Monthly Archives: May 2009

Get vanity

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Amused by the fact that when you go to complete your LinkedIn profile it gives you the option of customizing the url to something more people friendly. For example changing your public profile from http://www.linkedin.com/pub/king-kong/10/466/577 to www.linkedin.com/in/king-kong.

What’s amusing about this is that the page link to more information about ‘customizing’ your url is: http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile?editwp=&locale=en_US&trk=mypro_getvanity. So I guess it’s not customization but vanity at play here? Do tell LinkedIn, which is it?

And on the subject of vanity urls: RT @soltran: Vanity URLs coming to Facebook soon! Get ready for the landrush! http://bit.ly/1aUhfa

But of course there’s always the option of using a service which gives you one url for all these various services too, I believe the jargon is ‘identity management platform’. For example check out chi.mp!:

Chi.mp gives you your own domain and Web site – your social hub. With chi.mp, you can bring together the many pieces of your digital life – your content, your contacts – to create “Centralized You”. And you control “who sees what”.

HP Labs report predicting content popularity, & thus revenue

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After picking up on HP Labs research on the value of paying attention to top contributors I thought it would be interesting to check previous research from the same guys at Palo Alto, looking at predicting the popularity of online content (pdf) or read it on scribd). The abstract nicely sums it up. Could be useful for planning a community growth strategy for example:

We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user’s access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data.

“In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.

So let’s get down to the bullet points:

  • There is a linear relationship between the time it takes to consume contributor generated content, and the ability to predict it.
  • There is a clear asymmetrical relationship at work — a few get a lot of attention. A ranking or rating mechanism supports this feature as the ‘rich get richer’.
  • As a side observation only 3% of YouTube views come from incoming links. I assume that includes embedded videos on blogs for example, but that’s not clearly stated.
  • The social network feature of Digg is key as fans get updates of what their favourite folk are reading and follow suit.
  • There is a key difference between Digg and YouTube popularity patterns related to the content context. Digg content is news-related often and soon as such reaches its ‘sell by date’. In contrast on YouTube videos are not promoted to the frontpage in the same way as Digg, and members find the content largely through the search: “An important difference that is apparent in the figure is that while Digg stories saturate fairly quickly (in about
    one day) to their respective reference popularities, Youtube videos keep getting views all throughout their lifetime (at least throughout the data collection period, but it is expected that the trendline continues almost linearly). The rate at which videos keep getting views may naturally differ among videos: less popular videos in the beginning are likely to show a slow pace over longer time scales, too.”
  • Another side observation: it matters what time of day you post content to Digg, if it’s posted in the middle of the night for majority of US readers then this will have an impact. I guess this is a general reminder of making sure content uploads on global communities take account of the various needs of readers, particularly to make sure they are wide awake when content goes up!
  • Digg itself may not be perfect in promoting content. It promotes on average 11% of content which does not generate sustained interest. Guess this means we are all on a learning curve;-)
  • The maths supports the ‘more popular content is early on, the more it will be later on’ rule of thumb:

Popularity measures

  • The researchers provides 3 models to predict submission’s popularity as a time in the future. They favour the constant scaling model (CS) for relative measures, while the linear model (LN) for absolute measures. In conclusion they suggest the error is less using the relative measure.

My reading of their results is that relative measures are particularly useful for judging the revenue value of advertisements placed next to content, but not so good for content popularity. Which is good for YouTube’s advertisers, but bad news in helping Digg correct its 11% error in promoting content which in fact turns out not to be popular!

I guess this also supports my conclusion from the previous post that (1) Have a strategy to support your top contributors. (2) As part of this measurable strategy make sure the means for them to gain attention work well. As I believe my sister company Sift Media does, you can then further tie the attention scalar by tying attention to payment to further reinforce this strategy’s influence.

How to pay special attention to your top community contributors

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Just got hold of this recent study from HP Labs which demonstrates the feedback loop between attention and contributions to online communities. The abstract provides a nice introduction:

A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose con- tinuing participation is key to the sites’ success. As we show, people’s propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time.

This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com.

What’s important about this is helping frame community management strategies to ensure the valuable ‘advocates’ in a community remain active, by ensuring the value of peer attention is factored into sustaining their involvement. This the author’s recognise if paramount as “a disproportionate number of contribution to online peer production efforts are made by a small number of very active users”. And here’s the maths that supports this:

The maths of attentionSo what sustains this feedback loop? The authors suggest that to answer this question “one needs to look into the constituents of a contributor’s potential audience”, or to put it simply the number of fans/subscribers they have — a feature of both Digg and YouTube — could well be the missing evolutionary link:

Because a considerable portion of attention a contributor receives can be attributed to her fans, the contributor’s publicity (measured by the number of fans) could act as the important missing link between popularity and productivity. A contributor with many past contributions (high productivity) naturally has many fans (high publicity). Her fans naturally pay a lot of attention to her next contribution (high popularity). This in turn incentivizes the contributor to make more contributions.

Conclusion? (1) Have a strategy to support your top contributors. (2) As part of this measurable strategy make sure the means for them to gain attention work well.

Getting these right could make the difference between success and failure in the long term. After all don’t 90% of posts get created by 1% of users, according to Jakob Nielsen?

This is why top contributors matter

This is why top contributors matter

Indeed Nielsen adds a useful caveat to this question:

If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value.

Feedback loops of attention in peer production, Fang Wu, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman , 2009/05/12, arXiv:0905.1740 (pdf). Thanks to the Complexity Digest for the initial research reference.

Update May 2010: A simple way to boost influencers’ (not precisely the same as ‘top contributors’ but still relevant) credibility with your users is by making their content more searchable, & by promoting it via tweets & bookmarking: http://ow.ly/1FUtM

Trolls, spammers, sock puppets & free speech

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Personally I don’t like to work too hard on researching blog posts only to get someone respond with a comment rubbishing it! But I do like to be in the right place/right time. And today that has yielded a post about blog posts, well specifically blog comments, inspired by one expert community panel discussion and another from the Editor of the Leicester Mercury on removing comments for posts about the McCanns.

Exhibit one from community guru Patrick O’Keefe (I’m waiting for his cool community book to arrive from CA via Amazon). Called “How to Deal with Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets.” Here is the panel description from Patrick, with the video of the discussion below:

You just wrote the greatest blog post you’ve ever written. You researched the subject, spoke with sources, conducted interviews and completed a well thought out, well written article. You hit the post button and your baby is up. Here comes the praise! The first comment you receive? “You’re stupid, you’re ugly and you’re writing sucks.” Whether you call them trolls, haters or griefers, they’re out there, waiting to ruin your day, harm your community and taint your world.

Or maybe the first comment was something like, “Hey, nice article, check out mine!” Just like there are people who’d like to harm you, there are also people who’d like to cheaply benefit from your work and your audience. Spammers can do their own sort of damage.

But, neither of these two groups need harm you, if you know how to deal with them. This panel will give you the knowledge you need to tackle it.

Exhibit two, the blog of the Leicester Mercury Editor Keith Perch, and my home town newspaper. Now what’s really interesting here is the fact he has to deal with people wanting to leave comments about the McCann’s, but he has been forced to withdraw the facility due to trolls. Interested? Then read this on the subject of ‘Free Speech’, with extracts below from Keith Perch’s blog:

One very irate reader – probably ex-reader – emailed me with a bitter complaint about the Mercury’s'decision to deny freedom of speech’ to our readers.

She wrote: ‘I am of course referring to your apparent decision to omit an ‘add comment’ facility for the most recent story about the McCanns … the British media’s generally misplaced sympathy for the McCanns and lack of ability to acknowledge that the parents deserve to be criticised (and convicted) for their negligence makes me suspicious that this a deliberate move by the Mercury to gag their readers.

I’m not convinced the name or email address supplied were genuine, but she was clearly very angry. It is a very difficult area for us – we give our readers the ability to comment on articles on our website without requiring them to register and without us putting in any form of pre-moderation (ie we moderate posts after they show up on the website, removing those which we think create a legal issue or which are in some other way offensive).

We certainly allow things on to the website which we would not allow into the paper – I guess we think it is clear that it is the opinion of the reader and not something that we would necessarily agree with. But we do have to draw the line somewhere.

So what about the McCanns? It is true that we don’t allow comments on any stories about Maddy or her parents. Why is that? We used to allow posts, but there is a small group of people out there who are convinced that they know what happened to Maddy – they have no evidence, but they are happy to make their allegations publicly and forcefully. Every time we have allowed comments on our stories about this family, the articles have become swamped with baseless accusations.

However, the right to free speech comes with a responsibility and the bile that is poured out by a minority on this issue, leaves us with little choice. I don’t like the decision, but I don’t see what else we can do without using resources we don’t have to moderate more quickly. I am considering changing our comment system to allow only those who have registered to comment. This, I think, would give our readers more commitment to the site and it would be much easier to build a system of trust that meant we didn’t need to moderate at all or where the readers themselves could moderate.

But that’s for the future. For now, I’m sticking with the ban even though it cost us a reader.

Lateral community links value to non-profits

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Nice video from Clay Shirley taken from the Commonspace site, where he cites the example of how non-profits (in this case the ACLU) can miss out on lateral links between members, if they’re not aware of the significant gains to be had from such a strategic approach to communities.

Don’t eye up the models, talk to the people

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Great advice for newly graduated MBAs on the importance of people over business from John Baldoni in Harvard Business. I add to think ‘complex’ rather than ‘complicated’ that way you’ll better see the role people have first and the technical business systems second, rather than the other way round:

Look for life in the “white spaces.” As diligent students of business, you have been exposed to hundreds of graphic models that illustrate the flow of information from one process to another. What you don’t see in those models are the people to people connections that make those business processses work. Those connections occur in the “white spaces,” the undefined areas between the interconnected arrows and boxes. How well you manage those connections with colleagues and bosses will determine how high you climb, either in someone else’s company or your own!

Wolfram|Alpha launch note

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WolframAlpha

I believe Wolfram|Alpha launched via webinar last night (GMT speaking). Not being a search engine geek I thought I’d just quote the tweet from CannonGod:

CannonGod Wolfram|Alpha Feedback: ‘No Result’ page needs to lead to similar queries/simple results. Users are getting frustrated hitting a brick wall.

Just for fun then I tried looking up data on medical imaging; the results page returned a message to say it was under investigation, and gave the option to leave my email to register my interest: so not so bad a verdict from me!



A neat semantic web tool with Calais

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Just heard of this tool from Thomson Reuters, which works on Drupal for one thing which is interesting:

Calais: Connect. Everything.

We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.

Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

Could Apple Buy Twitter?

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Nice story from Valleywag. I like the comment about Apple culture, as seen by the public, and as seen by insiders. Backs up my hunch. Please can Google buy Twitter rather than Apple?

Facebook tried to buy Twitter. Google and Microsoft have been giving the red-hot Internet-messaging startup the eye. But we hear it’s Apple that’s closest to sealing a deal, possibly for as much as $700 million.

A source who’s plugged into the Valley’s deal scene and has been recruited by Apple for a senior position says Apple and Twitter are in serious negotiations, with the goal of unveiling a deal by June 8, when Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference launches in San Jose.

Twitter turned down a $500 million offer in cash and stock from Facebook, in part because Twitter’s investors couldn’t agree on whether Facebook’s stock was worth as much as Facebook said it was. But Apple could easily pay cash. A source familiar with the thinking of Twitter’s board says the company would be hard-pressed to refuse an all-cash offer in the range of $700 million. (Is Twitter really worth that? Since it’s business is nothing but a fantasy at this point, any valuation, high or low, is a matter of make-believe.)

What does Twitter, an adorable but unprofitable startup, have to do with a hardware company like Apple? The iPhone is the obvious driver of the deal: The many iPhone apps like Tweetie that people use to post Twitter messages are hot sellers for Apple. But Apple gets the benefit of Twitter-addicted iPhone users whether or not it owns Twitter. And it seems like an odd cultural fit, since Apple’s hardly known for its Web prowess.

That’s where the deal makes a certain amount of sense, if you understand the particular culture of those who work on the Web. While Apple might have its pick of hardware designers and software engineers, Web developers are a breed apart — and they have balked at working at a company like Apple, which may look innovative to the world at large, but seems fusty and hidebound to the Mission hipsters who build websites. You’ll hear the complaints: Apple’s secretive and paranoid, resistant to the wide-open ways of the Web.

Twitter , of course, is open in both nature and spirit. Users overshare every last detail of their lives, while Twitter makes these updates available on its website, via RSS, and through third-party applications. Apple is surely realizing it needs to play in this world, and needs someone to show it the way. Is it coincidence that Apple has put Twitter executives on stage so frequently, or that it profiled Twitter as a “business” recently?

If Apple buys Twitter, it won’t be about making money. It will be about making a statement. In 140 characters or less.

Leicester’s sikh festival procession

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A little video as it past by the Cotton Mill…

Sikh festival procession from stuart Hall on Vimeo.