Internet – Page 79 – DECISION STATS

An open source and better Search Engine

Search Engines are difficult subjects to talk about � there are multiple experts and there are multiple vendors from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Cuil and there are newer innovations like Cosmix -Blended Search and there are Wiki Search (Including the Digg bar and same features introduced in Google now). Content itself has exploded from websites in 1999 to websites, blog posts, RSS feeds, tweets, Facebook profiles, online communities, voice, podcast and video. Quantitative measures to measure, index and rank the new types of content require that the algorithms behind search be made open source but with strict creative commons licensing and using third party developers to create search algorithm extensions.

This idea seems difficulty to implement but it has been there and done before. No one creates Palo Alto like research labs anymore- all scientist and researchers have to first sign away �copy"cat�rights before beginning their research.

The year 2009 is different from the year 1999, and PageRank is no longer a maths based algol- it is a marketing brand. Time for the Stanford dropouts to go back to school and get some more math and some less marketing (and less pranks on Wolfram please) in their search engine. And Paul Allen who created the building in Stanford where the Google algol was first thought, he needs to spend some Bills and venture fund a new wave of innovation in search engines. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe. I just need a better search engine than Google right now.- Perhaps Herr Schmidt take some time from viewing mountains in Mountain View and measure customer satisfaction instead of just measuring market share in non competitive and likely to face anti trust scrutiny in US and Europe very soon. So better give some of the ranking algol features open so all websites implement the SEO tactics magically revealed and create a better world wide web- thus negating the information asymmetry in a closed source search engine.

An E Book Review

Here is a nice e book I got from my colleagues at The Customer Collective. I really really loved the friendly design making this a very easy e-book to read unlike other self help books. It has tips from 11 top sales experts in how to sell in that specific sector during a recession- and these are not essays but nice bullet point specific action items. Hat tip to the editor and the authors here.

You can download the ebook here

Working Together -Yuuguu

Here is a nice software called Yuuguu. I really liked the software because it enables sharing of screens so we can have secure virtual meetings, it is quite light on processor and memory , and best of all it works across Ubuntu 64 bit, Windows XP, Mac OS .

So if you want to work on a project team that sit across the seven seas and the big pond, and you feel the best way is to talk through a demonstration rather than give a documentation � then Yuuguu is the right software for you. The worst part of this software — is probably the name. And yes it is free and has a paid version as well.

See www.Yuuguu.com

terrific Tr.im trims Tweet time

Okay, the title of the post was bad attempt at a haiku. But the tr.im plugin for Firefox is incredible and helps you tweet interesting reading in matter of seconds. More importantly it shows you the analytics behind how many actual users went to that particular tr.im url. While Tr.im is yet another url shortening service like the tinyurl.com and bit.ly services, what makes Tr.im stand out in a terrific manner are the following innovations –

1) User friendly Firefox Plugin that can be downloaded from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10232/

See the screenshot of the Tr.im panel which conveniently opens on the left. The Statistics can be seen in the separate window ( note the Twitterfox application which is also open on the right – that is a separate application)

2) Analytics for tracking the locations, of people who click on the url and whether they were human or a bot.

3) Seamless Twitter integration even for multiple accounts

So it seems like you will run out of excuses to run away from Twitter soon, and all the additional social network data being generated could really help the next generation of response and online propensity models.

Tr.im that!!

Twitterfox- Twitter for the busy people

Here is a nice firefox plugin for people who want to start using Twitter without losing too much time. It sits nicely in one corner and gives gentle tweets – think of it as a big instant messenger, big in terms of number of followers and need to use twitter and busy in terms of time, but very nice and comfortable. The screenshot says it all and all you need to do is start using Firefox and install this from http://twitterfox.net/.

Heavily recommended for non users of Twitter who are curious on what this thing is all about—-

Screenshots courtesy� myself and the gentlepeople at http://twitterfox.net/.

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter.

This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets.

Install TwitterFox

If you want to get updates of TwitterFox, feel free to follow @TwitterFox.

New Features and Changes in Version 1.7.7.1

Supported Firefox 3.1b3

Added a context menu to each tweets which has:

Copy

Re-tweet

Open this tweet in new tab

Delete tweet

Auto extract is.gd and bit.ly links.

Added Mark all as read menu item to main context menu.

Increased contrast of background color of read/unread messages.

Added in-reply-to-status-id parameter for status update.

Added da-DK, th-TH, vi-VN, ar-SA, ar, and kw-GB translations.

Bug fixes.

Does Twitter reduce Blogging ?

One more post on Twitter you may sigh, but wait. I am examine Twitter as an economic complementary� or substitute product to Blogging and trying to come up with a mathematical proving rule to dis prove the Null Hypothesis-

Twitter does not affect blogging of individuals or communities as� a whole. or does it ?

Twitter reduces blogging because

Twitter is easier to do. Creating a blog is different ball game.
Tweeting is two way and interactive while Blogging is mostly a one way broadcast.
People respond to Tweets and re tweet them much more than they comment or forward blog posts. This is due to the inherent design of the softwares.
Twitter is chaotic, but so is real life in which human brain processes different information from people like collegues, family, friends and sorts them. Blogging has a structure which helps the reader more than the writer
It is easier to tweet and faster to get your point across than in Blogging.
People allocate a set amount of time for social media activities and personal branding. Now this may be elastic but not totally so. Hence the rise of twitter time in people’ lives would mean lesser time to read and write blogs.

Now to a more quantitative study.

We get statistics from Technocrati – State of the Blogosphere and add in WordPress Stats to boot.

(credit -http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ )

A chart of total WordPress.com blogs since� launch:

(credit- http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ )

Note new signups can be seen for WordPress.com at http://en.wordpress.com/stats/signups/

Fatigue could be a reason why Twitter is hotting up while Blogging sees steady state growth.

The following figure from Technocrati’s 2008 report sums it best.

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/

But if I compare June 2008 numbers of Blogging Frequency with the 2007 report – I am not able to compare the numbers

(Source -http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/the-how-of-blogging/ )

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

It seems that Blog posts did get a boost with the 2008 elections and the current low traffic may simply be due to a lack of issues in Blogosphere. The rise in Twitter traffic is also due to creation of applications by third party providers and this trend has led to Twitter being the number 3 social media site.

Based on the data, it does not seem Twitter reduces Blog posts to a significant degree. After all Twitter is also a great medium to disseminate or spread the word on good blog posts.

It is simply too early to say that Twitter is reducing blogging though there seem clear trends along that line.

What about you ? If you were a blogger, is� your blog post frequency affected by your tweeting activities.