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It looks like online conversations are important after all…Form the Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music post form the state of mind of art blog:

“We analyzed the usefulness of blogs and social networks, as well as reviews in
consumer, online media, and mainstream media, in predicting album sales in the four weeks before and after the album’s release date. We found that the most significant variable is blog chatter or the volume of blog posts on an album, with higher numbers of posts corresponding to higher sales.

Check it out…

Great Piece Josh…Could not agree with this more.

Brad Stone’s piece on Digg provides a good comparison between automatic crowd based moderation promotion system at Digg and a more manual approach at SlashDot. But to me it misses a key flaw with both these systems. The issue is when users visit a destination site like SlashDot or Digg that is removed from the original community where the conversation is taking place, the conversation loses a lot of its context and become more and more like a game. This is really what is being manifested with all the digg gaming that has been going on where a lot of people digg a story without actually reading the contents.

What is really needed is a distributed model (kinda like hmmm… SezWho ) where the ratings and reputation stay within the context of the conversation rather than becoming a way to drive traffic to a different destination.

Great piece by Brian Solis (we work with Brian for PR) about how we are losing a lot of value from the conversation:

Steve Rubel recently accused bloggers of contributing to the “lazysphere” by simply glomming on to other “me too” conversations rather than creating new ideas or penning thoughtful, “deep” essays. In a side discussion with Steve, he also added that it’s not about length either, it’s simply about good content. He’s right.

Indeed, the barrier to entry has been lowered to a point where new user-generated content is only going to increase in volume and frequency and not necessarily in value along the way. But, for those who pay close attention to the shift in the behavior of adoption, creation, and consumption of media in all forms, it is also blinding with insight.

Check it out…

Clive Thompson has a interesting little piece in Wired about the rise of MicroCelebrity:

Whenever Peter Hirshberg is at a party, someone eventually pulls out a camera and takes a snapshot with him in it. Hirshberg — chair of the executive committee at the blog-search company Technorati — performs a quick mental calculation: Does the photographer look like one of those people who will immediately dash home and post all their candids to Flickr? “If I think it’s going to end up on the Web, I straighten up more, try to smile the right way,” Hirshberg says. “Because if it goes online, people I know will probably see it.”Hirshberg has a blog, which means a couple hundred people — some strangers, some friends — regularly follow his comings and goings, his Facebook updates, his online photo trail. Any time he does something embarrassing or stupid, those people will know. So in essence, Hirshberg has to behave like a very minor version of Brad Pitt. He’s got to watch out for the paparazzi, be careful with his public image.

But he’s not a celebrity. He’s a microcelebrity.

Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen. As DIY media reach ever deeper into our lives, it’s happening to more and more of us. Got a Facebook account? A whackload of pictures on Flickr? Odds are there are complete strangers who know about you — and maybe even talk about you.

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Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and “message” almost like a self-contained public relations department. “People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives,” says Theresa Senft, a media studies professor and one of the first to identify the rise of microcelebrity. “Corporations are getting humanized, and humans are getting corporatized.”

This is indeed a trend we are very familiar with. By organizing all user interactions around the users, we are working to provide tools for users and communities to manage their own MicroCelebrity portfolios. Thanks Clive for articulating it so nicely.

Fascinating piece by Cory Doctorow in Information Week about the follies of facebook like ego driven application, titled “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook“.

The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define “the Internet” for a large slice of the world’s netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe’s Law: “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.” This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).

But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that’s not always true (see Brook’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”).

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” Perhaps we can call this “boyd’s Law” for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. Here’s one of boyd’s examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn’t like her boss doesn’t really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it’s perfectly valid to demand to be “friended” in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend’s buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there’s an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it’s evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It’s natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a “social scheduling” application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

That’s why I don’t worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

Cory does a great job of articulating a lot of things I have been saying when I am talking about how SezWho is different from Facebook. Facebook provide a great user centric, ego-driven profile. SezWho on the other hand provides a community and participation based profile. The differences between the two are gigantic:

What do you think?

Great piece by Jeremy Liew about now to make sense of all the user generated content. He explores 4 approaches prevalent right now:

Tagging is the first approach, and its use has been endemic to web 2.0. Sometimes the tagging is limited to the author of the content, and other times any user can add tags to create a folksonomy.

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The second approach is to solicit structured data from users. Examples of sites that do this include wikihow (which breaks down each how to entry into sections such as Introduction, Steps, Tips, Warnings and Things You’ll Need), CitySearch (which asks you for Pros and Cons and for specific ratings on dimensions such as Late Night Dining, Prompt Seating, Service and Suitability for Kids) and Powerreviews (which powers product reviews at partner sites that prompt for Pros, Cons, Best Uses and User Descriptions, including both common responses as check boxes and a freeform text field with autocomplete).

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The third approach to user generated data is the traditional approach to the Semantic Web. … Ideally, each web site creator would usa an agreed format to mark up the meaning of each statement made on the page, in a similar way that they mark up the presentation of each element of a webpage in HTML. In a subsequent article, Iskold also notes some of the challenges with a bottom up approach to building the Semantic web which can be summarized at a high level as “it’s too complicated” and “no one wants to do the work”.

The fourth approach to user generated structure is to build a central authority of meaning. Metaweb appears to be trying to do this with Freebase, a sort of “Wikipedia for structured data” which describes itself as follows:

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There are clearly both advantages and disadvantages with a single authoritative source of user generated structured data; and criticisms similar to those leveled at Wikipedia (potential for systemic bias, false information, vandalism and lack of accountability could cause some data to be unreliable) could be leveled at Freebase. Wikipedia has combated these problems largely successfully through a robust community of Wikipedians - it isn’t clear if Freebase has yet developed a similar protective community.

I think all these approaches are important parts of the solution and so are other technologies like natural language processing, concept identification and extraction etc. Overall, there isn’t one approach that will address all the issues but its going to be a heady cocktail of a number of approaches and technologies. One thing is for sure though, search of meaning in the mountains of user generated content is a going to be profoundly important to the evolution of web 2.0.

Interesting report by Laura Ramos of Forrester Research – “Marketing’s Role in B2B Blogging”, where Ms. Ramos touts the potential of corporate blogging as a “promising communication medium” capable of

• Increasing influence. Last year, 57% of business and IT professionals responding to a blog impact study rated blogs equally or more credible than information found in news outlets, industry publications, vendor white papers, analyst reports, and industry or professional associations.1 B2B bloggers understand that blog readership — and their ability to influence decision-makers — is on the rise (see Figure 1). So they create company blogs to build thought leadership and influence press, analysts, and investors.
• Creating new customer connections. Darren Wesemann, CTO for SunGard Financial Systems, explained how blogging allows him to influence not only prospects but also new contacts for current customers. Mr. Wesemann’s blog opens up issues for shared discussion and helps him synchronize SunGard’s architecture with that of its customers and service their needs better. This work paid off when one of his readers recently asked SunGard via the blog to submit a bid on a new system the customer had out for tender.
• Paying off big on a relatively minor investment. Blogging is dirt cheap compared with the cost of advertising, PR, and other mainstream marketing tactics. Moreover, B2B bloggers report that blogs can build trust, fuel publicity and word of mouth, and improve corporate intelligence. While short-term results are insubstantial, bloggers feel that blogs will improve brand perception, create more sales opportunities, and propagate new ideas in the long run.

She goes on to note that very few corporations have made the commitment to business blogging – “only 29 of the Fortune 500 show clear evidence of public-facing, business-oriented blogs”. Among the few firms which have adopted business blogging, the majority are still in the earliest stages. In fact, of the 16 blogs Forrester evaluated not one passed their usability tests. Specifically Forrester’s evaluators felt that the blogs

• Lack visibility as a company communications channel
• Favor technology and technical subjects but lack organization
• Struggle to sustain the conversation
• Can’t provide conclusive evidence of blog value
• Want consumer intimacy but don’t often get it

Clearly the most fundamental reason that corporate blogs are so underdeveloped is that they are still in their infancy, and over time organizations will add the usability and design features necessary to make them a useful marketing tool.

However, in order for corporate blogs to reach their true potential they will need to provide functionality beyond good layout and usability. The real power of the blog is its ability to engage an audience in multi-way interactive conversations and create an engaged online community.

Quality content must be easy to find verses the more common, less interesting content, in order for new users to become regular readers and ultimately active contributors. Readers should be able to evaluate, track and influence content without having to necessarily create it.

Blog contributors should be incentivized and rewarded for quality contributions. They should be given the opportunity to build a portable community reputation which will carry with them wherever they choose across the entire web.

This is great…Check out the initiative at Huffington Post to engage their community:

But we’re most excited to announce a new initiative where we will choose one commenter a month to become a featured blogger at HuffPost. Yes, a blogger! Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our readers are an underutilized resource – smart and opinionated. Our decisions will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a favorite and our moderators’ favorites. Every comment has an I’m A Fan Of and a Favorite link so start voting for the comments and commenters you like best. We will announce the first one at the end of this month!

Thanks community guy for pointing it out. These are the kind of things we worry about as well. In fact we are working on a widget that will reward the best commenters by highlighting their contributions. This will be based on community ratings rather than an editor at a site (who has the time anyhow??)

We live in a page-rank world. Google the main organizer and cataloger of the internet, uses Page-Rank as the primary way to organize information (I know I am oversimplifying here as Google uses a number of other algorithms as well but link structure between sites and pages is still one of the most important factor). Even blog search engines like Technorati and Sphere use a derivative of page-rank algorithm to rank the content. At a high level what that means is that content on a site derives its credibility from the credibility of the site. E.g. if there is a page on cnn.com, it inherits the page-rank from the site. Now if there is a page that has same information and is on a site with a lower page-rank than cnn.com, the page will be considered less credible and show up lower in the Google search results. The idea of deriving credibility of the content from the site made a lot of sense when there were editorial boards and organizations to ensure everything was vetted, reviewed and solid. But does it still make sense in the evolving social media landscape?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say there is a video on YouTube. Should the fact that the video happens to be on a popular site make it more credible? You can be sure that the staff at YouTube has not reviewed the video to ensure the credibility of the content…In such situations does it still make sense to use a page-rank based mechanism to evaluate the credibility of the content? Clearly with user generated content the credibility of the content cannot be derived from the credibility of the site, instead the credibility has to come from other source. How about users who are generating the content? How about the consumers of that content?

Its all about the people

When sites become a two conversation (ReadWrite) and when everybody has access to the means of publishing content, and has the potential to get immediate, unlimited distribution, as is the case with social media, the ranking of the site become meaningless in determining the quality of the content. This is a change for the Internet but in the real world, that is really how things work. E.g. in a meeting, a conference or a social gathering, people take into account the credibility of the person who is speaking to determine what to make of it. In other words, who is delivering the message is almost as important as what is being delivered. Now that Internet is enabling a global conversation, we need to go back to the same people-based credibility model to evaluate the content that is generated by users.

Let’s go back to our earlier example to see how it can work. Instead of using the site based credibility, suppose there was a way to establish that a particular user has spend some time thinking about the topic and has posted some interesting thoughts on the subject on his/her blog. Wouldn’t that make you more likely to watch the new YouTube Video?

This is all good but how?

One of the key strengths of social media is that users have the means of producing and publishing content. This also means the conversation on any topic span multiple sites. While this provides a great deal of flexibility to users it also makes it really hard for any particular site to provide enough of user context to make their content credible. Even a popular site like YouTube can only show what other videos a user has published, but what if the user has only a few videos on YouTube and the rest of the context is in the form of Flickr pictures, blog posts/comments and forum discussions? YouTube will not be able to show that context for the users and the content is going to become less interesting as a result.

Another problem with building a people based credibility framework has been that there has been now way to establish people’s identity. This is an artifact of the evolution of the web where initially the focus was on sites and the organization principle was page-rank. Lack of a universal identity mechanism prevents sites, even though community clearly benefits from such context, from putting together cross-site user profiles. Right now there are a number of efforts like OpenID, card-space that are underway to establish a universal distributed framework using which applications can establish user’s identity. The issue though is that these frameworks are still in their infancy and still a few years away from critical mass. So in the meantime, how do we proceed?

Rise of Community-Rank

One of the key ingredients that has been that have not been leveraged this far is the incentives for participants to identify themselves and be known as a good member of the community. There are a number of members in each community that are serious participants and would be happy to be rewarded in terms of recognition for their value-added participation. What if there was system that enabled users to build and control inter-site and intra-sites participation profile. Such a system will have to allow full user control over the profiles and provide mechanism to users to have as many identities as they want (let’s face is – all of us have multiple identities both in real and virtual worlds). Much like real world, in such a system, community will be able to reward users for participating well and punish those users that don’t. Let’s can this system a community-rank and identity system.

Using community-rank and identity system, readers of social media sites will be able to establish participation history of a user, understand what the community thinks of the user’s content and easily find the most credible content. For search, community-rank will lessen the reliance on site context and put the focus on the community reputation of the people generating the content.

But what about privacy?  There are always risks when you start organizing information around users and their participation in communities. While a system like this benefits the community as a whole, some of the users might not want to have participation profile. To address these concerns such a system will need to provide full user control on the profile information. In addition, it should allow users to be anonymous if they want their contributions to not be a part of their profile. By addressing some of the privacy concerns, such a system can really help improve the quality of conversation in communities.

ConclusionPage rank based organization is not suited for social media site (you just have to go and search in a discussion forum to realize that things don’t work as well as you would like). A community rank and identity system has the potential to unlock huge amount of value in social media by incentivizing participation and by empowering readers.