Food hacking, why not?

Food hacking -- it is what the name implies -- has its own wiki. Food hacking is the other end of the spectrum from ordered-in pizza.

Hat tip to Mike Love.

Technorati : food, food hacking, marc powell

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:32pm in Food, Food and Drink, Social Media, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Feedburner’s new stats. I like!

Friend Shel Holtz gives us the heads up on Feedburner's new stats:

Those holding Feedburner accounts for their RSS feeds can take a look at the renovated stats page, unveiled yesterday. Included is the ability to track podcast downloads along with a new feature called "Uncommon Users," which lets you find places where "your feed content is referenced or clicked that FeedBurner does not recognize as a common feed service," according to the official Feedburner blog.

What I like is the breakdown on popular feed items -- while I am not a stats junkie, my fast analysis shows that articles popular with subscribers are not the same articles that are popular with people who wander in through a link. There's overlap, but discrepancies, too. Not sure what that means, and I am pretty sure it's irrelevant. But fun to know.

Technorati: feedburner

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:34pm in RSS, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Painless tagging: great tool

One reason I used to rarely tag Desirable Roasted Coffee posts is that it was just too tedious to fiddle with html, remember the right Technorati or del.icio.us tag sytnax, etc.

But now I'm using EGM Stratagy Tag Generator. Wow, punch in the tags, hit the button, and out pops the right html for clipping and pasting.

Works for Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl tags. Nice touch: the html comes wrapped in a <span> so you can tweak your CSS to get tags to show up in style.

Technorati Tags: tags, tag generators

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:10pm in Gadgets & Toys, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Want to get the most out of Technorati? Rubel cleans house.

Say what you will about Technorati -- it still thinks Desirable Roasted Coffee is not a "PR" or "public relations" or "Copenhagen" blog despite my repeated admonitions it's all three and more --  it's a pretty good tool for finding stuff in the blogosphere.

In Ten Technorati Hacks, Steve Rubel has codified pretty much what every blogger, journalist, PR practitioner and general news-head should know about using Technorati. I'd sussed most of this out, to some degree, but it's nice to see it all in handy-dandy format.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:43pm in Blogging, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google's Little Mysteries

How Google works is a mystery to me.

In April, I noted that Desirable Roasted Coffee was suddenly the first landing page for anyone searching Google for John Constable's painting Hampstead Heath:

"For a week or so now, I've noticed 15 to 30 readers a day coming by Desirable Roasted Coffee looking for information about John Constable's glorious painting "Hampstead Heath". Puzzling, because Desirable Roasted Coffee is the last place to come looking for English Romantic landscapes.

"However, I did post a brief aside months ago about John Ruskin and J.M.W. Turner, in which I linked to Constable's painting.

"Today, however, I had more time to investigate. I found a Google Images search for "Constable Hampstead Heath" brings up 28 results, the first of which directly links to Desirable Roasted Coffee. But, and here's the odd thing, it doesn't even link to the Ruskin-Turner story (which, anyway, didn't show the image; it only linked to it)."

Sometime in June, this phenomenon vanished. No explanation.

Today, I noticed a raft of new traffic coming from Google searches. Investigation revealed that when I  search Google for "anyones blog" ,  Desirable Roasted Coffee rolls in at number 5 of 17.4 million.

Pisses me off, frankly. We don't let just anyone in, you know.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:38pm in Bizarre & Unexpected, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Conversation Clouds vs. Blog Rankings & Page Rank

PubSub recently finished tearing up and replanting its LinkRanks service; I, for one, like the new look & the results presentation. And while I don't understand how the rankings are calculated, a few test runs on the bloggers I know indicate to me that the rankings are pretty valid.

At about the same time, the Feedster 500 was launched. Another ranking service (congratulations, Neville and Shel).

I don't want to be provocative:  But how much should rank matter?

I know the Blogging For Benjamins crowd is intensely interested, because more rank could mean more "reports" sold. The well-known political bloggers of the left and right are also intensely interested because, ironically, it gets them more coverage on MSM.

But who else cares what your PubSub rank is? If you care, should you? Should I? What does my rank have to do with standing, reputation, place in the community? Everyone in every steel town in America once knew who Andrew Carnegie was, but who had the highest standing in their community? Probably the corner grocer, who helped you at church or building a house (And, lest anyone go astray, Shel and Neville are where they are on these ranks because they help the PR  community).

Dina Mehta -- and I wish I discovered her blog long before Reboot 7.0 -- discusses in her easy, inclusive way why the idea of rankings is flawed. In her post, she's commenting on another post by Adina Levin, that argues for the idea of Conversation Clouds as a better way of understanding relative influence.

As Adina tells it:

The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month, six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps you re-center around that blog's conversations. If you click on a tag or topic, you search based on that. You'd need to experiment with several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud.

This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities.

Cloud-browsing represents a pattern of blogsurfing. A reader might start with

Mary Hodder's post on blog metrics, and then traverse to Dina Mehta, danah boyd, Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield. 

The cloud would show in graphical form what a Technorati or Blogpulse search would -- who linked to the post. And it would also illustrate the repeated links and cross-links as people reply. If you zoomed out the time horizon, you'd see some relationships become more obviously dense, with repeated patterns of links and counterlinks.

I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we're looking for -- a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation.

And as Dina comments:

I think this would very nicely integrate values that I hold important in blog conversations - relevance, integrity and credibility, interest and empathy generated, stretch in teasing boundaries, intimacy with my audience, respect and amicability - rather than blog rankings and ratings.  Making 'invisible' conversations and clusters and communities of interest visible as a result.  I'd love to see comments at posts integrated into these clouds in some way too, as many who comment donot necessarily blog, and often the comments enrich the thought in a post much more.

I'll certainly follow this conversation. Might (don't we wish) kill the A-list meme. And describe what we know to be true: our "cloud" is far more influential than any "top-100" list.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:45pm in Bloggers, Blogging for Benjamins, Communication, Online Media, Public Relations, Social Tools, Society, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (1)

PubSub LinkRanks looking Pretty Good!

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that PubSub's LinkRank (now called LinkCounts, apparently) feature was back up but buggy. Almost immediately, PubSub's Mark Wagner and Bob Wyman were Johnny-on-the-Spot with news of fixes and requests for feedback.

Today, Mark sent me this mail. And it's true, the site is looking and working as it should from where I sit.

"We have been continuing to work on our LinkCounts pages based, in part, on your previous feedback. We have "quietly" slipped out an update of the pages.  Several things that you had mentioned have been addressed. We have started tracking Shel's blog and we have fixed the "Site Converter" so that it now properly identifies Warren's blog.  The other main change that was inspired by your comments was that we hooked the "Look Up a Site" box to our Site Converter code.  Now you can enter a URL and we will "resolve" it to our entry for said URL. Thus you no longer have to guess what we may "call" the site.

"If you have some time and would like to run through the pages we would welcome any additional feedback, suggestions, etc that you have. Please note that the "start" page has changed and can befound here:  http://www.pubsub.com/linkcounts.php"

Bob Wyman has more on LinkCounts.

I've worked with programmers for much of my career, and so understand well that it's hard to get it right the first time. What I like about these guys is that they respond to criticism and follow up when the problem is solved. That's just common business sense -- and all too uncommon these days.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 05:33am in Blog Management, Blogging, Gadgets & Toys, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

PubSub LinkRanks Back Online; Very Buggy (But They're Working on it!)

Update: Even before I managed to send a copy of this post to the PubSub people, Pubsub's Bob Wyman and Mark Wagner had both posted comments explaining why I got odd results. That sort of fast, useful feedback is a great way to make friends. Thanks, guys!

Original post: PubSub's LinkRanks service is back online, after being down some months. The new version does not, so far, have the old "ranking" feature that gratified my blego when I was feeling blue and lonely, but it does have some interesting factoids (updated daily):

Top 100 Sites By Inlinking Sites for May 9th, 2005

•         249,827 sites created         716,886 new blog entries       
• 1,170,798 outlinks were created to 149,717 other sites
• 94,076 (38% of those with new entries) created outlinks.
• 6,310 sites       (3% of those with new entries) had both inlinks and outlinks.
• 260,629 syndication feeds had new entries.
• 5% of the 5,390,292 recently active feeds monitored by PubSub had new entries.
• 3% of the 9,968,379 feeds monitored by PubSub had new entries.

You can type in the URL of any blog and see a 30-day day-by-day review of how many incoming and outgoing links the blog had. Here is Desirable Roasted Coffee's summary.

For the fun of it, I checked up on friends Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Eric Eggertson, and Warren Bickford. And noticed right away that the service is wildly buggy.

For example, Neville gets credit for an average of 18 outlinks a day, with an astounding 127 outgoing links to 99 sites on April 28. Nevon readers will instantly realize that the program notes from For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report play a role here: the HH Report program notes link to anyone mentioned during the podcast.

So you'd expect to see similar stats from Shel's blog. But no... he's credited with zero outgoing links the last 30 days.

Moreover, the URLs are a problem. PubSub doesn't recognize Warren Bickford's blog address http://blogs.iabc.com/chair/. Tweaked to look for http://blogs.iabc.com, PubSub finds the results.

So while it's nice to see PubSub's LinkStats back on line, it's still in need of major debugging to be useful. To their credit, they admit that, and ask for feedback. I'll be sending this along to them.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:55am in Blog Management, Blogging, Gadgets & Toys, Online Media, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0)

Folksonomy Sans Frontières

Sinking further into the quicksand of taxonomy/folksonomy of the Net, I can only commend Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease to your attention.

Specifically, his series starting with Translating Taxonomies and Categories looks at the problems of classification across languages and cultures.

Much of the debate I have read so far, at other sites, takes it for granted that the tags and sites are in English. And certainly the problems of classification are huge even if we only had one language to deal with. But leaven that with a mix of cultures and languages and -- and I believe my fellow expats would agree -- and.... well, it's not my field, but this layman sees huge scalability problems.

Via friend Gunnar Langemark's quirky blog.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:16pm in Blogging, Society, Taxonomy of Cyberspace, Technology | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tagging and Folksonomies: My Head Aches But Other Heads are Thinking

Earlier this month, Steve Rubel admonished us all to pay more attention to tags and folksonomies, because they show what people are thinking about:

One of the most important social media trends to watch this year is the increasing influence of tags, also known as folksonomies. According to Wikipedia, folksonomy is the collaborative categorization of user-generated content using simple tags. Folksonomies are wildly popular on Flickr, a photo sharing site, and on del.icio.us, a social bookmark site.

Although tags are far from perfect, you should nevertheless be using them to keep your finger on the pulse of the American public. Right now, at a minimum, you should be monitoring your company/brand tags on Flickr as well as your competitors' folksonomies. I wrote about this last week. Jeremy Zawodny smartly advised marketers to take in del.icio.us as well.

Since Steve is usually ahead of the curve, I've been trying to take his advice by learning what I can and noodling how to a) apply the idea to Desirable Roasted Coffee and b) advise clients about it.

I keep running up against two issues.

First, since tags are self-applied by tens of thousands of Flickr users and other bloggers, I suspect we are bound to end up with common categories too large to be useful (Parties, Dogs, NewYork) and, because no one need agree to any one taxonomy, a plethora of tags that refer to the same thing (insulinpump, insulin_pump, insulininjectiondevice).

Second (but related) is how we bloggers can discipline ourselves to apply tags judiciously; moreover, how will and should tags affect how we design blogs. For example, Technorati already interprets Typepad categories as tags. Does that mean Typepad bloggers should drastically expand their category lists? It would seem to be a good tagging idea, but it would also render "categories" fairly worthless.

None of which means I am giving up on the idea; it simply troubles me.

It also seems to trouble Shelley Powers at Burningbird. In Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café, Powers examines -- in what I believe is the longest blog post I've ever read (and one of the most thoughtful) --  seemingly every aspect of tagging and folksonomy. Extensive quotes from Weinburger, Doctorow, Rebecca Blood, Clay Shirky, Julian Bond, and a host of other thinkers.

Clay believes that ultimately ontologies will fall to folkonomies, as the latter gain rapid acceptance because of their low cost and ease of use; I believe that ultimately interest in folksonomies will go the way of most memes, in that they’re fun to play with, but eventually we want something that won’t splinter, crack, and stumble the very first day it’s released.

What we don’t need are more cheap solutions, and ultimately, I find that Technorati Tags are a ‘cheap’ solution, though a compelling one, and useful for generating conversation if no other reason. And I don’t want to deginerate Technorati’s efforts with this, because I feel in the end Technorati is going to play a major role in our semantic efforts. Still, no matter how many tricks you play with something like tags, you can only pull out as much ‘meaning’ as you put into them.

What we need, instead, is a way of making richer solutions more accessible to people, and in that, I do agree with Clay–lower the barrier of participation. In the email list for the Identity Commons effort, the members talked about how the URL which serves as identifier within LID is also a URI, which forms the basis for XRIs, and how the group should look at ways of achieving synergy with this new effort. Rather than being disdainful, they sought to turn LID into an opportunity.

Finally, most of the conversation the last month at Many-to-Many has been about tagging and its applications.

Many minds working hard on this issue. Go read.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:55pm in Blogging, Society, Taxonomy of Cyberspace, Technology | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Amusing Time-Sink and A-1 Blog Directory

A month or so ago, I stumbled across Blogshares, which bills itself as "fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links."

I like simulations and, while I don't have all that much time on my hands, thought I would give it a go.

$14 billion (fictional) later,  having pumped-and-dumped Neville, Shel, DRC to a fare-thee-well, and having realized that the "market" is not really a market (and that "Ideas" and "Chips", not blogs, are the valuable commodities), I don't need to play anymore.

But... and perhaps this is the point of the game ... for the "market" to work, blogs must be filed and catalogued into various "industries", which can range from the language of the blog ("English", "French"), to the subject ("Advertising", "Cooking"), to the location of the blogger ("Russia", "North Carolina"). Players make these assignments by "voting" on a blog's industry (and thereby earn the ever-valuable "chips").

It's not a Blog-taxonomy-Wiki, but it has every attribute of one.

The result: a complex, comprehensive directory of the most active part of the blogosphere. Not every blog is here; on the other hand, I've not met a blog recently that wasn't here. And by exploring various "industries", I find myself on a journey of serendipity.

Don't worry about playing... but sign up. The directory is worth real gold.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:54pm in Games, Taxonomy of Cyberspace, Time-Sinks | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)