Tag: Wordpress

Reputation on Social Networks

Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility
Image via Wikipedia

Classical Economics talks of the value of utlity, diminishing marginal utility if the same things is repeated again and again (like spam in an online community)

StackOverflow has a great way of measuring reputation – and thus allows intangible benefits /awards -similar to wikipedia badges , reddit karma. Utility is also auto generated like @klout  on twitter or lists memberships and other sucessful open source communities online including Ubuntu forums have ways to create ah hierarchies even in class less utopian classes.

Basically it then acts as the motivating game as the mostly boy population try to race on numbers.

 

in Stack Overflow- you can get buddies to upvote you and basically act as a role playing game too.

—–From http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation

To gain reputation, post good questions and useful answers. Your peers will vote on your posts, and those votes will cause you to gain (or, in rare cases, lose) reputation:

answer is voted up +10
question is voted up +5
answer is accepted +15 (+2 to acceptor)
post is voted down -2 (-1 to voter)

A maximum of 30 votes can be cast per user per day, and you can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day (although accepted answers and bounty awards are immune to this limit). Also, please note that votes for any posts marked “community wiki” do not generate reputation.

Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions:

15 Vote up
15 Flag offensive
50 Leave comments†
100 Edit community wiki posts
125 Vote down (costs 1 rep)
200 Reduced advertising
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The SEO mess on joining blog aggregators

 

Mug shot of Paris Hilton.
Image via Wikipedia

 

If you are an analytics blogger who writes, and is aggregated on an analytical community- read on- Here’s how blog aggregation communities can help you lose 30% of all future traffic long term, while giving you a short term.

The problem is not created by Blogging Communities (like R-Bloggers, or PlanteR, or Smart Data Collective or AnalyticBridge or even BeyeBlogs )

It is created by the way Google Page Rank is structured- you see given exactly the same content on two different we pages- Google Page Rank will place the higher Page Rank results higher. This is counter intutive and quite simple to rectify- The Google Spider can just use the Time Stamp for choosing which article was published where first (Obviously on your blog, AND then later to the aggregator).

How bad is the mess? Well joining ANY blog aggregation will lead to an instant lift of upto 10-50 % of your current traffic as similar bloggers try and read about you. However you can lose the long term 30% proportion which is a benchmark of search engine created traffic for you.

So do you opt out of blog aggregation? No. It’s a SEO mess and it’s unfair to punish your blog aggregator, most of whom are running on ad-supported sponsors or their own funds on dry fumes to publish your content. Most of the fore mentioned communities are created by excellent people I interacted with heavily- and they are genuinely motivated to give readers an easy way to keep up with blogs. Especially Smart Data Collective, Analyticbridge and R-bloggers whose founders I have known personally.

You can do one thing- create manual summaries in the excerpt feature of your blog posts- it’s just below the WordPress page. And switch your RSS feed to summary rather than full. It avoids losing keyword rank to other websites, it prevents the Blog Aggregation from gaining too much influence in key word related searches, and it keeps your whole eco system happy, Best of All it helps readers of Blog Aggregators- since most of them use a summary on the front page anyways.

An additional thought on Google Page Rank- something I have sulked over but not spoken for a long long time.  It ignores the value of reader- If Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and 500 ceos from Fortune 500 companies read my blog but do not link to it- it will count daily traffic as 500. Probably it will give more weightage to Paris Hilton fans.

A suggestion-humbly- you can use IP Address lookup of visitors to see if traffic is coming from corporate sources or retail sources -Clicky from GetClicky does this. Use it as feedback in Google Analytics as well as Google Trends.

And maybe PageRank needs to add quantity and quality of visitors as additional variables . Do a A/B test guys some Chi Square juice- its not quite Mad Men Adverting but its still good fun.

 

PageRank
Image via Wikipedia

 

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and the world is one big community as per xkcd


Microsoft Online Games

No, this is not about the X Box kind of games. It is about Microsoft ‘s tactical shift in the online space from going it alone, and building stuff itself, –to partnering, and sometimes investing and exiting business.

In Blogs- It recently announced a migration of MS Live Spaces to WordPress.com – It gives Automattic 30 million more users- no small change consider there were 26 million existing WP users.

Microsoft Messenger, which is the oldest online app in the suite, now provides instant messaging services to about 350 million users, and from now on Windows Live Writer works specifically with the WordPress.com blog service by default. Hopefully Skype, and Google Voice will show MS the way to monitize that business app yet.

Google buying blogger-blogspot seems to have done little, but given Biz Stone room to create another content disruption-Twitter.

With the round of lawsuits by proxy, in Android -Motorola, or for acquisitions – MS is just doing what Marc Anderseen (who’s apparently a better VC than Paul Allen was), Sun and co did to it in the nineties.

Google seems to be regretting putting a spade in the Yahoo acquisition- that would have tied up a big chunk of Idle MS cash- leaving it little room for niche investments (like the 250 mill that helped Facebook ramp up in time).

The real surprise here could be Apple- it has shown little interest in cloud computing- and it seems to be testing the waters with Ping. But Apple sure smells competition- and Android is doing to Iphone what Windows did to the Mac in the early 1990’s.

Google lacks presence in online gaming (despite it’s own Zynga investment)- and needs to start monetizing properties like Android OS (say 10$ for every phone license ??), Google Maps (as an app for GPS) and Google Voice. Indeed it may be time for the big G to start thinking of spinning off atleast some products- earning better returns, while retaining control (dual stock splits) and killing those anti trust lawyer fees forever.

As the Ancient Chinese said, May you live in interesting times. Fun to watch the online games people play.

 

 

The auto-suggest link/tags for WP.com blogs

WordPress.com blogs have a great new option for generating tags, and links and thus improving their search engine optimization for posts.

Just go to Users-Personal Settings- and check the options shown. Thats it every time you write a post it suggests links and tags. Links are helpful for your readers (like Wikipedia links to understand dense technical jargon, or associated websites). Tags help to classify your contents so that all visitors to the web site including spiders ,search engines and your readers can search it better.

The bad thing is I need to go back to all 1025 posts on this site and auto generate tags for the archives ! Oh well. Great collaboration between zementa and Automattic for this new feature.

Open Source and Software Strategy

Curt Monash at Monash Research pointed out some ongoing open source GPL issues for WordPress and the Thesis issue (Also see http://ma.tt/2009/04/oracle-and-open-source/ and  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/switching-things-around/).

As a user of both going upwards of 2 years- I believe open source and GPL license enforcement are general parts of software strategy of most software companies nowadays. Some thoughts on  open source and software strategy-Thesis remains a very very popular theme and has earned upwards of 100,000 $ for its creator (estimate based on 20k plus installs and 60$ avg price)

  • Little guys like to give away code to get some satisfaction/ recognition, big guys give away free code only when its necessary or when they are not making money in that product segment anyway.
  • As Ethan Hunt said, ” Every Hero needs a Villian”. Every software (market share) war between players needs One Big Company Holding more market share and Open Source Strategy between other player who is not able to create in house code, so effectively out sources by creating open source project. But same open source propent rarely gives away the secret to its own money making project.
    • Examples- Google creates open source Android, but wont reveal its secret algorithm for search which drives its main profits,
    • Google again puts a paper for MapReduce but it’s Yahoo that champions Hadoop,
    • Apple creates open source projects (http://www.apple.com/opensource/) but wont give away its Operating Source codes (why?) which help people buys its more expensive hardware,
    • IBM who helped kickstart the whole proprietary code thing (remember MS DOS) is the new champion of open source (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/) and
    • Microsoft continues to spark open source debate but read http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/07/02/a-perspective-on-openness.aspx and  also http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
    • SAS gives away a lot of open source code (Read Jim Davis , CMO SAS here , but will stick to Base SAS code (even though it seems to be making more money by verticals focus and data mining).
    • SPSS was the first big analytics company that helps supports R (open source stats software) but will cling to its own code on its softwares.
    • WordPress.org gives away its software (and I like Akismet just as well as blogging) for open source, but hey as anyone who is on WordPress.com knows how locked in you can get by its (pricy) platform.
    • Vendor Lock-in (wink wink price escalation) is the elephant in the room for Big Software Proprietary Companies.
    • SLA Quality, Maintenance and IP safety is the uh-oh for going in for open source software mostly.
  • Lack of IP protection for revenue models for open source code is the big bottleneck  for a lot of companies- as very few software users know what to do with source code if you give it to them anyways.
    • If companies were confident that they would still be earning same revenue and there would be less leakage or theft, they would gladly give away the source code.
    • Derivative softwares or extensions help popularize the original softwares.
      • Half Way Steps like Facebook Applications  the original big company to create a platform for third party creators),
      • IPhone Apps and Android Applications show success of creating APIs to help protect IP and software control while still giving some freedom to developers or alternate
      • User Interfaces to R in both SAS/IML and JMP is a similar example
  • Basically open source is mostly done by under dog while top dog mostly rakes in money ( and envy)
  • There is yet to a big commercial success in open source software, though they are very good open source softwares. Just as Google’s success helped establish advertising as an alternate ( and now dominant) revenue source for online companies , Open Source needs a big example of a company that made billions while giving source code away and still retaining control and direction of software strategy.
  • Open source people love to hate proprietary packages, yet there are more shades of grey (than black and white) and hypocrisy (read lies) within  the open source software movement than the regulated world of big software. People will be still people. Software is just a piece of code.  😉

(Art citation-http://gapingvoid.com/about/ and http://gapingvoidgallery.com/

Creating a Blog Aggregator for free

I discovered an increasing trend of Blog Aggregators ( Blog Lists have been around for a long time). Several sites come in this category- http://bigdatanews.com/ (which is a GreenPlum /AsterData sponsored site on Big Data) , http://mapreduce.org/ (which is a site on MapReduce that has an inbuilt blog aggregator but is more of a community website – I will explain the difference below) , http://www.r-bloggers.com/ (which is an excellent aggregation of 69 R Bloggers sites that is built by Tal and is currently not sponsored/independent) and http://smartdatacollective.com/ which is sponsored by Teradata and uses http://wordframe.com which is a paid software) and some others like http://www.biblogs.com/ (which is Adsense supported 🙂 ) and http://javablogs.com/Welcome.jspa (an aggregator on Java) (or even http://feministblogs.org/).

CMS Based Blog Aggregator

CMS Based Blog Aggregator/ Community Site

CMS Based Community Site with an inbuilt Blog Aggregator feed

I am noting blog aggregator as a distinct website that pulls in automated content from RSS feeds , may or maynot be moderated, and usually revolves around a certain domain or topic. It is slightly different from community websites which have Lists of Blogs as part of many other features, and boutique collection of blogs like http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/index.php

and Intelligent Enterprise ( http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com/blog/index.jhtml) as they have selected authors and have more than Blogs as their featured content including News etc. Since community is a buzz word- many websites claim to be community websites while retaining the look and feel of a CMS- Blog Aggregator.

WordPress Enabled Blog Aggregator

Anyways, if you have a WordPress Installation- you can create a Blog Aggregator for free. Basically there is a wordpress-plugin called FeedWordPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/

Doing so you can simply addin as many RSS feeds as you like –

(see a screenshot below).

Of course – you can use Twitterfeed to create a Twitter Aggregator/ Fire Hose that simply pulls in Post Titles, and can link them using Facebook-LinkedIn-Twitter apps to your RSS feed of the aggregated website. 🙂

Building a website /content aggregator is just a few clicks away and free for anyone with a website and some passion for a topic. It is really free and painless 🙂

Automated Content Aggregation

Here is a way to create Content Aggregator-

1) Create a Google Alert for keywords (like say MapReduce and Hadoop)

at http://google.com/alerts

2) Create a WordPress.com free blog and enable the Auto Post by Email Feature (using manage my blogs in Settings- Reading in Left Bottom Margin). This creates an email with random numbers that can enable you for sending emails and thus auto posting.

3) Create an Email Filter in your Gmail Account to auto forward this to the post by Email Account

Note you can thus create an auto aggregator and pick and choose for creating a Keyword specific or domain specific newsletter. It is all free and takes 15 minutes to set up, and is then automated.