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Google recently announced a project call Knol that will combine parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo to create a new user generated knowledge-base of everything. While the overall project has many similarities existing projects, it differs in a key aspect. Instead of focusing on content like Wikipedia etc., Knol is focused on the credibility of the content and its creators. Some of the key differences are:

• Only one editor can edit a page
• The picture and name of the editor is displayed with the content they create
• Google shares the ad revenue from the page views with the editors.

This is a an interesting and important step for Google which has thus far focussed only on content based ranking (via page rank etc.) of content. By organizing the content around people, Google is adding an editor-based element to their search ranking algorithm. This change to Google algorithm can be potentially applied more widely to rank the usefuness of content in all social sites one global ratings and reputation (like SezWho) data is available.  Such a change can make it so much easy to find quality content in the social web and to provide incentives to the best producers.

This is great news for social media participants like me as Google can finally provide the right incentives for all participants in the social mediums.

Interesting piece by Carl Bialik aka The Numbers Guy titled “Understanding How A Current Kids’ Flick Can Beat Out de Sica“. In the piece Carl examines a number of different ways rating systems operate online.

Compiling all of that information into a single ranking is a provocative numbers question. If the only two critics to rate Café Chris each awarded it the maximum five stars, while 100 diners rated its rival Dave’s Diner with an average of 4.8 stars, has Chris really surpassed Dave in culinary excellence? Or should we treat the much smaller number of voters for Chris — who could be Chris and his brother — with a grain of salt?

This raises a really good question…Are all ratings equal? And what does a rating really mean without some understanding of who the rater is? Let’s compare the situation to a real life scenario. Suppose a software engineer were to be recommended by Bill Gates and another one by somebody not as well know…Who would you hire?

Clearly the answer is that you will put more weight in a recommendation coming from Bill. You would justify putting higher weight on Bill’s recommendation by noting that Bill has better access and understanding of software talent and clearly has a lot more to lose in terms on his reputation by making careless recommendations.

But on the internet its hard to identify, who is who. This patina of anonymity forces sites to adopt hokey solutions like the IMDB

Internet Movie Database, the cinema site owned by Amazon.com, approaches its list of users’ favorite films in this way. A new release whose first two votes are enthusiastic doesn’t push it past “The Godfather.” Instead, IMDB assigns all new movies 1,300 votes with a rating of 6.7 — the average rating for all films listed on the site. Then each actual vote is added to those.

This is how “Umberto D.,” with an average user vote of 8.3, can rank at No. 242 of all time, while “Shrek” is 10 notches higher despite having an average user vote of just 8.0. “Shrek” wins because almost 30 times as many people have voted for it than for “Umberto D.,” adding more certainty to its acclaim.

This modified formula dates from the early days of IMDB, nearly a decade ago, managing editor Keith Simanton says. At first the site used a simple average, but “it wasn’t working out well,” he says. The current ratings system helps “to mitigate the fan-boy aspect.” In other words, two die-hard fans — such as the director and his mother — can’t easily game the ratings.

Another interesting problem here is the problem of context. What is the point of putting together a list of all time favorite movies on IMDb? Is the list intended to display the movies one should watch? If that is the case, a genre based organization might be more successful. In terms of ratings, such a classification would ensure that the fans of a particular genre, like animation movies, who tend to be excitable and a lot more comfortable with rating things online are not directly compared with fans of a different genre who might have different characteristics.

When applied to a specific context and where community credentials of a participant can be clearly established, a rating system can indeed produce results.

A similar approach underlies player rankings on Halo 3, the Xbox 360 title released two weeks ago that lets players in multiple locations join the same game online. The first day Microsoft released the futuristic war game, players joined a game 2.4 million times. Some were playing with friends, but others relied on the game’s matchmaking feature to find equally skilled strangers to compete against.

Microsoft uses a Bayesian formula similar to IMDB’s, called TrueSkill, to change players’ rankings slowly as they get more experience. After all, a single great result in a Halo 3 match could be the result of a fluke (your opponent gave up because an urgent offline need took her from the game) or a deliberate effort to game the system (your friend threw the game so you could gain rating points).

Getting the TrueSkill ranking right is crucial. “If there is a great disparity in skills between competing players, neither of them will have a lot of fun,” says Microsoft researcher Thore Graepel, who helped develop TrueSkill.

…

A new Halo 3 player who gets good quickly may have to wade through tiresome routs until TrueSkill catches up to his true skill. And IMDB users may not be able to discover highly regarded films that haven’t received enough votes to make the Top 250 chart, which in turn makes it hard for those films to get more attention and so more votes. Many other sites, such as the local-reviews site Yelp, keep it simple and just show average ratings.

While TrueSkill is clearly an important component of Halo 3, it also brings up the limitation of such context restrained interactions. Even though a user has skills playing video games and even has a great score in other games, Halo 3 still treats the user as a newbie who has to earn their reputations before playing at their true level. These kind of limitations are likely to force a number of good players to abandon the game in the course of ramping up.

This is the point I have to make a plug for SezWho :-)…We think we have a solution that does not have any of the limitations, identified above. It assigns proper weight to ratings based on reputation of rater, it rewards users for identifying themselves and handles context based translations across different social media (Blog, forums etc.) communities.

Via Emerging Network Technology Laboratory (Quoted from ACM TechNews Aug. 29-2007 Jerusalem Post (08/18/07) Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy)…Original source is here.

University of California, Santa Cruz associate professor of computer engineering Luca de Alfaro has developed a program that analyzes Wikipedia’s entire editing history and estimates the trustworthiness of each page. De Alfaro’s program uses the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable. “The idea is very simple,” de Alfaro says. “If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If you contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls.” The program analyzes the user’s editing history to assign a reputation score. The trustworthiness of newly inserted text is computed as a function of the reputation of its author. As more contributors examine the text, their reputation contributes to the text’s score. Working from copies of Wikipedia the site distributes, the program is able to analyze Wikipedia’s seven-year editing history in about a week, and correctly flags more than 80 percent of edits that turn out to be poor. After the initial backlog of edits has been processed, de Alfaro says updating reliability scores in real time should be relatively simple. The program prominently displays the trustworthiness of each article, but keeps individual contributor’s scores hidden to avoid creating a competitive atmosphere that would detract from Wikipedia’s collaborative culture.

Below is how the algorithm works:

This is an interesting finding and the great results the researchers are able to achieve with a basic algorithm demonstrates the amount of work that can be done to improve the existing reputation systems for social apps…

Fascinating survey post at the Freakonomics blog (Thanks Indus for pointing it out) asking users why do or why don’t they comment. (I love these guys not just because of the book or because they write intelligent/insightful stuff but also because Prof. Levitt is from my alma mater). The post generated 114 responses…Now these responses can be extrapolated to other social media as well where the participation more or less follows the same 90-9-1 kinda pattern observed on blogs. I waded through these responses and summarized them in the table below:

Some of the sample comments from the article are listed below:

# Matt W

First is the fixed cost.. it just took me 3 minutes to register with Wordpress and thats a long time for the internet age.

Second, usually, on a high traffic blog like this, commenters have usually taken most points of view in an hour or so.

But mostly, its just like in school where theres a class of 30 people but the same 5 or 6 are the only ones that raise their hand.

# From Deckard

I REALLY WANT OTHER PEOPLE TO READ MY BLOG AS WELL AND GET THE STATS UP - also I WANT TO LOOK IMPORTANT AND ASSOCIATE MYSELF WITH SOMEONE AS GREAT AS (INSERT NAME HERE)

Being a bit of a marketing whore with a new business to promote

# furiousball

Many bloggers comment to get comments. Many also comment to connect with people. The undying need to be loved is strong with the blogging community.

# akbal

I rarely comment on blogs because (1) written communication is a skill I have not practiced since high school (often my comments are misunderstood), (2) Ive learned that people usually ignore or attack what they dont already believe (this makes my comments seem futile), and (3) I have things I would rather be doing (it usually takes 30 minutes or more to write even a semi-coherent response to a blog.

Shyness definitely plays into my reasons.

# sbw

Commenters needed to be parsed into distinct categories. Some comment to learn to nail an idea to a page so others will refine it. Some comment to convince. Some comment for community.

Still others comment to overpower ideas with cheap rhetoric.

# jonathank

I comment on two types of blogs: people I know and where I believe the author reads the comments and might actually be looking for ideas and different takes.

I have, on rare occasion, joined in to reinforce others comments. It is fruitless to argue with people in comments - or mostly anywhere on the internet - but sometimes it can be enjoyable (and, in a rare case, even constructive) to agree with other commenters

# RobertSeattle

I actually tend to avoid blogs that dont allow comments. Not allowing for comments means the blogger really doesnt care about what their readers think. I prefer some kind of login system though because I am a firm believer in the formula:

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Idiot

# sasha

1. I (like many readers, I suspect) read your blog through an RSS feed. So commenting involves clicking on the link to your actual site, remembering my wordpress username (which usually takes a trip to my email account where its saved), and then remembering the password Ive chosen.
2. After a while, regular commenters start to form a community. It starts to feel intrusive to insert yourself.
3. The time it takes me to formulate a comment Im happy with posting is usually not worth what Ill get out of actually posting it. Im usually picky about being concise, grammatically correct, and having fully formed ideas, so a comment can take me upwards of 30 minutes to put together. And then the comment will usually be ignored anyway.

# kentavos

Why I comment:

1. I feel passionately about the topic or I have unique insight.

2. Im in the mood and I have time.

3. I might win a t-shirt.

Why I dont comment:

1. My point of view is already represented.

2. Too many comments, Id just be lost in the sea of comments.

3. Too many passionate views, no one would really listen.

4. I dont have the time to deliver a concise and well thought out comment.

# mungojelly

Right after spending a while writing a detailed comment, I always have a nagging feeling that Ive wasted my time. If I have something important to say, why am I saying it way down at the bottom of a pile of messages, where no one will read it? If I dont have anything important to say, why am I spending time typing at all??

Heres a paradox, though: In principle I believe comments are very important, and Im offended when theyre disabled, even though I still think theyre usually a waste of space in particular. Theres some sense to that attitude, and heres my attempt to explain it: The difference between having comments and not having comments is whether you are projecting an open space or a closed space. Allowing for comments even if in practice theyre spam & junk & metooism is saying I am participating in a conversation, not a monologue; this is a two-way street.

Earlier today I saw something that was interesting but smelled like bullshit, so I glanced at the comments: Naturally the first comment was someone cutting through the bullshit & giving the real facts. Thats part of whats so nice about the internet.

5 insights for the bloggers are:

1. People hate sites that do not allow comments
2. Asking people explicitly for their feedback and participating in comments is a good idea if you want more comments. Also providing clear incentives or rewards for participation works. Such rewards could be vanity items like t-shirts or just an explicit recognition in blog posts
3. Go out there and meet people. If people know you in real life, they are a lot more likely to comment on your blog then otherwise.
4. Providing a respectable and positive environment for participation can help commenters overcome their shyness or fear of being attacked. This can be done by sanctioning personal attacks/harsh comments and ensuring that a positive environment for participation is maintained
5. People get overwhelmed with comments so a mechanism to filter useful/unique comments can help drive more comments

Finally a haiku from the comments section of Freakonomics blog to remind you how wonderful and creative commenters can be:

# egretman

The question is not why we comment
Thats seems all too evident
Rather I want to know why you blog
Is it for the comments that you will log?
Are you a comment hog?
Do you take them home and cherish them
Read them as if each were a gem
If so then you are one sick dude
Especially if you read them in the nude
Well thats all I have to say
Heres hoping that Ive made your day.

An online community, or for that matter any community, is built upon shared experiences of its participants. In the real world, people in a community typically interact with each other by gathering at same physical location, at the same time. In online communities, it is easy for users to interact with each other without any geographical or temporal limitations. But in return for the benefits that Internet (or even telephone to a lesser degree) provides in terms of ease of communication, it takes away from the richness, texture and context of the conversation. As such a number of startups are trying to address the problem with online communities and restore richness, texture and context to online communities. (Richard calls this market segment, meta social networking).

Who reads my blog

MyBlogLog started off with the agenda to provide blog analytics. They launched MyBlogLog Communities mid last year, to enable readers of blogs to join and share their experiences with other like-minded group of readers. The idea was that if readers like same content, they probably have plenty else in common. They built a platform where readers could trade messages with other readers and see what other sites they visit.

Power of Images

They hit the jackpot with the reader rolls that provided a picture to connect readers and writer of blogs. By just providing a static visual cue in the form of a picture, MyBlogLog provided an important visual context for online community conversations. The result, their usage took off and is not at over 50K users…In the meantime, they also got acquired by Yahoo! for a $10M.

Where there are visitors there is spam

With all the success came a number of people looking use MyBlogLog for financial gains. From R-Rated avatars to people pretending to be somebody else to other commercial avatars like Mr. Online Pharmacy, there has been a glut of stories related to how people are trying to game MyBlogLog and given their history, MyBlogLog has understandably been having a hard time coping.

Competition

In addition to all the spammers, there is new competition on the horizon for MyBlogLog. OthersOnline and Explode are two emerging players. These players have interesting new twists to the functionality provided by MyBlogLog. Let’s take a quick look at each:

Explode

Explode provides the same analytics capability as MyBlogLog but in addition to Analytics, it also allows users to build a network for friends who can be readers or writers of blogs. Bloggers can then display a friends widget on their blogs. This widget provides valuable context on the readers of the blog and the bloggers circle of friends. Another capability Explode provides is a comment wall for each user, where friends and other users can post comments. This also provides valuable context on each of the user.

OthersOnline

OthersOnline has an interesting twist on the idea of providing context. They allow people to register their profile along with their website. As part of the registration process, OthersOnline asks users to categorize their website and themselves via keywords. Now using these keywords, OthersOnline shows profile information, along with presence and email, of users via a browser plug-in (a widget is in the works as well). The idea is to make it easy for people to locate other like minded individuals or websites in the course of browsing.

Conclusion

While these companies are breaking new ground in making online conversations more useful, there is still a long way to do before we have achieved a good enough quality of online interactions. Good things, a lot of companies are working on it.

There have been some new identity verification services trying to bring some order to the wild world of Internet.

You can read my take over on the Read/WriteWeb (Thanks Richard, for the great job editing and laying out the piece!).

There is a lot of buzz of late in the blogosphere about this idea of De-Portalization. Fred Wilson got the discussion started and coined the term to discuss and suggest a strategy for Yahoo!. Edgeio explained it the best with the following pictures (Great job with the pics guys).

The following 3 graphics illustrate what we believe has happened already and is likely to continue. The first picture is a rough depiction of Internet traffic before the flattening (View image to see the full picture)
The second picture is a rough depiction of today - with the mountains still evident, but much less so

The third picture is where these trends are leading. To a flatter world of more evenly distributed traffic.

I totally believe that the foothills are rising. The trend is driven by easy to use publishing tools and a thirst for more communities and authentic discussions among the populace. Still, I am not sure that rise of foothills means that the mountains are not going to as high as they used to be… I recall a similar discussion in 2000 when the product/price comparison engines were all the rage. People were debating the value of a brand and why anybody would pay a premium price for a product on Amazon.com. I suspect the mountains, that represent the well known brands on the Internet will continue to exist and even thrive. If anything, the rise of the foothills means that the mountains would become even more important, as a bearer of mass sensibility and will behave like mass media. The reason for this is really credibility…The mountains (like mass medium) bring credibility to the discussions in the foothills, and even though, there will be a lot more discussions and participation in the foothills, the denizens of one foothill will need to refer to the mountains to make sense of the discussions in other foothills. What do you guys think?

Other discussion on the subject on the web:

Kevin Burton Techmeme Mike Arrington Syntagma Keith Teare’s Weblog Dan Farber at ZDNet Mark Evans Fred Wilson Ivan Pope at Snipperoo Tech Tailrank Collaborative Thinking David Black Surfing the Chaos Ben Griffiths Dave Winer (great pics) Kosso’s Braingarden Dizzy Thinks Mark Evans

I just finished reading the latest Scoble book - Naked Conversation. This book provides an interesting take, on how Blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. The driving force behind the trend, is the advent of social media and changes in consumer attitudes towards business-as-usual, that is getting companies out of “command and control” and “batten down the hatches” mentality, and forcing them to engage their customers in real conversations. San Jose Mercury News had an article with a number of examples, last week, further confirming this trend.

Perhaps best known is Mark Cuban, a billionaire who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 and who owns the Dallas Mavericks and co-founded HDNet, an all high-definition television network. His blog is ranked No. 105 in the Technorati blog rank. His fans read him for his idiosyncratic take on technology and sports, YouTube and the media.

At Sun Microsystems, they have gone blog crazy — 3,000 Sun employees (close to 10 percent of the workforce) are bloggers, riffing on topics light and geeky, from “techno celebrity sightings” to “how the world needs only five computers” to “what I wore at the annual shareholders meeting.” Chief among them is the chief himself: Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO. Titled “Jonathan’s blog”, it is translated into 10 languages and ranks 1,370th among all blogs on Technorati.

…

“The notion of the corporation as an ivory tower has just gone,” said Schwartz.

…

If a customer complains about a Sun product on Schwartz’s blog, “now I know before my competitors,” says Schwartz. When a commentator complained that Sun’s products are too expensive for start-up companies, Schwartz responded — and offered start-ups a new program.

Schwartz and Sun are unusual but not alone. Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, writes a blog, but not for public consumption. Mark Hurd, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, doesn’t blog but many HP executives do at www.hp.com/blogs.

Among executive blogs, there’s some venting. Dave Hitz, co-founder and executive vice president of Network Appliance, headlined one of his recent entries “Why NetApp’s Earnings Results Last Quarter Frustrated Me” (http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/).

Alan Meckler, chief executive of Jupitermedia, an Internet media company in Darien, Conn., has used his blog (http://weblogs.jupitermedia.com/meckler/) as a sort of therapy. In one entry, he complained about a company that pulled out of a deal years ago. “I’ve been carrying that grudge for years, and when I had a chance to write about it, I did,” said Meckler.

Of course engaging customer in real conversation means that companies have to be more accountable. This forces companies in some uncomfortable positions of having to directly respond to public criticisms.

Of course, once the CEO blogs, he must blog when the company faces a public problem. Live and die by the blogging sword.

And that’s what happened in October to Richard Edelman, president and chief executive of Edelman, the public relations firm, and a blog expert. In his own blog he wrote about his firm’s work with Wal-Mart and bloggers.

When a fake blog (known as a flog) promoting Wal-Mart was exposed, Edelman was called to respond. When he initially said nothing, the blogosphere went crazy.

Finally, he posted. Took some blame, announced ethics initiatives, endured the slings and arrows. And moved on.

My take: He was better for it.

As usual, silicon valley companies are taking the lead in redefining public relations and a lot of other traditional companies have a long way to go in order to catch up. Overall this is a very promising trend for all businesses and all I can say is - Amen.

(the pic is not particularly relevant to the topic but it brought a smile to my face…)

I came across this fascinating piece on Auctionbyte, about how some users are gaming the eBay rating system.

Many eBay users are familiar with sellers who use a low-price/high-shipping strategy to manipulate eBay search results. But less well known is the technique of listing 1-cent eBooks with zero shipping charges. In fact, it would appear at first glance to be a money-losing strategy, since eBay charges a minimum 5-cent listing fee for Stores (and 20 cents for core listings). But sellers employing the strategy offer multiple quantities of the items in each listing.

While sellers legitimately sell digital content on eBay, many of the 1-cent eBook, no-shipping Store listings AuctionBytes examined looked suspect, including the possibility that sellers are in effect creating “feedback farms” - creating multiple User IDs that bid on these listings to quickly build up positive feedback ratings.

One such listing posted on September 20 netted the seller close to 1,000 feedback points in a 4-day period. The item for sale was a 1-cent/no shipping eBook that promised in the headline to make sellers $100/day by selling on eBay. By the evening of September 24, there were 9012 of these eBooks still available for sale through this one listing. (The listing contained photos of scantily clad women for no obvious reason.)

One UK website owner is apparently well aware of the penny eBook strategy and created a page to help users quickly overcome the restrictions eBay places on new accounts. “I know what it’s like when you have just opened your ebay account and have restrictions in place such as not being able to list “buy it now” auctions. To help with this problem I put together this short helper page which will get you 10 positive feedbacks within 100 seconds” (http://www.tradedemon.net/10EbayFeedbacks.php). The page includes links to active penny listings on eBay with instructions to buy 10 1-penny eBooks and leave positive feedback for the seller. “By the time you finish all 10, your feedback should be on 10.”

The article also talks about the struggle between the eBay policy enforcers and people trying to make a buck. Now, I don’t recommend that you do any of the things mentioned in the article, but check it out…Its an interesting case study on how it really hard for a horizontal e-business like eBay, to work effectively in the long tail economy.

Francois Gossieaux, president of Corante, Inc., has an interesting post about lack of community spirit and trust in corporate cultures. He points to some interesting statistics from a study by American Management Association.

…76% of companies monitor employee web site connections and 55% retain and review email messages. The number of companies tracking telephone calls, including amount of time spent on the phone and phone numbers called has grown to 51%, up from 9% in 2001. And this does not include companies who require periodic medical checks and random drug usage tests.

This is a disturbing trend that runs quite contrary to the idea of karma capitalism (check out the BusinessWeek article that coined the phrase).

On the one hand, open source model of software development that relies on trust in the community, is gaining prominence. Google is a media and community darling based on its “don’t be evil” mantra. Wikipedia is becoming one of the most important and useful source of information on the web. Cooperation is becoming more and more important in the concept of coopetition. E.g. check out Matt Mullenweg’s take on competition in a recent interview.

On the other hand, enterprises are still looking for ways to extend their command and control influence. Remember the Walmart and Edelman PR fiasco or the lack of trust mentioned in the report above.

This is going to be an interesting tussle…Already, the public opinion is changing to reflect a growing dissatisfaction with business-as-usual. I hope that overtime, this is going to force enterprises to face up to the limitation of command and control, and lead them to appreciate the power of trusting their employees and customer communities.