One of the drawbacks to RSS is that unlike identifying who is linking in to one’s site or blog, we don’t really have a way to truly discover who is subscribing to our RSS feeds.

Is that a big deal? It depends.

It’s a big deal if you’re a blogger or online news organization trying to inform potential advertisers of your reach.

I think it may also matter in the whole area of determining who should be called an“influential” or “authoritative” blogger. Today Technorati, and most everyone else determines this influence by counting the number of incoming links, which is fine as far as it goes, and overall works surprisingly well. But as more and more people choose to “vote” on which bloggers they feel are important by the feeds they subscribe to, it seem that this metric rather than links in should become more important. But how can this be done?

I have a question in to David Sifrey of Technorati on this. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: blogs

Technorati Tags: RSS

Alright here I am doing my almost but not quite first live conference blogging, while attending the opening session of Information Today’s Computers in Libraries event in DC, which apparently, according to ITI President Tom Hogan, has a record attendance this year—over 2,300—not bad at all.

I say nearly live, because I am not able to pick up a wireless signal. So all this means is that after I take a few notes from keynote speaker Chris Sherman, I’ll go back up to my hotel room, plug in the cable, and post this on the blog. I hope the 5 minute lag time or so to posting won’t make this posting seem hopelessly dated in this age of instant conference blogging!

Chris has just returned from the first search engine conference in China…Here’s what he’s saying:

“Feels So 1995″: for the first time in years, we’re starting to see true differentiation and divergence among the major search engines…what Chris calls “one upmanship and me-tooism”
AskJeeves forcibly retired the butler, but has really upgraded Ask—”first class technology” as good or better than the others. –and hired Gary Price as a bridge to the search community! No other search engine has done this…[I will need to test this for business research applications. ] Ask’s features include:

Smart Search: high quality reference info and answers
Web Answers: can do natural language questions—and really works now!
Zoom—binoculars open up a preview page
New “Toolbox” provides flexible access to many types of searches, including superior mapping tools. Mapping includes ajax for dragging, so you can get nice directions, and will draw a path, as well as an animated tour of when/where to turn etc. So if you want to go from one place to another, just drag the icon and the directions will change. This includes driving AND walking directions.

Google: What is Google these days? Now it’s a print and radio advertising company more than a search engine. It has lost its “laserlike focus on search”—is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, doing experiments with features like: suggest, Q&A natural language–not as good as Ask’s; Google desktop, reader, blog search, Google video, googlebase–its Ebay killer and now Google Mars.

MSN: Still spending lots of $$ to develop its own search advertising network—doing demographic and behavioral targeting and want to deliver ads based on who you are…but these efforts are not gaining traction yet. New Windows Live initiative. NEW: Virtual Earth; Direct Answers, SRC–search result clustering like the old Northern Light. Windows Live toolbar has the Onfolio web research assistant to clip and annotate the web pages you are finding. Also like its Birdseye and Street Level Imagery.[—looks like high quality photos--*worth looking at*.]
Not fully up to speed, Chris say, but very interesting.

Yahoo: Chris says that i seems like their recent burst of change and innovation is slowing; today they are turning into the champion of “people mediated” search, primarily via tagging and personalization, via MyWeb. By doing this, they offer a different view of what the Web is about—people vs. algorithm. NEW: Y!Q, MindSet. More. MindSet. Slider tag of research/shopping. Chris sees that these sliders and dials are the future of search interfaces.

Google and Books: Google has been sued by the American Association of Publishers. Chris feels what they are doing is legal and will prevail. Feels publishers are having a “VCR” myopia factor, and this is a clear win for libraries.

Google Print:
1. Print Publisher Program: voluntary where publishers can contract voluntarily w/Google to show bits of books—bibliographic info, a few pages before and after and links to bookstores to but the book. Will be adding a link: find this book in a library via the OCLC WorldCat.

2. Library Project: scanning libraries in and out of content from libraries. Can browse fulltext of public domain materials. If in copyright, can only see a few sentences around the search term but not full text.

Google says that it’s goal is to: see a world where all books are online and searchable..but Chris feels what this is all about is, that they are scanning the books so Google can learn by scanning—giving it to the search engine to read and learn.

The Dark Side of Personalization: privacy concerns exploding. Tradeoff of convenience vs. confidentiality. Google taking security very seriously. Sees the DOJ request the first step of a slippery slope to personally identifiable information, requested 1 million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for one week: Google refused; eventually DOJ downgraded request 50K random URLs and 5K queries. Chris says “what is being requested is ridiculous” and these searches and random URLs won’t help the government. I’m a little more careful now in how I use Google

My China trip: US government is bashing the search engines over censorship; search engines maintain they are simply obeying the law. But what about the Chinese people—what do they want? I asked what they want. They absolutely prefer the search—unanimously, 100% of people I asked prefer the search engines be there and censor than not be there at all.
Only a few topics are censored—I didn’t notice much difference in my own searches. Savvy Chinese know they can reach virtually any web site in the world via widely available proxies. Paid search results dominate Chinese search services to bypass the 10,000 people who have to read all searches. Most popular search engine is Baidu—and all of them are paid, sponsored listings—ads, not algorithm.

Conclusions: Search is getting exciting again; new tools and approaches are making more types of content searchable. Only shadow: threats to privacy and individual liberties subtly increasing in U.S. while ironically, things seem to be improving in China.

[Yet another succinct and excellent talk by Chris]

Technorati Tags: CIL2006

Technorati Tags: Computers in Libraries

Technorati Tags: Internet Searching

Technorati Tags: Google

Well, it’s late in Washington DC, and having flown from Rochester New York to Chicago last night to do a training session at Accenture, and then to DC this afternoon for an Information Today meeting, my eyes are a bit blurry–BUT–I wanted to take a look at Google Finance anyway.

My first impression was quite positive–after linking to the site, you can enter a company name or stock symbol, and you’ll get a nicely formatted page of information back–a one paragraph company description, some key financial and directory data, a stock chart if a public company, names and titles of top executives, recent news, related firms, recent blog discussions, and a few other extras.

Nothing here is new or very significant, and you can get most of this on the free Hoovers site, among other places. But, it’s all very intuitively and neatly displayed, the news and blogs are very timely, and there are some very interesting customization features.

So, its the package that Google’s put together that’s very appealing here–especially if you’re already a Google user and you want a very fast snapshot about a North American firm–public or private. And we think integrating recent relevant blog postings works extremely well too.

Nothing revolutionary here by any means–but it’s a very appealing start. We’ll be interested in how this evolves.

Technorati Tags: Google Finance

Technorati Tags: Google