is it realtime?
What is it:
- Real time
- Realtime
- Real-time
- realtime
- real time
- real-time
Someone please clarify, which realtime is the correct one? I am wasting our natural resources by monitoring all of the different ways someone can spell real time. According to the article “The environmental impact of Google searches” “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle or about 7g of CO2 per search”.
Help me save the planet.
OneRiot Predicts American Idol Winner
As I walked into the house tonight my kids were watching American Idol and my son informed me that Adam was going to win. I said Ethan, I know he is your favorite but I disagree. According to the analysis done at OneRiot this week Kris was the winner.
He said no way and asked if I wanted a jellybean. The jellybean container actually has two snakes that jump out upon opening. I said no thank you.
Visit the OneRiot Blog to see how they predicted the winner or to search the realtime web visit OneRiot.com.
Techstars Mentors and the Boulder Community
Boulder has this incredible program called Techstars. One of the impressive things they do is leverage mentors both locally and nationwide. The Techstars employees and advisors do a great job of getting these mentors to Boulder. When they overlap with community events like New Tech, for example, they connect these people to the event organizers and the larger Boulder community can network with and gain access to these experienced professionals.
The problem arises that community events only happen a few days a month so members are only getting access to a fraction of the mentors. Over the past week, I have received multiple emails, txts and tweets from Boulder entrepreneurs expressing their envy and their desire to make these mentor trips more productive for the community and the arriving mentors.
I would like to propose a few options and if anyone has other ideas please comment:
- Create a public calendar of visiting mentors
- Hold several of the mentoring meetings per week at CU or some other large auditorium so a portion of the entrepreneurial community can attend
- Do an interview series with mentors, similar to the Entrepreneur’s Unplugged series hosted at CU during the school year.
I am not suggesting these events should be free, though it would be nice. I think most people in the community would pay $5-10 to sit through these sessions, especially if it included snacks.
thoughts, ideas suggestions?
While I am on my Boulder sopabox, I also think Boulder needs a cool tech conference. I propose something like SXSW meets TED.
who’s in?
Bring on the noise bring on the notification fatigue
How do I gain control of my online social life:
I have the Seesmic desktop client running with 7 twitter accounts ranging from 10 to 1000’s of followers plus several active searches. The thing is out of control and requiring my full attention. The concept that twitter is a one way communication is just not true it’s like Facebook, IM or email, certain posts require a response and most are looking for a very timely reply.
I have given up on IM for the time being, I check Facebook and linkedin at least once a day and my email client is always active and taking up way to much space.
What should I do, if I want to be responsive to those who need or want my attention?
The Real Time Web is changing how I consume information
OneRiot released a vertical search engine today, focused on twitter URL’s.
The OneRiot beta search engine that has been available for a few months uses implicitly captured URL’s, while the OneRiot Twitter Search uses URL’s that are explicitly entered by twitter users. The content overlap is fascinating.
I ran a search for G20 at 9:47am:
- Google’s number one result is navigational, followed by News
- Search.Twitter has opinions and comments
- OneRiot Web search has News and Fashion
- Oneriot.Twitter.Search has news
The other real interesting fact for me is time. I ran my test search for G20 again at 10.10am:
- Google had no change
- Search twitter had 641 new updates
- OneRiot had replaced it’s number one result and lost the fashion reference
- OneRiot.Twitter.Search had 4 new updates
The Real Time Web is changing how I consume information.
I included screen shots of my results, and I would highly recommend trying the different engines to see the difference.
Google.com:
Search.Twitter.com
OneRiot.com
twitter.oneriot.com
I am tired of people asking me why they should use Twitter. Why shouldn’t they use it? Besides the medical conditions that it creates, trigger finger, extreme joint swelling and ADD, the service is used by many celebrities and millions of people. So why do so many of my friends think the service provides no value?
I say trigger finger and extreme joint swelling provide value. What if you didn’t feel like playing a game of basketball with a bunch of oversized peeps who show up at the park? A quick tweet and wham, trigger finger. It’s the perfect excuse to avoid any sporting event that requires your hands.
Not all users will suffer from trigger finger and extreme joint swelling , but ADD effects all twitter users at some point. You know you have ADD when you find yourself checking twitter at inappropiate times. Examples include: tweeting during a meeting, in the middle of a conversation, during a congressional session or while having sex.
I admit I suffer from all of the above, and my knee hurts. I wonder if I can blame that on Twitter as well?
Twitter user name: menro
SEO Vs. Personalization
When the link structure of the Internet is no longer a primary signal to a web search engine what happens to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What other signals might replace or augment current techniques?
- Social Graph
- Implicit web
- Tagging
- Semantic Web
- Status Updates
- Comments
What will drive the next generation of web search, let’s review a few of the leading candidates?
Social Graph
This is already an important signal that few people have mastered; Microsoft purchased a portion of Facebook, Google has OpenSocial. News Corp is pushing really hard with Myspace.
This is already an important set of signals, but they are not very public. Every click you make every search you enter everything you purchase oneline – someone’s gaterhing that data.
Tagging
Delicious made this concept popular and it has already been folded into the list of existing signals leveraged by search engines like Google.
This ismoving slowly into the limelight, one tripple at a time.
Status Updates
This is a feature of most social systems; it also stands alone as a signal that can be mined. Twitter and FriendFeed is a perfect example of this activity.
Authority
The concept of a trusted source has been around for years, but is it becoming more important to web search engines as they branch into universal search.
Summary
I have hinted at a few of the emerging signals, what else should we be looking @?
What’s the difference between a web search engine and a publisher
Two guys sit down next to each other at a new tech meetup.
One guy says, Hi I am Robert while pointing at his name tag, what’s your name and what do you do?
the other guy says, I’m David and my company aggregates content and we sell ads based on it.
Robert says, Cool I do the same, but we also have lots of pictures.
Daivd says, Yeah we have tons of pictures as well.
Which media company do you work for?
The Why and How of Add-on-Con
Dec 11 2008 was the first Add-on-Con and it surpassed my expectations. As a first time conference producer I realized a few things about myself and learned a few things about creating a conference. For me personally, this event brought up how much I like creating new things. I get a rush seeing an opportunity, thinking of an idea, and then taking it to market. Creating Add-on-Con was fun, a little nerve racking but still provided the appropriate rush. The event had enough people purchase tickets in advance to suggest the turnout was going to meet my goals, but you never know. In the end the event exceeded the food and premium items ordered and even sold reduced price admission at the door. Along the way I learned a few things about producing a conference that I thought were worth sharing. I will start with Marketing, because so many technologists think of it as a black box.
Add-on-Con Marketing Strategy
I used several techniques to get the word out quickly.
- We published 2 Press Releases through the wire services, which cost around $600 per release. I did a quick compare of the server logs and the sites that published our press releases generated about 2% of the overall traffic
- We used 2 different wire services to distribute the press releases and PR News Wire had significantly broader coverage then the other service.
- Articles written prior to the event generated about 8% of the traffic, my personal favorite was written by Christian Zibreg “Browser rivals to sit down and discuss the future of browsing”.
- Twitter generated about 4% (surprise)
- Brightkite generated about .5% (surprise)
- SV, NY and Boulder Denver Meetup message boards generated about 1% (I thought these would generate more traffic, especially the SV Meetup)
- Paid Ads generated about 2% of the traffic and cost us $20. I was able to purchase most terms for under $0 .05
- I purchased $50 worth of event promotion from LinkedIn.com and it generated 0% of the traffic
- Media sponsorships
- Techcrunch donated 125×125 pixel ad that ran on their home page for 2 days, it generated about 4% of the traffic. I believe, if this started earlier, it would have generated significantly more traffic.
- Mashable mentioned the event in there Monday events section and it generated 0% of the traffic
- GarysGuide generated 0% of the traffic
- Center Networks generated 0% of the traffic
- Blog’s generated the rest
- Several of the bloggers received discount codes for their readers.
- VC Bloggers generated 15% of the traffic and contributed 34% of the paying attendee’s. (wow)
- individual tech blogs generated about 4% of the traffic and contributed 5% of the paying attendee’s (wow)
- The Mozilla and Microsoft blogs generated about 25% of the traffic.
- Several of the bloggers received discount codes for their readers.
I was surprised by the amount of twitter traffic, the lack of traffic from the event listings and Meetup message boards.
I wanted to thank every person, news service and news agency that talked about Add-on-Con 08, it was greatly appreciated. Plus the people from my company OneRiot, AdaptiveBlue and Sxipper, without their help this event would not have happened.
Thank You
Does Size Matter
Coverage vs. Quality in a Web Search Engine
Does quality matter if you do not have enough coverage? This entrepreneur says no.
What is enough coverage? If we think of a vertical search engine, how much coverage is needed to display results that are better than a general web search engine like Google or Yahoo.
Techmeme.com for example uses somewhere around 100 trusted sources to determine the top tech news stories, but is it enough? The popularity of Techmeme has stayed consistent for the past year according to Compete.com, fluctuating between 200 and 300K per month.
What about general web search engines? Does the consumer require millions of results in order to trust a web search engine or could a smaller more focused service capture general web search market share.
This entrepreneur believes the answer is yes.
So how big is enough?
A back of the envelope calculation suggests the index could be 10% of what web search engines index and update today, if the goal was to answer 80% of all searches. The trick is figuring which 10% to index and update.
According to search analysts:
- 40% of web searches are navigational
- 40% are browsing
- 20% are long tail
If you forget the long tail, because that does require a very large index you are left with 80%. If we look at general popularity of websites over the past year, the majority of all internet traffic is driven by the top 1,000 websites.
So if a web search engine indexed the top 1000 sites would it cover the needs of the general internet user? The answer is No, the web crawler has to be smarter, because web sites gain and loose popularity quickly outside of the top 100.
We have been brain washed to believe size matters
In turn all of our search engines are designed the same way and deliver pretty much the same results. This entrepreneur believes if a company could create an index of what people want and update it frequently enough, statistically it is possible to satisfy 80% of web searchers with an index that is 10% of the size of today’s top web search companies.
Why should we care about the size? The answer is simple; to support an index the size of Google or Yahoo the data has to be optimized for specific types of queries. For example; Google was designed to support navigational and long tail searches, which covers 60% of what people do on the internet. This is not a bad strategy, but it does lead to an interesting question/opportunity. Would people switch to a new search engine if they could get the correct answer 80% of the time?
