesn't work. Please share if you know.

p.s. Zawodny talks about the need for content discovery. I don't know about you, but a lot of the content that I discover comes from browsing through a conversation and finding voices that I want to keep hearing.

And Mitch Ratcliffe, who has a company called Persuadio which visualizes relationships between data, responds with Cloudmakers R Us:

I've been following this discussion, mostly holding my tongue because it may look self-serving to respond with "here are the pictures you want of blog relationships" by pointing at the MyDensity site we've put together to show off the social analysis tools built by Persuadio. I also realize it would be incorrect, as we've focused on the big picture to the detriment of a small world.

Simply put, like many of the indexers, we've tried to capture the role of any blog or Web site in any conversation (being about more than blogs has been important to us from the very beginning). Meanwhile, it would have been simple all along to provide what Adina calls a "conversational cloud" that shows the relationships around a single posting or Web page. And, frankly, it took someone asking for that simple solution to realize it was the first thing we should have offered instead of trying to solve the really huge problems we're wrestling.

The current MyDensity maps show all the relationships around a blog, rather than the links to a single page (which we can do, but just hadn't).

Unfortunately, we hear often from customers that they want a "top" this or "top" that list and had decided to focus on that. With limited resources and real money coming from these people, we paid attention. It is what they are ready for.

The desire to see the big picture is endemic in a changing market. Top 10, Top 20 or Top 500 lists make a certain amount of sense if you are trying to aim for plain old low cost-per-thousand (CPM) or cost-per-impression advertising deals. Most advertising and marketing people aren't prepared to think outside the CPM box, and if they do, they think about relatively ineffective cost-per-click (CPC) ads.

The contours of this market are very poorly understood. ComScore, the Reston, Va.-based research firm, in an August 2005 report describes visitor traffic to the top blog hosting sites in aggregate even though the blogs hosted by those services, their authors and readers share few demographic or behavioral characteristics. For marketing and advertising purposes they are separate publications, not a monolith that can be compared to the traffic of the New York Times—however, ComScore does make that spurious comparison. Yes, more readers (ComScore does not distinguish between readers and bloggers visiting BlogSpot to author their own sites, confounding any attempt to characterize audience size) may visit BlogSpot in a month, but the information they are consuming and commenting on there is disorganized; by contrast, the editorially coherent sections of the New York Times create viable venues for addressing audiences with specific interests.

Marketers are stuck between that familiar composed environment of the Times, with all its shortcomings, and the apparent anarchy—from their perspective—of the blogosphere with all the opportunities it represents. Every discussion of a "top" list is predicated on mapping the reach of a site to the community around a blog or group of blogs. There's a hunger for something recognizable to grab hold of, which is why I keep harping on the question of how to get today's content owners to start across a bridge to content sharing.

If we can solve all these problems by laying out the flow of influence, the role of trust and conflict in discussions, magical things will happen to the marketplace of ideas.

When it comes to conversations about specific topics or just conversations between people, though, there are multiple dimensions of value, some personal—the kind of information in the clouds around a single posting—and some profoundly economic: If you can target advertising based on behavioral characteristics, the value of an ad can soar. If you know what people are talking about, you can guess why and position a contextually relevant and high-value CPC ad alongside the content of the page.

If the marketer were really radical, the ads would go away and the message, with all necessary disclaimers so that it would not pollute the content, would come through as part of the conversation.

When it comes to blogs, the content is so personal and bloggers so interested in understanding the intellectual currents around their writing, audio or video, that the first responsibility of a company that wants to be of service to the market is to be of service to the bloggers. So far, Persuadio has been of service to a couple customers, but if we cannot get more information to bloggers we'll forever be outside the market we most want to serve. For most of us bloggers, it really is about the neighborhood (Ross Mayfield's discussion of the Rule of 150 play well, even years later) we're talking with than our rank in the whole blogosphere (though such ranking is a guilty pleasure the honest blogger will cop to).

That said, as we map blogs we also map the rest of the Web and the relationships between all information, individuals and organizations we are often confused as primarily a mapping service rather than an analytics service. We want to offer information about who is talking, their relationships (even the hidden ones) so that everyone can judge ideas and movements based on the fullest information. We've been aiming at that, but thinking like an old-style analytics company, so we're going to change, but I hope you'll remember that there is a lot of social measurement going on in the background that have both social and economic value.

We'll have link clouds for you very shortly. Allow us a bit more time and we'll let you configure the variables of the map, so that you choose to include current or archival links in the calculation of influence, as well. We're awake to this, now.

Nice! Go look at Mitch's diagrams.. but you get the gist. It's just so cool.. I figured why rewrite, just put up their words!

More comments on...

a community based algorithm and the attendant issues...

Michael Frasse on Information authority and ranking:

Hodder says, rightly, that the metric for assessing weight in the blogosphere should be open, not closed. “Bloggers should have input about the importance of one social gesture over another,� she writes. “One metric over another, and know what it is that is included because it will be used to describe them.�

Kevin Burton has published an excellent response to Hodder that really advances the discussion. Burton has been working in this area since its inception (what, five years ago?) and has clearly been thinking about these issues. His main point seems to be that transparency in a blogosphere ranking and reputation system is problematic because of technological complexities and intellectual property barriers.

And Kevin may be right, but I think we should at least consciously talk about why something ought to be secret, and choose it, rather than just falling unconsciously into having a secret algorithm. I'd like to hear more about this, and discuss the reasons in the community, explicitly.

Barb Dybwad/The Social Software Weblog on Small is good, too: on quantifying connections:

There’s all this fixation on getting links, getting traffic, getting on the lists. Why? That’s about monetization, that’s about fame/celebritism, that’s about gaming a structure that uses heuristics to measure what is supposedly value. And distantly, it’s about having your voice heard — I get that. But it gets blown way out of proportion. We forget that getting on the Technorati 100, in the end, is supposed to be about getting your voice heard by the people you want to hear it — instead it just becomes yet another pissing contest.

But that’s an old model — it’s a vestige of the economics of scarcity, the analog world. The fact is, not everything I write needs to have a mass appeal. That’s precisely the beauty of the long tail.

It's a great post.. you should just read the whole thing. I only quibble with one statement:

If you want someone to pay attention to you, if you want to make a new connection, just ask.

Well.. if it means asking for a link from another blogger when they wouldn't have otherwise given that attention, it to me sounds like gaming the system, to get a higher link count to rise up the power curve, rather than putting our efforts to measuring conversation within topic communities. If it means really conversing with someone, and getting their attention that way, then I think it's great.

She finishes with this, which I very much agree with:

We don’t need to form new companies just so we can make new lists, in order to take action. We need to make new connections, and foster the connections that are honest, authentic and strong, as opposed to merely proliferating a bunch of opportunistic weak links.

I think making a representation of what we want to see measured and giving it to existing companies with existing databases in a community-company partnership is a great way to go.

Kevin Burton on Indexing and Blog Post Popularity:

My thinking is that we should write up how an ideal metric would recommend posts. The algorithm implementation problem is another discussion as this can be implemented in many different ways. The devil is in the details I'm afraid.

Kevin actually did a comprehensive response to my original post, much of which I'd thought of, but it was great to see his take on the same issues. I think that what is important right now it that the community discuss what it sees as important to weight in an algorithm, or system, to participate in the process. Oh, and Kevin, sorry I didn't get any of your response into my first post about what people were saying, as you were a really early responder. My mistake!

PC4Media on Blog Social Network Analysis:

Q: But, what happens when the scale gets bigger?

A: (Yes, I am interviewing myself.) Of the 250 odd people that read my blog and the 300 or so that have linked to it, how many of them are actually people that have a meaningful relationship with me? Or even just a two way relationship with me? How many of them know someone I know? Or 5 people that I know? Do those people have meaningful relationships with each other?

I have no freaking clue. But, damnit! I would love to know.

Jay Rosen, in the comments on Burningbird (where there is a fantastic discussion going on about this stuff):

what a blogroll “says� in my understanding of how to blog well, although I must add that people can and do use their blogroll for any damn thing they like. My point is it makes perfect sense to link to the post that is already in your conversational field (blogroll.) The idea that there is something basically corrupt about it is a fantastic suggestion, yet perfectly normal for this discussion.

But it is also worthwhile, I think, to reflect on what would seem to be “natural� linking practices, because they’re one way a blogger can get stuck in ruts, or become narrow minded without realizing it.

An excellent point.. because I think it's not just that we are not aware sometimes of our habitual behaviors in ourselves, but also, that any system has to take into account in some way the many 'kluges' many of us have developed, as early adopters as well as newbies, linking styles and 'technological workarounds' because blogging software just isn't that old. It's very early and we are still experimenting with lots of things. What appears from a blogger to be a social choice may be due to some funky piece of technology. It's yet another reason why I think having a public discussion where people talk about their habits and reasons for doing things is so useful, and will add to the solution.

Sarah Allen on The Value of Conversation

There was a time when the web was a small community. When I started working on web software in 1995, a search on Yahoo! would list a small number of results. I don't know whether the whole web was indexed, but I think they kept up with the majority of it. I could view most of the web pages on a topic that interested me and make my own choices about what was most interesting and credible. When the Shockwave player was released, we could view every Shockwave movie that was created as it came on-line.

As the web grew larger, it became more challenging to keep up. Thanks to the innovations of the search engines, we can do a quick search and find something relevant to our area of interest most of the time. However, with the creation of these search and ranking algorithms certain voices are omitted. I rarely look at more than a few pages of search results. Is it possible that the pages that would be most relevant to me might be later in the list? Or even worse, because of some artifact of gender use patterns could it be that pages more interesting to me will often be toward the end of the list?

I like the idea of tracking conversations instead of purely inbound links. If we had an alternate index that tracked only links from posts (rather than blogrolls and other collections), then we might see where conversations are happening. Adina Levin describes this as a cloud presentation.

My favorite IM from yesterday..

11:40 PM
Bad time - @ wedding drunk

Yes, mobile IM will take you anywhere.

Podding along

I have to say, I just love the pod- thing. I called Peter Hirshberg yesterday and he said hello by way of saying: "hodcasting!" .. made me laugh.

So Doc Searls has posted his second podcast, which I fell into during recording by IMing him.
He's edited it, and it's cute, what with 'the kid' talking all the way through, and Doc trying to figure out how to get all the parts of the audio system up and running.

Nice show. I listened to it while having breakfast today. Starting the day off with Doc and the kid is great.

More comments on a community based algorithm and the attendant issues...

...with Linkrank, the Technorati 100, A listers, and creating a dialog to move beyond it.

Tish G at Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams talks about trading links to create a vibrant community:

I love the community of voices on my blog, the different kinds of people, from men to mommybloggers to compulsive knitters. Linking back to them shows that in my own way I'm maintaining a vibrant community of interesting people who don't need to be in the same niche. It's more about Life than about one particular aspect or thing in life. Then again...that's just me being ecclectic and non-committal I guess ;-)

This may be true, that by linking on blogrolls, as we visit each other's blogs, we read those rolls to see the visible community. But additionally, Halley brings this up (and Tish responds) as she has been thinking about how to make more bloggers visible with inbound link counts by asking A-Listers to link to others. With this, she tries to define Noblesse Oblige:

There is a notion of NOBLESSE OBLIGE -- here's the definition -- it is the responsibility of those of high rank, power or nobility to be generous -- literally from the French "noblesse" nobility (being the queen) "oblige" obligates one. Nobility and rank obligates you to do selfless, generous acts.

Is it not generous of those of "high rank" in the blogosphere to blogroll someone?

Two things. One is that for now, a link is a link is a link. There is no differnce in Technorati's link count system of whether a linking blog is an A-lister or not, so really by this methodology, asking for and getting a link anywhere would help.

However, it concerns me that the reason we throw this solution out is to change the ranks of the less powerful. But in fact it doesn't change anything at all except for a few because in the end we are gaming the flawed system of *only* counting inbound links to the exclusion of all other metrics of conversation.

Maybe a better way to approach this issue is to define Robert Fuller's ideas around dignitarianism, where those in power don't abuse their power and the community creates solutions to problems as they arise. It seems to me that the solution to our rankist issues with inbound links is much more appropriately solved by changing the system, than by asking those who benefit from rankism to share some power with a few (there is no way A Listers have the time or the blogspace to do all the linking we would need to see to correct the problems of rankism with linking.)

Jonathan Carson at Buzzmetrics Mouthpiece:

One thing which I think might be interesting to add to the discourse, would be something around topicality. i.e. "influential on what?" Because BuzzMetrics is typically answering questions of influence within a commercial setting, we are rarely looking for "top bloggers." We are looking for "top influencers amongst wireless application developers who happen to be positively inclined towards the Linux platform."

This makes the problem much more complicated to solve, but would make it far more useful from a commercial standpoint. That may not be the goal of the open source ranking system that Mary recommends - but certainly that system would then be leveraged for such commercial purposes if it were to be built.

He is absolutely right that topics play a large role in figuring out communities of interest in order to find conversation, if in fact that proves to be the best way to go about this. However, I would dispute that the community proposal is a 'ranking system' but rather a community algorithm, based on topic communities. But I want to see this community algorithm, as both a description of communities, by topic, as well as community generated. So I'm looking for expressions of what communities mean to people, how they want to see those communities, and Jonathan's example community: 'wireless application developers who happen to be positively inclined towards the Linux platform' is great because it gives indications of his needs and desires for community, and in looking for influencers, linkrank would not tell him. Rather other factors will show this.

Christina's LIS Rant:

This seems a bit egocentric or even whiney at first glance, but keep in mind that 1) many bloggers are actually trying to help people and need to have readership to do it 2) many other bloggers are trying to sell ads.

Dina Meta in Blog Ranking and Popularity:

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?

How would you define and measure popularity in the blogworld? Can there be a robust quantitative measure? Does the blog software you use matter? Are links and comments and page visits and clicks good measures? How is stickiness measured?

I'd rather look at more qualitative measures (disclaimer : I am a practitioner of qualitative research) like relevance, integrity and credibility when you engage readers in your areas of interest, empathy generated, stretch in teasing boundaries, intimacy with your audience. A combination of respect and amicability. There was a good discussion about some of these issues at the opening session at BlogHer.

So I want to know what people feel are the measures of relevance, integrity and credibility? Interest and empathy generated, stretch in teasing boundaries, intimacy with your audience? Respect and amicability? How do we fold those in?

And Dina Meta again with Blog Ranking and Popularity (2):

I like this measure - "i enjoy their company" - maybe someone should use that as some form of index? There are some bloggers who come up with really 'popular' posts which get linked to heavily - they may be 'popular' in a mechanized sense, but it isn't always the case that they make for relevant reads most of the time. There's value in what Alok says as it may lend itself to a more holistic approach - if someone loves hanging out at your blog, enjoys your company through conversations there, that's the best measure for me. It is what builds my network and community in ways that are far more compelling than from just links I may generate.

I like it too, but what is it that bring us to an understanding of 'enjoying your company' if that is a standard we want to include?

Somewhat Frank suggests that blogs be divided into three categories in order to help solve the problem:

• Primary: General consumer blogs, such as teen blogs, family blogs, and other personal blogs (i.e. My Space, etc.).

• Secondary: Business blogs...purely-for-business blogs. They exist to sell products and services and are usually tied to companies or organizations.

• Tertiary: Serious bloggers, or as John describes them those "who talk endlessly about "the blogosphere". Recognize them? They are serious bloggers, info-providers, probloggers, A, B, and C-listers, people who use blogs to sell themselves and their ideas ~ what H.G. Wells called "the originative intellectual workers".

Mitch at Ratcliffe blog asks this question in regard to news, but links to the post, so I assume he means it to apply to both news and blogs:

I reiterate my question: How do you create a measurable connection between producer and customer, one with sufficient transparency and give-and-take that enables a debate that would actually improve the value, truth and usefulness of the news today?

And Halley again, recounting Doc's notion that the internet is intrinsically feminine (Britt Blaser was the first to actually tell me this a year or so ago and I think it's pretty insightful):

Even the word "LINK" is not neutral. It describes the way the brain synapses work. It describes the way the Net was built. It describes an attitude of distributed SHARED intelligence. It's funny to remember what Doc concluded -- it's so FEMALE, the Net is so feminine, as is the notion of sharing power in a networked structure. (Ever heard of a "family?")

Wondiring on Blog Social Network Analysis:

Blogging is only ostensibly publishing and syndicating thoughts to an unknown audience, and really more about pinging your friends (via links, trackbacks, etc) about your thoughts on what they're thinking or to get their thoughts on what you're thinking. I blog knowing that I probably only have a couple regular readers (who I in turn read each day) and I'm really just talking to them, and anyone else who wants to stop by I suppose. In that sense, it's a very organic SN.

To me that sounds like a nod to conversation, but I may be mistaken.

Adina Levin at Book Blog notes that clouds of blogs by topic, with some sort influence weight, might solve this problem:

Time would be an interesting factor. Perhaps one could view the cloud by week, month, or year. See how participation ebbs and flows over time. A longer time frame would be interesting -- I wonder whether other bloggers are "bursty" in their topics of interest. A long time frame would catch people who come and go.

And Library Clips notes:

We have to be mindful that incoming links score high with what is important to our contemporary culture…if war, gadgets, politics, etc…are important or topical within our culture, then these types of posts will get you high on the list.

We need to help the emergence of important blog content that is absorbed in the long tail (just because of lack of incoming links, and the specificity of the topic)…how do we expose these types of blogs….I think top blogs by topic, by comments, etc…is a start.

Sour Duck notes the value of the image from Paris in making the subject more interesting. Thanks much!

And thanks to Jonathan at Buzzmetrics Mouthpiece for the little plug, noted on his blog recommending 'HodderNot' as the name for this effort .. and PC4MEdia's buying of "amihoddernot.com" ... cute! Not sure that's right for this whole thing (it shouldn't be about me) but I love your spirit.

I take this as a vote of confidence and support in the effort!

The Speaker's Wiki

It's really coming along, and as I discover more and more amazing folks with terrific expertise, I think this project has a chance of changing speaker's lists at conferences. So far there are 108 people speakers!

Many more people have been adding and updating themselves. As I find people I add them too.

And pivoting on categories gets some interesting people. Look at DRM or municipal wireless or photography or open source (wow.. that one has gobs of amazing women!)

Please keep adding yourselves, comment on others as speakers and list events in the speakers area.

Also, check out the Blogher story about how they found their speakers.

WARNING

I'm interrupting regularly scheduled programming to warn about eBay fraud. Two friends in the past five days, experienced techies, were solicited for sales, after they were the second highest bidders (one wonders if the first bidder was real and realized the scam, or they were a set up to create the scam on the #2 bidder).

One was for $2300 and one for $1800. The first one I found out about (Sunday) was a situation where my friend got an email saying the first bidder couldn't complete the transaction, so the seller wondered if she wanted the item. They did the whole email thing outside the eBay system, instead of using the inhouse mail system. She thinks the seller may have hacked eBay to get her outside email, and then, wanted to do a cash payment through Western Union instead of using paypal or escrow. Many crazy payment suggestions later from the seller, all of which she nixed, until she realized it was fraud. She lost no money, but all the reply addresses on his email were set to appear as if he were using the eBay email system, but underneath, it was his own email.

The second case is nearly the same, but this person actually lost the $1800 today.

I hate paypal, but frankly, use that, or escrow, or a credit card to protect yourself. eBay has become really crazy for honest users. The reputation system is so pressurized for 'perfect' feedback, that it's very hard to leave anything but 'perfect A++++++++ best transaction every conducted' feedback, which for me means the person drove the item straight from Kansas to Berkeley to hand deliver it. For regular UPS, I'm more inclined to say things like 'things were normal, nothing weird happened, good luck!' The alternative to the perfect feedback is only something really really bad. There is no in-between, so it's harder to tell if the person has the 'perfect A++++++++' rating that flaky behavior is coming until you experience it yourself.

Good luck!

Lotta Linkin Going On.. Or Not

I wanted to summarize some of the very interesting things people have been saying about making a community based algorithm for understanding topic communities in my post Saturday, Link Love Lost.

Elisa Camahort at Worker Bees Blog:

... all of this talk and tempest around some relatively new companies and their tools makes me wonder why people don't get as up in arms about discussing the algorithms behind general Internet search tools. Oh yes, people occasionally compare their positions on Google vs. MSN vs. Yahoo search, but there's little accusation associated with those comparisons.

Why is that?

...

3. Most important: they don't provide an accounting of the links they are using to calculate their rankings.

Why is this last one important...because it removes the incentive to link to sites simply to get their attention and potential links back. Look, from a publisher's perspective it's great to see who's linking to you. Understood. But it also encourages people to link to the "top" blogs because a) they hope to be noticed by said blogs and b) when someone looks at the top blogs, they can see who's linking to them, and the linker will be on that list...and therefore might hope to be noticed that way too, even if said top blog doesn't link back to them.

The point of counting links is to calculate relevancy. But the results are distorted because the very transparency of the web of linking in the blog community encourages dishonest linking patterns....

In blog search, the point of counting link *sources* (which is what Technorati does to make link rank.. and the top 100 of those end up on the Top 100 list) is about what Technorati calls "authority." This is different than relevancy. It may or may not get a searcher anywhere near relevancy as they search for a term or URL, and relevancy is far harder and more complex than counting link sources that link to a blog.

I know it's heretical to make any argument for opacity in the blog environment, but a little more of it might lead to more authenticity in our blogging, and in the search tools for blogs.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to talk about every aspect of this, including creating an opaque standard, if that's the best solution.

Eric at CollabuTech:

There are many implications for the corporate blogosphere. How do you measure the worth of contributions? How do you help people find "blogmates" who have affinity for and knowledge of similar topics? Do you encourage a particular pattern of linking? What norms do you establish?

Is worth something we want to establish, or do we want to let readers retain responsibility for judging what they read?

Shelly at Burningbird:

Yesterday, Mary released her new effort to identity alternate algorithms based on a dinner she had with Ross, Doc Searls, Halley Suitt, and others in Paris a couple of months ago. It’s a very detailed and thoughtful post, and I respect the amount of work she put in it, but it seems to me that no matter how much the community is involved in this effort, it’s just propagating the same problems, because the issue isn’t about technology, it’s about people and how we behave.

...

think Mary should stop with …I hate rankism. I understand the motivations behind this work, but ultimately, whatever algorithm is derived will eventually end up replicating the existing patterns of ‘authority’ rather than replacing them. This pattern repeated itself within the links to Jay Rosen’s post; it repeated itself within the speaker list that Mary started for women (�where are the women speakers�), but had its first man within a few hours, and whose purpose was redefined within a day to include both men and women.

Rankings are based on competition. Those who seek to compete will always dominate within a ranking, no matter how carefully we try to ‘route’ around their own particular form of ‘damage’. What we need to challenge is the pattern, not the tools, or the tool results.

She's right.. whenever there is a measurement, a power law develops where those at the top sit and the rest bend their behaviors toward them, trying to attain top status they don't have. Link counts mean people change their behavior to get more links. It's not the spammers I fear, but us.

But if we get rid of rankings, and instead see topic based communities with long standing conversation, can we get out of some of that power law dynamic? I'm not sure. Maybe not. Maybe we must simply refuse the metrics all together. I think it's an open question.

Stowe Boyd at Get Real:

Instead of developing a single, open source, mega algorithm for determining blog value, how about developing a simple standard for publishing blog metrics so that individuals or groups could easily collate various sorts of interesting metrics about blogs into meta-indices?

For example, imagine that I were to create an online solution, let's call it Blognetter, that would discover the centrality of any given blog in the implicit social network that the blog is part of (this would be a very useful tool, by the way). Pointing Blognetter at Get Real would discover links from Get Real to Mary's, Doc's, and Ross' blogs, and vice versa. Using various parameters, it would rapidly determine a network that defines a community, of some number of hops via links away from Get Real. Blognetter would calculate that Get Real is connected to and from a specific number of those other blogs. That service could then provide that data in an agreed upon XML format.

...

...a collating service, let's call it RankOut, could aggregate these various feeds related to Get Real, and any RankOut user could override the default weighting built into RankOut. RankOut may "know" what the feeds "mean" in a sense -- the builders of RankOut may be aware of the point of Blognetter, for example....

And lastly, specific rating services -- the Robert Parkers of the blogosphere, if you will -- could then publish their ratings, based on what they deem to be most important....

These are interesting suggestions.. I'd like to see topic communities, as I proposed in my post, with a conversation weighting.. that would show conversationalness over time. But as Shelly points out, people will behaviorally lean toward any system, no matter what it is. As for ranking people, I have real trouble with that. Even Robert Parker acknowledges that people just look at the wine scores (90+ means they buy the wine without reading the review). I think rating each other would produce crazy results, where just like junior high, we were all so concerned about being popular. For me, the value lies in understanding cohesive communities.

Rachel at License to Roam:

The Technorati Popularity list - you can ignore it, love it or hate it for lots of reasons. It's the equivalent of the All-time greatest hits chart, looking at total number of links over time. But just because Elvis or The Beatles would always be on top of the charts looking at total sales, does not mean they would be on the chart if there was a smaller timescale.

...

(In response to Jason Calcanis' bounty of $50k for a better ranking tool) I'd add another requirement - the ability to slice and dice by category/metadata. That of course would need the categorising data to be collected from the blogs or when blogs are registered with the search services, but I can see the need to be able to assess 'popularity' with a niche, ie movie blogs, music blogs etc. But that's a longer term desire.

But is it popularity within a niche? Or do we have metrics to show conversation, collaboration, interest? I totally agree with wanting to see topic communities.

In putting this challenge up, you could argue that Jason is acting in the 'old model', or, more likely the 'male model'. There's a problem, here's a solution, throw money at it and get it fixed my way. This is in contrast to the more collaborative, discussion based way I see Mary Hodder's proposal developing. So is Jason just perpetuating the male domination of the space by making more lists based on popularity? I don't think so; he's trying to make what we have (a subjective, measurable analysis) better and is prepared to encourage it.

I don't see the link count and the corresponding rank as necessarily male, but rather as a legacy media model. However, legacy media measurements are were developed at a time where men completely ran that business. So they naturally reflect that point of view. Now that digital media allow us to measure things easily in many more ways, and we have many more styles of blogging than just those that fit legacy media paradigms, why not figure out better ways to discover interesting communities and discussions?

danah boyd at M2M and Apophenia on the biases of links:

There are a few things that we know in social networks. First, our social networks are frequently split by gender (from childhood on). Second, men tend to have large numbers of weak ties and women tend to have fewer, but stronger ties. This means that in traditional social networks, men tend to know far more people but not nearly as intimately as those women know. (This is a huge advantage for men in professional spheres but tends to wreak havoc when social support becomes more necessary and is often attributed to depression later in life.)

And yet, in all of these systems, a link is a link is a link.. with no distinction for type, or network ties, or styles of linking.. or God forbid, types of links (as in no-vote, + or - in the rel tags -- who knows what a blogger means when they use those tags).

While blog linking tends to be gender-dependent, the number of links seems to be primarily correlated with content type and service. Of course, since content type and service are correlated by gender, gender is likely a secondary effect.

Interestingly, there are distinct clusters of norms with linking in blogging, not a coherent and consistent one. The search engines (and the Technorati 100 and PubSub’s Daily 100 Top Links) are validating one of those clusters, regardless of whether or not that is what searchers are looking for. The Top 100 is a list of blogs who either fit into those norms or have adopted those norms in their patterns (most commonly the companies).

...

These services are definitely measuring something but what they’re measuring is what their algorithms are designed to do, not necessarily influence or prestige or anything else. They’re very effectively measuring the available link structure. The difficulty is that there is nothing consistent whatsoever with that link structure. There are disparate norms, varied uses of links and linking artifacts controlled by external sources (like the hosting company). There is power in defining the norms, but one should question whether or companies or collectives should define them. By squishing everyone into the same rule set so that something can be measured, the people behind an algorithm are exerting authority and power, not of the collective, but of their biased view of what should be. This is inherently why there’s nothing neutral about an algorithm.

Very interesting stuff. Keeping this in mind as we discuss what we make will be key to gaining something we consciously want to describe ourselves.

Assaf at LabNotes:

Start with this blog, use it as context and search for the keyword ‘blog’. First observation, there’s a lot of links coming out of this blog. Most are links to sources I find interesting, relevant, authoritative. Others may disagree, but in this particular context, my outbound links rule. Anything these sources have to say about ‘blog’ should be ranked highest.

One problem with outbound links are that they are extraordinarily susceptible to spam. However, we have to deal with that anyway, so thinking about how we weight outbound links is valuable.

Second observation, those blogs link to other blogs, which they find interesting, relevant, authoritative, etc. So that’s a second hop that increases the sphere of relevance. Repeat enough times and you’ll spider the entire Web, something to do with six degrees of separation. But now we’re just duplicating Google.

There may be a way to derive who uses whom for filters, but this may be reflected in RSS subscriptions and reading habits. However, there are serious identity, privacy and data ownership issues (users should, in my opinion, own their data) to figure out first before we can think about using this kind of information.

Third observation, limit the number of hops to a small set (say six), and decrease relevance in proportion to distance. So a blog four degrees of separation ranks less than a blog two degrees of separation. Interesting patterns start to emerge.

Link decay is a very interesting idea. PubSub does it now, but it's not clear to me yet what the effects are. However, I plan to discuss it with them so that I can understand it better. Bob Wyman explains more in this post.

The Vision Thing with Enough with the Lists:

...Mary Hodder's post about "better algorithms" (sorry to generalize, but my eyes glazed over and I have yet to read the whole thing), and in a nutshell, I’m really sick to death of "lists." If you've seen one Top N list, you've seen them all. Wake me when there's a list that actually conveys something interesting.

This is not about making a single list. This is about making a metric that takes several factors into consideration, to find topic groups who consistently talk about something. At least, that's what I first proposed in my eye glazing post (sorry about that). However, that may not be what we end up with, as I believe the community should decide what it wants. If something else is better, let's try it.

Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts

A discussion about creating a new metric for understanding blogs is something I think the community should have the chance to participate in to find a different way of perceiving a blog, or the ripples a blog makes. Partly I believe this because of the frustration people express about Google's secret algorithm for pagerank, where they feel something this powerful should not be secret (update: the algorithm is not secret but the ordering of the search results is secret). And partly because I see that blogging is a opportunity for people to talk transparently, so why shouldn't the algorithm used to express our weight in the blogosphere also be open. Bloggers should have input about the importance of one social gesture over another, one metric over another, and know what it is that is included because it will be used to describe them. And also, I cannot assume that the ways I read blogs is the same as everyone else, so I'd rather have a community algorithm in the sense that the community has commented on the weight of some metrics over others within the algorithm, and not just assume that the ways I or others weight these gestures in our blog search are correct for everyone.

A closed algorithm is purported to be a kind of spam control, as opposed to an algorithm that is open. But a community based standard means the community can help police those that try to game it, if we put in place mechanisms to flag those who abuse the system. Transparency as it exists in open source software, and as it should exist here, is the opposite of security by obscurity. But creating this is also an experiment, and help is needed in order to make creating a community based algorithm possible.

Currently, blogs are measured in systems like Technorati or ranked in PubSub by links or by number of subscribers to a feed in Feedster. In particular, these are the not very interesting, subtle or telling measures used to make indexes like the Technorati Top 100 or the PubSub 100 or the Feedster 100. In Particular, the Technorati Top 100 is based purely on inbound links. All of these lists tend to favor those who blog in more general, popular topic areas, and not those who are specialists in an area.

For many bloggers the relevant sphere of influence is not overall popularity, as those indexes express. It's influence and connection within a community. And the relevant measure of connection isn't the number of connections -- it's the depth and impact of those connections. This is about celebrating the niche, and measuring engagement over time.

Links alone are not a good metric for authority. There are several reasons for this. But the most important, I think is that as consequence for the blogosphere, it harms the way people see blogging. People know some bloggers want influence; many bloggers know they want it too, though many others don't want it at all. Counting links is very much like counting subscriptions to magazines in order to sell ads, as far as comparing it to a number not reflective of what is actually going on with the media it's meant to reflect. Link counts alone are an analog media model, but online media is dynamic, and what is digital often has the possibility of getting much closer to finding smaller, more granular, and more interesting ways of perceiving things, that are much more interesting, and orthogonal to legacy media models counting eyeballs.

I should also be clear that this effort, and the discussions I've been a part of this topic do not have the goal to make another list to replace the Technorati Top 100 or the Pubsub Link Rank 100 or the Feedster list, or any other top (insert #) list. Rather, this is about going beyond lists and links, to understand that the social relationships of expression between and across blogs is really about searching for a "metric for identity" or "metric for affiliation", "metric for community", or "metric for influence".

So a couple of months ago, at a dinner at Les Blogs, a group of us (including Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls and Halley Suitt among others) talked about what it would mean to make an index that could give a clearer sense of a blogger's reach and influence, that might upend the inbound link counts to give some clarity to what is now opaque and hard for us to see blogs we are unfamiliar with but want to find context. Actually, the service was taking a while, and with 30 or so bloggers in the room, eventually things turn to blogging. We started talking about the issue of inbound links and how, counted up and reported as a kind of "attention index," as a show of interest or attention or conversation, they weren't very interesting or telling on their own, partly because they lump together all types of links, no matter when the links were made or where they are from (blogrolls or posts).

Part of what we want is a rich user generated ontology resulting in topic groups that is constantly adjusting to find what's delightful, useful, interesting across blogs. And a more complex metric for understanding those topic groups and individual users as they blog memes and interact with each other, with some context around those bloggers, would help quite a bit.

This issue came up again in force at Blogher where the opening discussion talked about how to play, or not play, the link game. Much of the room was, to one degree or another, very frustrated with using inbound link counts as an expression of attention, and how the derivation of "A list" bloggers comes from that, ignoring the many blogs that are very influential or conversational in their topic areas.

To automate this process, or create a score, is to judge the stone by the ripples in the pond. Right now, the Technorati Top 100 list is obtuse enough that we can all agree that it's not useful for judging 14 million blogs, because blogs are as different as their authors and those who would make a link rank for a person in one's topic community. As for lists of bloggers based on the number of subscribers, like the Feedster Top 100, we know that in this instance, the list is a count only those users of Feedster, so it reflects a small percentage of overall readers.

So I hear people dismiss the current indexes all the time. By doing so, we let the opacity of inbound links counts be a barrier to rankism or scoring that we don't really want to make more precise. The obtuseness is useful because it's can't be relied upon, and therefore the confusion as to the value of a blog is left to be determined by readers through their own methods, by those who look on their own for the ripples across blogs, combined with some reading of the blogs. And this may make many people happy. For me, I would rather have people do their own assessment of my blog because they read it or participate in discussions I am in, seeing what the activity is around it, to judge it, verses relying on a score or count of inbound links.

However, I'm beginning to see many reports prepared by PR people, communications consultants etc. that make assessments of 'influential bloggers' for particular clients. These reports 'score' bloggers by some random number based on something: maybe inbound links or the number of bloglines subscribers or some such single figure called out next to each blog's name. The bloglines measure in particular is not a great one on it's own, because RSS aggregator users are reported to be only approximately 20% of the blog readers, though I believe it's really half that, because my own user studies show that many who are asked if they use an RSS aggregator say yes, when in fact they don't know what it is (they just think they should know, so they answer yes to the question of whether they are users). And of those RSS aggregator users (I think it's 10% of blog readers), and of those, 50% supposedly use Bloglines. But my own assessment of Bloglines is that maybe 60% of their accounts are probably used regularly (not abandoned or very rarely checked), so if they have 35% of the RSS reader market, a Bloglines score might only reflects 3.5% of the total blog reading market -- a very low sample to judge the readership of a blog generally. Using the Bloglines count only counts users of that aggregation service. As a point of comparison, Bloglines shows 20k subscribers of BoingBoing, but Feedburner has 1.2 million subscribers to the BoingBoing feed itself, because they produce the feed, though those counts are only discoverable to the blog owner currently.

And these kinds of counts may or may not reflect the actual readership because users may not necessarily open the feed or posts. On the other hand, I think you do have to weight RSS users a little more heavily because right now, as that user base tends to be early adoptors, influencers, and a market that also tends to be the blog writer set. However, this won't always be the case. And I'm not confident that these PR/Communication agencies understand how to read this kind of information, and while it's one thing to gage the influence of a blogger who writes about their clients by reading the post, it's another to make decisions to send sponsorship or advertising based upon these kinds of measurements.

So the tension is, do we in the blogosphere figure out a more sophisticated, open standard based metric that reflects the way we see blogs, within and across communities, in order to score blogs? And do we do this within topic areas? Or does using a more sophisticated algorithm across all blogs make more sense? Or do we allow this all to be done for us, possibly in an opaque way by some of the blog search engines or by people who are trying to figure out blogger influence and communities for their clients, or do we write off those efforts because we know they cannot possibly understand us anyway?

I have to say, I've resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others. What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I'm seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I'm at the point where I'd like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us.

If we are going to do this, I think the algorithm has to be open source, at least as far as the weighting of social gestures and what gestures are to be included. Many people are upset that page rank is secret, and that something so powerful online is not open to scrutiny by the community it ranks. So this is an attempt to have the community determine the social weighting as it goes into algorithm, and have it be transparent to the community.

At the Les Blogs dinner, a group of us made a list of things we might include in this algorithm. This list is an attempt to figure out what things we look at when we're trying to figure out where a blog is at, in terms of interest, conversation and value:

I think a newly made blogroll link now, in the age of 14,000,000+ blogs is far more telling of community and interest, than a blogroll link made five years ago when there were 100,000 blogs (in other words, few choices about where to link). And of course, links made in posts, which are more indicative of conversation or immediate attention about specific topics, are lumped in as well, with the same weight as a blogroll link, for the indexes we have now.

So.. below is a list based on the earliest discussion, but it really needs refinement and input on what is important, how it could be expressed and I'm looking for feedback to help define these issues better to help get the best set of social gestures weighted in the ways we see them across blogs for a community based algorithm.

A new metric could balance links with these other representations of activity (not all are available, but if we want them, we should ask tool builders and data aggregators to get these kinds of information for us). Note that many of these are subject to spam, and spam controls for them are implemented by the companies that track this stuff. Using a metric that incorporates those will require additional spam controls.

So then.. we talked about how important those kinds of information are us as we evaluate a blog or post, and then whether or not there was a number associated with that particular information or a ratio between two sorts of information that might be interesting, and whether it's information we have, and what we might do with it.

A new metric could balance links with the following items in this chart:

We wanted to see these measures used in an algorithm that balanced the weight of each social gesture, put against large data sets to see whether the resulting score or characterization felt right against what we know about blogs as readers and writers. One thing to consider is that some data sets are made up of spidered data (including blogrolls), while others are made up of RSS feed information (some partial and some whole posts, but there are no blogrolls in RSS feeds) and some are a blend. So we would want to adjust the algorithm for different types of data sets.

So this is my first post think about making an open source algorithm. And I'm wondering, is this a useful approach? I think it could be worthwhile, done right, and I put it out there to the blogging community to determine what is best here. As I said, after seeing what people who want to work with smaller topic communities are doing, it may be in blogger's interest to think about how this might be done so that is it more in keeping with the desires and views of the blogosphere.

Blogher: Getting it by being a listener

I was thinking today that really, I have to give Scott Rafer, Jay Rosen and Mena Trott a lot of credit. Different reasons. But I give them a lot of credit.

All three showed up to Blogher and listened. All three of them weren't so busy that they came late, or left early, or had other plans.

Jay flew out from NY to check it out, and he asked a lot of questions, was genuinely interested and warm, and really cared about what people had to say. He does this everywhere I see him, but a lot of other bloggers who report didn't show up at all, and so, I give him some credit for wanting to know first hand how things are a little different for female bloggers than they are for men, although not always. And he was there to figure out the subtleties around these differences, to learn.

Scott, as CEO of Feedster, could have been too busy making deals or come in late and leave early or yaking on cell, but instead he came down from SF for the Friday night dinner, spent time talking to folks, listening mostly, as I observed each time I saw him engaged with attendees in a very quiet, respectful way. And saturday, he was there early, stayed late, never discussed Feedster in a session, and listened in really such a nice way.

I didn't see any other management from any other blog search companies. Yes, Technorati sent Niall Kennedy, its community manager. But it's not really the same as sending the decision makers to hear first hand what's up with people, to listen and take in the subtitles, to allow people to tell them in their own words what they think, instead of getting the filtered version from others, 2nd hand. Over 50% of the attendees had never been to a conference like that before. It was their first shot at it. They aren't geeky. They aren't early adoptors. They are the future target market of many online companies.

I think it's really important to hear how attendees aren't well informed (read it this way: companies online overall do a really sucky job of communicating with users on those company sites, and designing services that make sense to people other than geeks and early adopters. This audience was misinformed because they have never been given good information from most of these companies). They also have intense emotions, expectations and connections to blogging, blog search and discovery and blog tools, because it is their mode of self expression, a tangible route to freedom and something they spend serious time engaged with. How this happens for these attendees was often deep in the subtext flowing underneath their statements. Getting that subtext was important. I haven't seen many blogposts that conveyed even a couple of those subtexts.

Mena I only saw Saturday, but she spoke from the heart, during the opening session, and otherwise, that I could tell, listened to what people had to say. She talked about not really wanting to be CEO after a while, because she was 26 (subtext: why in the world does she even have to defend this, and she's right) and being happy to have Barak run things while she evangelized the company. She talked about being a woman in public view and being criticized publicly (often it appeared to be for the same stuff men never are criticized for, when they form and run companies).

But I give those three credit because they took the time, spent the money, and came down and mostly listened, only talking once or twice to share their personal, helpful or heartfelt observations and experiences. It was very very cool. I could name a list a mile long of people who make, or hope to make their companies successful based on these types of attendees, that didn't show. Their companies would be better for having have showed, without an agenda, ready to listen and take it in.

The Speaker's Wiki: I need your help!

I just blogged the Speaker's Wiki in my previous post. But I wanted to explain a little more about it and what it is.

First, it is an open wiki for anyone to post themselves or another speaker. There is an alphabetical list of speakers, but that presumes you know who to look for or have the time to read through peoples information by name. However, with Categories, conference organizers can find people with expertise in art or law or who are researchers or CEOs (yes.. many executive conferences want CEOs or high level executives to talk). I encourage you all to add new categories (which are really tags) to allow people to be found this way.

I've seeded it with about 50 women, but I want men and women to be put themselves up. The goal is to show conference organizers that when they are looking to have a panel or talk on an area that there are many folks to choose from. I will be adding more men, but this effort comes from a need we discussed at Blogher, where organizers often say they can't think of any women who are expert enough to talk, or they just chose those they could find in their usual circles.

I want to broaden the circles, get more voices out there and make more opportunities for all of us. The wiki is also an effort to make information explicit and easily edit-able by anyone, that in the past has often been locked up in Speaker Service Bureaus. Those are often about money, but there is a kind of power in speaking. People chosen to speak do interesting things or are in high level positins, which they are asked to discuss. This is followed by those at the talk who blog it or come up to ask about future projects and ideas, further causing those speakers to become known as thought leaders in their fields. And then, they get asked again to speak, lead projects, join advisory boards, etc. Also, often men ask to speak but women don't know to ask, or don't feel invited, or don't know about the events to begin with, so organizers need to reach out a bit if they want to cover more than the white male perspective. It's a fine perspective, but we also have the whole rest of the world out there with interesting things to say.

The speaker's wiki is one way to get us moved beyond the rut we are in, with too few speakers asked to talk over and over, and not enough new voices. And it is a way to find people based on their expertise, verses having to know them by name. Once a potential speaker is found, there is an opportunity to find out more by going through the usual word-of-mouth channels.

So go add yourselves or others you think want to speak!

Also, a HUGE thanks to Socialtext for hosting this wiki, contributing once again to the community by sharing their wares for the public good!

Update: if you are having trouble getting in to the wiki, email me at mary at hodder.org.

Blogher: Observations, gratifications and goals..

Saturday at Blogher was an amazing experience. And high in contrast to my usual experience with the conferences I usually attend, which are mostly men. Men's conversational style at events is often competitive and not very sharing of information. Over time, I've learned to share information and develop strong ties with many of those men, without competing, but rather by having interesting conversations. But at Blogher, which was 80% women, my style of conversing at my usual conferences would not go over, even if not competitive. This was a much more collaborative scene, and listening proved to be the most interesting thing, and the best way to connect with all the many amazing women there.

Although. I did talk. In the morning session during the session that was essentially about inbound link counts for bloggers. After 45 minutes of intense anger and frustration from many audience speakers in the room toward Technorati link counts and top 100, I suggested we create a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. It's something I've been working on for few months, trying to frame, about what this problem is and how we might solve it. But it's a complex issue and I'm also busy. So it's taken a while. However, my blog post is almost done, and I do plan to put it up in the next day or so.

So.. the first session was a debate about "playing by the rules" which refers to the inbound link count rules, where A-listers who've been around for a long time have so many links, and get the most attention and credibility due to the Technorati Top 100 list.

I pointed out to them that 4 or so years ago.. when there were only 100k blogs, that a relatively small group of people all linked to each other in blogrolls, and so those blogroll links are sometimes old and the networks dense, for A listers, and yet, Technorati doesn't do anything to express a blogroll link that is years old from a current blogroll link. They simply scrape the front page of a blog, and treat all links, old or new blogroll links, and current post links, as the same and then count them, for their rankings.

People in the audience didn't realize this, and I could see it was helpful to know more. But then I suggested the community algorithm. People really liked that idea, because it gives us a constructive way forward to find new ways to express conversation and influence in the blogosphere.

In the afternoon closing session, which was far less angry and much more about appreciating the amazing experience of spending a day with hundreds of women who blog, many people again spoke. It was there that I suggested that we make a speakers list. Then when conference organizers say they have mostly male speakers because they can't think of anyone else, or that male speakers lists are due to a lack of interesting others to invite, we can point them to the wiki and say, there are women who are experts in their fields do interesting things and they should be here speaking! Now, there really is no excuse.

This list, made on a wiki donated by Socialtext (thank you, thank you, thank you!!!), has been seeded with a few women I know, or met at the conference. However, it is far from complete, and I need the community's help to get it going.

Please list yourself, male or female, and list categories so that you can be searched by areas of expertise. Look at the profiles already there for examples.

I feel strongly when there are problems, that we identify them, and express frustration, but that soon after, we get to work on fixing them. I hope these two ideas get us closer to moving toward many industry conferences with more accomplished and amazing women who represent other points of views, and other ways of accounting for the blogosphere than inbound link counts.