Web3.0 or WebRT

Things are going real-time. Social network, decentralize me, or semantic web are all great and we will see more of those coming but the most disruptive change that is already happening is that the web brings us all tougher in real-time. It allows us to read/write the web at any time from anywhere.

There are few catalyzers for this change. The first is the mobile technology including the devices, integrated GPS and the bandwidth, the second is that we are getting use to be always connected, and the third is all the good stuff that is happening on the web.

Now, I’m not talking about the future. I’m talking about the here, now and more just a little later.

Some examples:

Twitter made the connection between SMS and the web like no other tool before. There is nothing more real-time than Twitter. News, gossip, agenda, help, you name it.

Nokia N95 + Qik - real-time video streaming

BriteKite - Location-based social networking - in real-time.

What stopping us?

I think that the biggest obstacle for mass adoption, at this point, is the cost of the data plan. If that cost will go down we can all enjoy:

Read:  mobile constant feeds aggregation getting location, timely, and profiled based information.

Write: sharing our current experience using text, audio and video.

So what will happen a little later?

• Creating real-time social events
• Getting recommendation as we approach a new location that are tailored to our profile
• Knowing who’s in the area (that could be annoying too - it requires some configuration about who you want to know that you are around).
• Car pooling
• Checking for bargains in the area (pool - not push)
• Possible: Instant check-out - just go through the door with the purchased items and check the bill(one at a time)  - combination of RFID and the mobile device (beware if someone steal your phone). 
• Mobile Peer-to-Peer - sharing the information among us off the server

Can you see more ways that WebRT can enrich your experience in real-time?

Update 5-12-08: I guess that I my timing was good RIM Introduced today the BlackBerry Bold Smartphone including GPS, Wi-Fi® support and Video camera.

How do you read the web?

Here are some of my experience dealing with lots of information. How do you do that?

I use Netvibe Ginger to consume most feeds from blogs that I like reading. It helps me with my constant battle with another “Inbox 0″ front on my personal email account. By copying blog feed’s urls to Ginger I avoid more emails to clear from my already overloaded inbox.

I have multiple tabs set for grouping my feeds by categories. I don’t visit every tab every day. Some I rarely visit.

There are two blogs I like and respect enough that I actually subscribed to their feeds by email: TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb. In this way I’m getting for sure every day two doses of what is going on in the Internet world.

These two has some similarity but they do not overlap and reading both keep me in the know.

I actually just finished reading The Stats Are In: You’re Just Skimming This Article post on ReadWriteWeb that inspired this post.

This post talks about the way that people read or more correctly skim the web. It quotes stats from Jakob Nielsen relying on a research study done by Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayerto support this hypothesis.

“What Nielson found by analyzing the data in the study was that although people spend more time on pages with more words and more information, they only spend 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. By calculating reading rates, he concluded that when you add more verbiage to a page, people will only read 18% of it.

Some other interesting findings include:

• On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less.
• People spend some of their time understanding the page layout and navigation features, as well as looking at the images. People don’t read during every single second of a page visit.
• On average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page…. “

So, how does busy people like us really read the web?

How did you change your reading habits due to the following conditions:

1. distracted by any mean of communication devices and applications (phone, cellphone, twitter, multiple IM accounts, multiple email accounts, skype, and more)  - one option is to print it and take 2 steps away from the computer
2. distracted by images, navigation, ads within the blog - this is partially avoidable when using feed aggregator
3. bombarded with information - see below: Building and associative tag cloud

Here is how I’m trying to deal with too much information: 

Building a personal associative tag cloud

As I explain in the beginning of this post I don’t read it all every day. I just can’t. I skim a lot. I  read a lot of headlines trying to build “hooks”. I’m filling my brain with links so when I’ll next time see something related I’ll stop for a little longer. I make my head familiar with words, names and terms. It is as if I’m building a tag cloud inside my brain and the more frequent the tag appears the bigger the “font” is or in my analogous the sensitivity to a word, name or term. For instance reading TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb over time helps me building an associative tag cloud of companies names, technologies and buzz words. I’m  aware of the fact that the difference between a “real” tag cloud and the one I shape in my head is that it is not just the frequency that count but also other factors like personal interest and preferences. It is also strongly driven by my intentions. Yet, with every time that I skim these two newsletter I feel that I get more out of it. So, maybe it is no longer skimming but more like “nesting”. Filling information and more tags inside the associative cloud. I do fully read some posts and comments

 

                        

So how do you absorb information? How do you deal with all the noise and distraction?

Finding obscure great bloggers and mashup

As I continue playing with the small application that I’m writing for monitoring positive shifts in bloggers’ Technorati rank I realized that I’m actually finding bloggers writing about almost everything. The only common thing I could find so far is that they are just consistently great.

The tool scans and builds historical data for over 700 blogs so far. I build this growing blogs’ URL list using my favorites (i.e. humanly picked in multiple social ways) and the crawling algorithm I previously explained in this post.

I won’t get into the operation details (and there are plenty of details) but I mange to get a lot done not exceeding the 500 API calls daily Technorati limitation.

I output the result to BlogMon Twitter user for now so please, you are invited to be a follower.

Example of outputs:

Short-term pattern:  http://wpthemesplugin.com, rank gain: 18.10 %, since: 4/12/2008, Top Tags: “wordpress”, “themes”

Long-term pattern: http://mediaphyter.wordpress.com, rank gain: 76.10 %, since: 2/1/2008, Top Tags: “Social Media”, “Security”

As you can see I log the URL, the rank gain, since when, and the top two tags to give you an idea what this blog is all about. I found that in most cases this is good enough. Do you?

Why am I doing this?

• First, it keeps me engaged with the mashup opportunities and there are lots of those available today .
• Second, I enjoy doing it.
• Finally, you may find it useful in some way - you can leave a comment on these blogs and maybe get some traffic to your website/blog. I will be happy to hear if you did.

I may be tempted to mashup more web data sources/services in the future or explore discrepancies between Alexa data and Technorati rank .

I’m also using a great early stage service developed by Microsoft called Popfly to build and deploy a small (too small and simple at this time) application to my Facebook profile called BlogTwitt. BlogTwitt will show the recently posted updates to the BlogMon Twitter user I use for outputting the daily findings from the application I’m working on.

At this point I could not share this application - I don’t know why so I left a message on the Popfly Facebook wall. As of this time I got no answer. I do appreciate what that they are trying to do, saving me the time learning/working with the Facebook API.

I think that I will write soon a post about the Popfly and the challenges writing a good mashup. I do encourage people that are just starting their mashup thought process to look at this tool and also at Yahoo pipes (fantastic interface) to play, understand, get ideas and brain-storm with the numerous available web services (API)  out there. This is like working in a software solution architect group for a company that offers multiple products and  findings new way to increase the value of the existing modules by symbiotically integrating them to new offerings.

Finally I don’t think that this is Software plus Service like Microsoft tries to sell it I see it as Service plus Service (the service is build of software, da). Maybe Service X N.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts so please use the comment section.

Update: I forgot to mention that what that I like about using Twitter vs. my blog to post results is that it does not  add to the blog reactions count. So, it goes under Technorati radar and does not impact the Rank (avoiding the Observer Effect). That may change one day when they will realize that Twitter’s twitt with blog’s URL is actually a blog reaction.

Alpha, Beta, Launch - whom, where, when?

It seems like the world of web site in alpha and beta phase is booming. Invites, private or public, spreads all over the web-sphere, help getting new online service a try prior to going live, .

I’m looking for a web site that shows what products are now in alpha or beta phase. A place where you can see what service opens its product for the small or large crowd. If you know about this kind of service please let me know in the comment below. In the meantime let me fantasize how it should work.

Every start-up that is working towards releasing a limited or general availability of his product and like to get people involved in testing, providing feedback and suggestions should fill up a small registration form on this web site.

The information should include:

• The name of the service
• The company information
• The URL
• A short description of the service (try to fit it to a listed category or create a new one)
• The development cycle phase: alpha, beta, limited availability (e.g. for only English language support)
• The method: private (#of invites) or public
• Phase starting date
• Estimated phase end date
• Any other relevant information (open text section)

Some features:

The service should provide the company with login to be able to update the development status.

This site will list all the companies and their product information

This site should allow search

This site should allow ordering the products under testing by date

The site could aggregate blog posts and news relevant to the company and product (if you choose to drill down).

Now in the spirit of everything social (aka Web2.0):

• People can rank, and comment on a specific product
• Subscribers can offer their service as alpha and or beta testers to available products in a chosen category (they can get alerts from the web site that something in their domain of interest/expertise just listed) .
• The company can invite its devoted testers to celebrate the launce
• The company can rank different testers based on their feedback, bugs, creative suggestions
• And like any good web2.0 service why don’t invite/follow your testers friends or the actual entrepreneurs to share something

The site can follow up with some success story and news (RSS feed, newsletter).

What is the value that this kind of service provide? To whom?

• VCs -  some visibility into their current or future investments
• The start-up - visibility and access to experienced resources that can help improve a premature service
• The tester - finally someone can see who we are
• Business development - visibility for opportunities to join forces and integration
• Recruiters
  • positive: convincing someone to join a start-up that is making good progress
  • negative: picking fallout
• Job seekers - knowing what company is looking for employees and some information about the place you’re may end up at.
• TechCrunch - it may save Michael Arrington some cycles and allow him to rest a little bit

I did a very quick search and all I could find is this site. Again, if you know about a place tracking this kind of information in an organized way please let me know.

Even if you don’t I would like to hear your thoughts? Do you agree with me here? Do you see a need?

The three pillars of Social Search Engines

Inspired by TechCrunch article listing multiple social search engines solutions I decided to check few of the services claimed to be (or categorized as) social search engines. I tried: Rollyo, Eureskster, RecommendBox , iPercis ,  nsyght, and andunite. There were few other names (from this source) that were mistakenly categories as social search engines.

In my previous post I wrote about blog searching and Twingly, a company that leverage the community for building spam free search engine and improving search results. By the way this company is very high on The Search Race list. 

To my surprise I found that most of these solutions lack in the one or two key features of social search engines: building great content and expending the community. After examining each of these services and looking at their process, mainly in the later two pillars of social search engine: content, and community, I yet to see a social search engine that made it simple enough to attract large audience and build an eclectic content base. If I was missing a great existing solution, in this short quest, I’ll be happy to hear about. I’m looking for a Google quality like implementation in each of these pillars.

It is not enough to provide a simple way to upload one’s eclectic web links to the system, it is also important to provide a way to expend the content in the same social fashion. It is not enough to provide the option to  add friends or search in one’s contact list(not that I’m too excited about this method), it is also important to help a person to find new friends; expending his network and at the same time the search engine input base. 

Pillar I - The search

I’m not an expert in search algorithms, and it is not the goal of this post to comment about this part of SSE implementations yet it is assumed. I will say that today’s concept of search expended beyond finding a word or a phrase in text to words, and idioms spell check  (did you mean?), direction (map) and business basic info.

Pillar II - The content

There are multiple ways that SSE collect and refine its content

The interactive way:

• Allow you to import your favorites
• Allow you to submit new links and tags from the search web site
• Allow you to submit new links and tags through a gadget on a web site or blog
• Allow you to submit new links and tags using a button on your web browser
• Allow users to add tags, comments and vote for search results

The offline (automated) way:

• Crawling the web looking for fresh links in addition to the interactive way - there is an argument whether SSE should do that and I can see both point making sense- pro: allow for fresh content to support complete search experience, con: more is not always better and mainly when it looks and feel like spam.
• Crawling the communality submitted content to find matches

Why stopping at the submitted content only?

If I may suggest use the community submitted content as a source for crawling kind of how Twingly does it. I would also ask the community permission to access any of their other Web2.0 services to find more content.

Services that I found doing it fine:

nsyght - no option for favorite import but allow you to get your links form delicious and few other sources, iPercis - I successfully imported my favorites, yet requires some usability improvements (select all in some palaces)

Services that I found doing it poorly:

Rollyo - failed to import my favorites (single folder)

RecommendBox -  no assistance or automated way to build recommendation

Pillar III - The Community

This was my biggest surprise I assumed that a social search engine will put his emphasize on the social aspect of the application. I found some cases where after registering to the site “I was left alone in the cold”. I had no way to expend my network.

There are multiple ways helping people to do grow their network.

From within:

• Show a page with the current people logged-in to the web site and a view of everyone else.
• Allow adding people as a friend or preferably as I wrote in here - use the Twitter “follow” model

New users:

• Allow the user  to import her contact list
• Allow the user to grab his friends from her other social services
• Social crawling - look on other social services for leaders with many contact and lure them to sign in

Nobody has to use any of these automated options if they don’t want to to but at least they could add friends easily if they do.

Services that I found doing it fine:

The best one so far in this area is nsyght - they implemented most of the options listed above.

Services that I found doing it poorly:

RecommendBox  - there is no way to add friends from within. There is no automated way to add friends that are not currently using it.

Update 4/14/08 - my bad, sorry, there is a way in RecommandBox to load conatcts from online address books in the welcome page (after login in). Thank you Scott Rutherford for correcting me.

In Rollyo, and Eureskster there is only implicit notion of community but you can’t “see” it.

From my short inquiry on social search engines I  learned how wide is the range of different solutions that this term cover and I think that I found two promising services nsyght and iPercis.  iPercis is still in alpha and nsyght based on the TechCrunch post is on public beta so expect some hiccups along the way, yet both companies invested, in my opinion, in all the right element of Web 2.0 social search engine solution.

Probably  I will stay with Google and del.icio.us that I really  hope to see coming up with better search capabilities. What about you?

"The Blog Search" - single exit strategy? Thinking outside the search (edit) box.

I see new start-up companies still working on new search engines and search technologies. I can’t seem to see the reason why and the need for it when it comes to searching web sites. I do see a business need for new ways searching blogs, under some conditions.

Google is more than good enough for me. Most time I manage to find what that I need on Google search.

There are many basic things that Google does great beside text search like finding address, directions, maps and telephone numbers. They have built a highly scalable spiders, data center, ad sense technology and many other essential capabilities.

Do you really think that everyone can afford to build it?

The only exit strategy that make sense for these companies is one contingent upon buyout by one of the search giants like Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com and Google.

If I’m right in this case I would suggest to these start-ups not to focus on the amount of data indexed by their new search engine because no one will ever use them under their origin brand name. They will not be able to wave with great statistics to convince someone to buy them because the chances for them to reach wide audience are slim.

On the other hand they should focus on building high technology that could be patent protected, alternatively they should find a niche or geography that Google is very weak in.

I can only offer them to walk directly to one of the large search engine companies, knock on the door and offer the new technology for sale and then to spend their effort in another technology front.

                                    

One place still worth making an effort in search technology is the blogsphere. Google is not so great over there as I wrote in here . Technorati is a fantastic blog search engine but it is mainly focused on English speaking blog readers and bloggers.

One blog search engine with promising future is Twingly. This is an example for a blog search engine that is strongly invested in other languages and have deep roots in European countries. See posts on TechCrunch here and here.

I recently signed up to the private beta and I like what that I see so far. I can’t speak much about the search quality but I can tell about few things that I liked. First is the spam free search engine approach. This is a working progress to find information based on few initial reliable sources and then spreading out using links from those known bloggers building a “white” links list to index. The second is the powerful support for multiple languages other than English. Yes, not all the bloggers are speaking English, there are  more than 140,000 registered Swedish blogs, tons of French bloggers to name a few. So there is a need. Even in the US, the big melting pot, there is a great market for multi-lingual blog search engines(like in Spanish). What that I really liked in this beta is the TechPlan section where people can offer suggestions for product improvements features and then allow others to vote on them. This is a great way to collect feedback. I can’t see why not leaving it out there, even after the beta is done. There are more capabilities like voting on blog posts, prefix a search phrase with tags like link:, site:, blog:, lang:, tag:, and tspan: for qualifying target searches.

So, where should Twingly invest their effort?

I have few ideas:

Be Cultural

Don’t try to be American. Europe has a classic culture that could be embedded in the search results. Alternatively Twingly can create countries’ specific web pages the same way that Technorati created the “what’s percolating in blogs now”. E.g. what’s percolating in [country name here e.g. Norway] blogs now?

Be Social

Find a way to bring bloggers from around the world together. Match bloggers from different places by area of interest and create a place for them to interact. Create events centered in Europe for bloggers to meet. Use the Twitter like follow model for bloggers to find one another.

Be digital - build the best Blogsphere system-of-record

As I wrote in here strive to monitor and collect any available data about blog posts, blogs and bloggers, measures, profile information, area of interest, methods, preferred media, activities, patterns. Make sure to organize the data in a way that it is useful for both the general public and businesses.

Well if Twingly grows on their own or not they still have high chances for getting on Google radar

What is a blog reaction these days?

Traditionally, if there is a chance for setting tradition in the fast moving Internet world, a blog reaction is a counter post on someone blog. This is what that Technorati count as inbound links to calculate blogs’ Authority (and Rank) and Google to calculate PageRank (this is based on my very limited understanding of their algorithm).

Yet, today there are more ways to link and react to blog post:

• Links to blog posts proliferates in services such as Twitter, and Jaiku by others than the blogger who wrote them. Btw, This is a great way to find great reads in real-time. I would argue that it is better to change the general question “what are you doing now?” to “what are your reading, viewing, or listening on the web now?”.  In this way you will see more interesting reactions to blog posts than something like “I’m now drinking my morning coffee”.
• Facebook wall and other social networks that allow you to share content.
• Social bookmarking tools like reddit and delicious.
• Digg is some form of blog reaction
• Blog comment
• Instant Messages, and Skype
• To take it to the extreme - someone mentioned a blog post during audio and video recording (beside regular recording there are more ways to get recording done using tools and services like Utterz, ooVoo, QIK).

In each one of the cases above I refer to reaction initiated by someone else than the one who wrote the blogs.

Google will find most of these textual instances but I don’t know if they factor that in their PageRank calculation.

Why do I think that this is important?

First, I think that 140 characters, less the URL string length (use TinyURL.com for squeezing more of your words), is a good enough blog reaction in most cases.

What that I see is that not the blog reactions (very few of them in my case) is what that drives traffic to my web site but most of the services on the list above. Do you see that too?

Is it possible (theoretically) to have none inbound links yet still great traffic?

Does Twitter twits goes under Google’s and Technorati’s radar?

Do you think that it is even more critical in the case of video blogging?

Wouldn’t advertisers need/interested/like to know that?

Your thoughts….

Blog rank monitoring - one month later…

These are the results for the blogs from the origin list that I started monitoring since 2/12/2008. I only report here on blogs moving up in rank. Take in consideration that during that time Technorati checks for the freshness of the incoming links (blog reaction) and modify the rank (mostly down). I think that the ones that went up in rank during this time are doing excellent. Good work brother bloggers!

One highlight is PR Meets Marketing. This blog managed during this time to cross up tiers from tier3 to tier2 (the rank is less than 100,000).

The bolded blogs are doing amazingly.

Name	Old Rank	Current Rank	Last Update	Delta Rank
Design*Sponge	298	179	3/13/2008	39.9%
A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)	489	348	3/13/2008	28.8%
Paid Content	445	429	3/13/2008	3.6%
The Jason Calacanis Weblog	810	552	3/12/2008	31.9%
Logic+Emotion	1889	1792	3/13/2008	5.1%
Web Analytics Blog - Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik	2412	2190	3/11/2008	9.2%
Mahalo Daily	7652	4317	2/29/2008	43.6%
Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel	15871	15717	3/12/2008	1.0%
Veronica Belmont	16708	15796	3/5/2008	5.5%
Community Guy - Jake McKee	20500	18227	3/13/2008	11.1%
Social Media Explorer	27786	20394	3/13/2008	26.6%
Wikinomics	25970	21958	3/13/2008	15.4%
CubeMe	32707	29505	3/12/2008	9.8%
The Business and Politics of New Media (And the Podcast)	35986	31906	3/11/2008	11.3%
Technobabble 2.0	47149	39904	3/12/2008	15.4%
MegFowler	55948	43404	3/9/2008	22.4%
Dossy’s Blog	68166	45180	3/12/2008	33.7%
Online Video Watch	65568	51019	3/13/2008	22.2%
Micah Baldwin on Succeeding Through Failing	92012	69101	3/11/2008	24.9%
Freemania	84045	74992	3/13/2008	10.8%
** PR Meets Marketing **	121630	98047	3/12/2008	19.4%
The Cheap Revolution	106742	103170	2/27/2008	3.3%
Social Honeycomb	154301	126758	3/13/2008	17.9%
THINK IT Services	166367	150747	3/3/2008	9.4%
Negotiation, Negotiation, Negotiation	377609	273240	3/6/2008	27.6%
Doug Haslam	1072771	360865	3/8/2008	66.4%
Mediaphyter	962510	395824	3/12/2008	58.9%
Purplecar	550426	437475	3/10/2008	20.5%
Adventures in social software media sustainability and life	2910025	1391575	3/6/2008	52.2%

I’m still not where I want this project to be but it is fun to see the numbers over time (at least for me).

Anyway I hope to grow the list in the following month and to get more step automated.

Feel free to use this data to show how good you are. I noticed a reference to my results in Mahalo Daily Press Coverage, it was not the origin title but a summary of the results - cool!

Bloggers clustering

There are different ways to organize blogs. The most common one is by category. Technorati offer this in here, so does Blogged and a list of others in here. They use directories for categories and subcategories to organize blogs in an hierarchical way.

The reason for organizing blogs into directories by the topic they cover is to be able to find them this way. The most typical user story is to look for blogger that writes about a a specific topic.

Google on the other hand don’t use directories and let you find blogs using a word or phrase. The advance option in Google Blog Search let you filter the results by URL, Author, Date and Language.

Technorati’s Advanced search also let you search by word, phrase and tags. It also let you find links to a given URL (nice).

I found it hard to find blogs no matter if I use the directory or the text search methods. In both ways I get too big of a results list. The current option to filter (by Author, Date and Language or Tag) is not helping much either.

I would like to suggest few more ways to find blogs and bloggers. Once the topic/category is selected the next step is to filter the results by one or more of the following options:

• Post measures
  • # of post reactions
  • # of time dugged, saved in social bookmarking tools
  • # of comments
  • Duration of the discussion (comments)
• Blog Measures
  • Technorati rank and authority
  • Google page rank
  • Traffic
  • Feed subscribers
• Blogger
  • # of followers in Twitter
  • # of contact, friends in certain Social Network - Wikipedia has an exhaustive list here
  • Related to - e.g. in someone’s network (1st, 2nd and 3rd degree)
  • Reaction from certain blogs- e.g. blogger got reaction from TechCrunch
  • Group, Association
  • Awards
  • Offline activities
  • Geographic
  • Preferred media: text, audio, video
  • Personality type
    • Psychological - there is a small startup in Sweden that is making great progress clustering bloggers by their psychological profile using AI and Jungian functions i.e. looking at some of the MBTI-types (Sensing/Intuition and Thinking/feeling) and Keirsey Temperaments. If you like to learn more go to: Prfekt. The results are amazing and I just wish I could read the entire article (it is written in Swedish). I got some explanation from Mattias Östmar.
    • Perceived as: leader, imaginative, inspiring, expert, fun, funny and etc…
  • Patterns
    • On the rise - the blog’s measures are on an up trend
    • Switching media - going from text to video (this is a marketing opportunity)
    • Switching social network - attrition
    • Spike in activity - “hot potato” - e.g. How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips) (156 comments) and Michael Arrington response here (as of now 217 comments).

Most of this information could be gathered automatically and some could only be added interactively but having it in the The Blogsphere system of record could help to support finding a refined list of bloggers and blogs than it is possible today using directories or text search.

Why to find blogs and bloggers that falls in one cluster or another is a good question. I think that it is valuable just for the reason that there are so many of them.  In my opinion there is a business need for it too. I will be happy to hear if you think so too or not. What is your experience finding blogs and bloggers?

The Blogsphere system of record - not another blog search engine (or why Google got it wrong)

It is not enough to support finding blogs that contains a submitted word or a phrase. It is not enough even to find tagged blogs. This is just one use case out of many to support the blogging world.

If you want to support the blogger you need to look at the entire picture. Google, building Blog Search, continued to index blogs content the same way it did for web sites, not so useful and you’ll see why in a minute, but Technorati on the other hand got it right from the start.

                    

Let me start by defining the term “System of Records”: the wikipedia’s definition for the system of record is correct but maybe too abstract.  The key element is that the system of records contains both the raw data (the content) plus the metadata that help to support different business use.

The difference between Technorati and Google is that Google has the raw data and some indexes. Technorati has the content and the rich metadata!

Why is this metadata so important? To answer this question we need to understand what bloggers are doing.

So what bloggers are doing?

Most bloggers are driven by clear objective(s) and look for supporting services to accomplished them. They like to be seeing, i.e. to find readers, to be able to interact with their readers. They like to co-operate with other bloggers or to react to other blog post. Bloggers like to share content with others. Bloggers love comments, traffic and communities.

If you agree with me here then you’ll agree that it is not enough to show you a list of blog post that contains the word “system of records”.

So what do we have today supporting the blogsphere:

• Blog authoring tools like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more that help us write, present, organize, tag, bookmark content and to make the connections between the blogger and its community (different gadget and plug ins(like the one for Facebook and Yahoo’s MyBlogLog).
• Social networks and bookmarking that help to socialize new posts  - I won’t even bother listing the numerous options in this category.
• Readers and news aggregators to scale reading new posts
• Blog search engines and directories
• Technorati and StumbleUpon that does few more things

The few more things that Technorati does:

• Make the connection between the blog and the blogger’s profile - allow bloggers to claim a blog
• Show reactions to the blog posts - blog authority
• Show what is hot (what’s percolating in the blog world now)
• Show the top 100 blogs
• Rank blogs relative to other blogs
• Categorize blogs (directory)
• Show what is popular and uprising
• Finding new content and keeping the existing information current - spider, pinging

To provide these capabilities Technorati has to collect, build, update and store a lot of information beyond the actual blogs content. I would claim that Technorati holds toady the best blogsphere system of record. And I would add that they organize the data in such a way that Technorati are now capable of supporting new business use cases.

One example I can think of is adding a function where the focus is changed from the blog post to the bloggers providing bloggers segmentation tool. One combination is finding bloggers from a certain category (technology, video stream), rank (mid to top), and preferred media (audio, video).

I plan to write another post to discuss bloggers clustering in more details with the intention to show what additional meta data can be added to the blogsphere system of record. Hopefully with new data new business use cases can be supported. 

Full discloser: I don’t work or invested in Technorati I just appreciate people that appreciate data and treat it the right way