Ryminate

Fixing Social Content Sites

I agree wholeheartedly with Dharmesh Shah’s assessment of social content sites like Digg. The problem is the content–-it's completely random, and while often interesting, it is NOT particularly relevant to me.

To illustrate, check out the current headlines on Digg:

Google says Vista Search Changes not Enough

One of THE COOLEST Guitars (PIC)

Why Wal-Mart Won't Sell You More Than Two Prepaid Cell Phones

The Weird Things People Eat Around the World

Stolen Homer Simpson Statue Found

Like I said, these stories are random, interesting, but not particularly relevant to me. The social content sites have responded by creating story categories (e.g., entertainment, technology, sports), BUT they really can’t slice the content narrow enough to solve the relevance problem.

How do you fix this?

One idea is to create a PLATFORM, where users can create social news site pages containing content relevant to any type of vertical market. The content on these pages could be anything from all things labradoodle for labradoodle lovers, Notre Dame Football for Notre Dame fans, a local political candidate for supporters, GTD, even a nucleotide of interest to particular group of researchers. Content within these user created, vertical market sites would be voted upon just like Digg, Reddit, Truemors, thereby incorporating the value of the wisdom of crowds.

There are those out there trying to create this PLATFORM, (e.g., coRank), but I think a MUCH less complex model would be much more viral. I envision a basic site where...

1. users can create their own pages using the platform;
2. news stories are listed in two basic categories: the latest (the latest submissions), and the greatest (the voted upon results); and
3. the site would allow for interaction among users (e.g., comments, chat, forum clouds, meetups)

The content on these sites would be VERY relevant to its users, because unlike the other social content sites out there, you’ve gone one step further and empowered the users to create the categories. This is taking user generated content to another level.

There is a bit of a dilemma here: as you increase focus and thereby increase relevancy, such focus may cause a site to fall below the critical mass of users required to keep it going. This dilemma might be able to be bridged. For example, it may help in such situations for the "latest" stories to auto-propogate with content based upon user defined Google News Alert keywords, and then the voters could take over.

Austin based startup Thoof may be building something that principally meets some of what I've described above. We'll have to wait and see.

If you're a startup trying to build something along these lines I'd love to talk.

Beautiful Internet... Beautiful Caselaw?

Check out this gorgeous map of the Internet, compiled by researchers studying the Web's connectivity. The dense nodes in the center represent the core of the Web through which most traffic flows. The study's novel finding: Taking away these core connections wouldn't crash the net. The 'mantle' and 'crust' of connections would keep humming, albeit a little slower, through peer-to-peer connections. Furthermore, the increased use of peer-to-peer communications could improve the overall capacity of the Internet and make it run much more smoothly. More BitTorrent will save the Internet? Hmm...

Findings aside, I think this is an intriguing picture. But is it art? I think so. Being a lawyer, I think would also be very interesting to be able to graphically represent a particular case. The center would represent a particular decision (e.g., Brown vs. the Board of Education), and then it would be linked to all decisions cited in the decision (i.e., precedents), as well as all cases which subsequently cite the decision. If there's anyone out there that is interested in pursuing this I'd love to have a picture of a few cases on my wall.

Windows Mobile Client for Typepad

Above is the view from my office taken with the camera on my Moto Q.  Unfortunately, my office does not face the mountians, however, I do have a great view of Kansas far far in the distance.

This post was created using Typepad's new Windows Mobile Client (also available for Palm and Symbian), which I was pointed to by Terry Gold.  I've been hoping for this kind of solution, which will make for much easier posting while on the move.

Empty your Inbox with the "Trusted Trio"

Gina Trapani at LifeHacker suggests another way to keep from suffering from InboxAsaToDoListitis.  She suggests dragging all messages into one of the three following categories (works best with Outlook):

The Trusted Trio

• Action
  

  These messages represent tasks you must complete; whether that's a response that will take more than two minutes (anything less than that, just respond on the spot!) or some sort of an action. All these messages represent an item on your to do list.

• Archive
  

  The Archive folder is your long-term email reference library. Place all the messages that contain information you may want to retrieve at some point in the long term future in Archive. Any completed threads, completed requests, memo's you've read, questions you had answered, and completed project email goes into Archive. Basically, whenever an email is "closed" but you may find it useful at some point in the future place it in Archive.

• Hold
  

  The Hold folder is a temporary holding pen for important messages you'll need quick access to within the next few days. If you're waiting on someone else to get back to you with crucial information, or you're maintaining a thread about a time-sensitive topic, keep it in the Hold folder. For you GTDers, items in the Hold folder might correspond with items in the next few weeks in your tickler file.

The Web in China

Clive Thompson of the New York Times has written a very interesting piece on Google in China.  I thought the web was revolutionizing life here in the U.S., but its effects in China are and will be hard to imagine.  The web is in some ways providing China the "Great Leap Forward", that Mao had intended.  It is allowing China to finish transforming itself from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, information economy.  One of the key factors driving this "Leap" is the desire to learn possessed by so many young Chinese.    Last time I was in Beijing this notion was impressed upon me by the inventories of China's bookstores.  In almost all cases, at least half of the shelves contained textbooks, on everything from English to advance computer science.  Also, popular are books written by U.S. CEOs and management gurus.  Not only are these self-education books found in China's bookstores, but also in common roadside markets.  The will to learn is staggering.

But back to the Times article, I found the section on the cultural nuances as reflected on the web to be most interesting:

Yahoo executives quickly learned how difficult China was to penetrate — and how baffling the country's cultural barriers can be for Americans. Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones and short text messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same reason; during the weeks I traveled in China, whenever I called a Chinese executive whose phone was turned off, I would get a recording saying that the person was simply "unavailable," and the phone would not accept messages.) The most popular feature of the Internet for Chinese users — much more so than in the United States — is the online discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments and flame wars spill on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search engine that was introduced in 2001 as an early competitor to Yahoo, capitalized on the national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows people to create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. When users now search on baidu.com for the name of the Chinese N.B.A. star Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on his games; they are also able to join a chat room with thousands of others and argue about him. Baidu's chat rooms receive as many as five million posts a day.

As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users — and drove them instead to local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites, including Sina.com and Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but they were full of links to chat rooms and government-approved Chinese-language news sites. Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo's expense. "There's now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy," I was told by Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American professor of media studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Best Gadgets of CES 2006

Check out the best gadgets of CES 2006 according to Newstips.

Very cool.

Low Barriers to Entry?

One of the great things about the Web is that it provides the ability to quickly start a business with very little capital.  In a matter of mere days (hours in some cases) you can go all the way from idea to revenue. 

Because of the low barriers to entry, you also see competition in terms both numbers and speed that is unprecedented.  I could identify a company offering a good or service one week and very easily duplicate the business model the next.  (You see this in action on a larger scale between Google, MS, and Yahoo).  How do your protect yourself from competition in situations where there are very low barriers to entry?

1. Build a Brand - This is your company's greatest asset.  This is perhaps the one thing that cannot be duplicated.  Spend the time it takes to identify what your brand is, whether it fits with your target customers, and how you are communicating it to the customer.  If you look at Google's balance sheet, goodwill (i.e. the brand) is valued at $194 million under GAAP, less than 2% of total assets; however, if you asked Google how much the brand is really worth I would guess they would come back with a figure representing a much greater percentage of their total assets.
2. Build a Community - Do not be satisfied with your customers coming to your site merely to buy your goods or use your services, create something more.  Create a place where customers can interact with other customers. Look for example at Amazon .  As a customer I visit Amazon just as much to read customer reviews of book / products as I do to buy goods, (and Amazon isn't paying one cent for this valued service).  They have created a community.
3. Do whatever it takes (i.e. sacrifice revenues) to build a critical mass of users / regular visitors - This is crucial.  In order to succeed you NEED momentum.  You also need visibility on the web.  Both of these things only come once you have a critical mass of users / regular visitors.  Look at Microsoft Live.  As it is new, MS is using Microsoft Live to provide valuable services for small businesses for free.  Many other sites offer their services for free and rely only upon ads for revenues.  Do whatever it is you need to do to get people to your site.  Then, once you have this critical mass you can tweak the business model to increase revenues.

Google Real Estate

Shimon Sandler posted today on the launch of Google real estate.  Just type in "homes for sale" or "real estate" and you are presented with search boxes that will lead you into a fantastic GoogleMaps plotting of the homes for sale within your criteria.  This is very similar to HousingMaps, but much cleaner and not tied to Craigslist. 

Not only Google real estate suck listings from sites such as HomesandLand.com, but it also allows you the option to post your own item.  Wow, this is yet another tool that will allow home buyers and sellers to cut out the agent, and save the ~6% in commission fees!  I will never use a realtor again.

See the below pictures:

SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards

SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards serves as a great list of the "Web 2.0" companies who are doing some exciting things.  One company that I was impressed with was HousingMaps, which sucks the  homes for sale  out of craigslist and displays their location, picture, and price through the GoogleMaps API.  Trulia is doing something similar, but on a much less craiglist-esque basis (i.e. less grassroots, more commercial).

Google Finance

Google again has demonstrated its ability to take something that is very good (in this case Yahoo Finance), clean up the appearance, do several small tweaks allowing better access to information, and one or two "wow!" capabilities that leaves the competition reeling. 

Check out Google Finance.  No longer must you know or lookup stock symbols (thank you!).  Simply enter the company name or industry and Google will get you the information you are looking for.  I love the dragable graph with corresponding  news pieces.  The ability to setup your own portfolio is equally impressive.  There are also discussion groups, management photos, blog posts on companies, and more.

This is the most impressive thing I've seen from Google in a while.