Friedbeef’s Tech

I’ve been doing some paid writing at Web 2.0 site Profy.com, as well as some guest blogging at Mapping The Web - a 9Rules blog. Check them out below for some good reads.

Zephyr Turns MySpace into SpySpace

Social network MySpace is developing software to keep parents informed about what their children are doing on the net. The project, codenamed Zephyr, would alert parents to the name, age and location details entered by the youngster on the profile of his or her homepage. This opinion piece dives into the implications this software will have, especially among families.

Pay Per View Journalism - Right or Wrong?

Mainstream technology media company ZDNet has put in place a payment scheme in place that rewards its bloggers based on the number of clicks their posts get. This opinion piece looks at the pros and cons of this system, and its impact on journalistic integrity.

What Makes Meebo Tick?

Meebo is the darling of the Web 2.0 Instant Messaging world.

• 1 million registered users (up from 0.5 million three months ago)
• 1.2 million daily logins
• 75 million messages sent per day
• Average session time of 70 minutes
• 4.5 million unique screen names sign in monthly

Impressive stats, appropriate rewards… but what’s their secret? This analysis piece breaks down the critical success factors of Meebo and how they differentiated themselves from the competition.

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Image source: Logic + Emotion

A list of the 50 Most Influential Blogs in Malaysia (based on technorati ranking) has just been released, and has caused some stir in the local blogosphere.

I’m flattered to be included on the list - #21 overall (and #3 in the technology segment), but that’s not the point of this post. What’s interesting here is the heated debate going on about how the rankings are decided, and what constitutes a blog’s ‘influence’.

What is blog influence?

Dictionary.com defines influence as “the action or process of producing effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of another or others”. So it is fair to say a blog’s influence can be measured based on the level of success in accomplishing the aforementioned. Also, blog influence does not equate to blog popularity - though both factors are often closely related.

Everyone’s an influencer

“The barriers to publishing online are so low right now”

“Do you think that AOL ever thought Vincent Ferrari was an influencer? I’m guessing they never even knew the guy existed until it was too late.”

“With sites like YouTube, MySpace and Digg that have audiences of millions of people that are reachable at anytime, all one needs to do is shout through the megaphone and people will hear it, loud and clear.” -via Pronet Advertising

You could say, that since the explosion of social networking on the web, no one is really too small to create a stir.

The image (from the Logic + Emotion blog) on the top of this post from demonstrates the ripple effects and relationships blogs have among one another. If you look at the tier 4 bloggers (<100 links), even they have some small amount of pull on other more influential sites.

How do you measure your blog’s influence?

1. From the actions that result outside the blogosphere

There’s a real world out there, and the most influential blogs can have an impact on many aspects of life for example:

• Purchase decisions (eg. Engadget)
• Voters (eg. Lim Kit Siang)
• Governmental Policies (eg. Education In Malaysia)
• Business practices (eg. Manager Tools)
• Attitudes and Approaches to Life (eg. Lifehack)

The more real life decisions it has an effect on, the more influential it is. For example, many early adopters rely on sites like Engadget to give the thumbs up for a new gadget. Many gadgets live and die on a review from these A-list blogs. Does your blog inspire action?

2. Whether or not you reach your target audience

The more focused your niche is, the easier to build up credibility in that niche, and the more influential you become. Trying to appeal anyone and everyone would simply make a blog lose focus.

• Track the keywords for the search queries which people use to arrive at your site. Are they closely related to your site’s overall theme?
• Track the time visitors spend on your site and the number of pageviews per visitor. They may have visited your site, but are they finding it interesting enough to browse through?

3. Number of people who talk about your ideas

Sign up for Technorati, and check your ranking. The more people who bother to talk about you blog, the more influential you probably are. Incidentally this was how the Top 50 Most Influential Malaysian Blogs were ranked.

4. Influence of the people who talk about your ideas

Does your site show up on A-list blogs from time to time? Have a look at the ripple effects of an A-list blog and you’ll note the significant effect they have in driving traffic and additional backlinks into your site. The more often you appear on their sites, the more influence your blog wields.

5. Number of people who want to keep listening to your ideas

Anyone can visit your site, but how many care enough to be notified when new updates are presented? To me, a feed or email subscriber is like a thumbs up for the work I do. The larger your feed count, the more people care about your ideas, and the more influence your blog has.

Those are my top 5 - What other factors would you consider?

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“Google now controls more than 70 percent of the market in France, Germany and the U.K., according to ComScore Networks Inc., which tracks Web use. Its U.S. share grew to 47 percent in the fourth quarter from 40 percent” via Bloomberg

I guess there’s no question who’s the king of the hill at this point, but even with such a massive lead in hand, Google continues to tinker around the search experience and has launched an experiment called SearchMash.

“SearchMash is an experimental search site operated by Google. The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users… The site does not include Google branding to help us gather more objective data about user response to new interfaces.” via Search Engine Watch

So what it does is serve up Google results, but with some great features like

• Dynamically appending more results to a search page
• Image and video thumbnails
• Showing/hiding results
• Multiple categories (images, blogs, videos, wikipedia) which can load up within the sidebar

With ALL the search results coming directly from Google, and results returned just as fast - you don’t compromise anything.  In fact, you could you be looking at the Google interface of the future!  Give it a try, it’s good fun.

My only question to Google is - Why is there no ‘news‘ section?

Searchmash

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