Res ipsa loquitur

IT DOES MATTER, YOUR VOICE MATTERS

On May 15th bloggers from around the world, will be uniting around one issue, to fight for human rights.

By all indications, including the fact that Amnesty International is co-sponsoring the event with BlogCatalog, May 15th should be the largest gathering of bloggers to unite about a social cause in the history of the blogosphere.

Yet despite this potential, I get a feeling that there are many more bloggers who are reading about Bloggers Unite for Human Rights and thinking, “why should I blog, on May 15th, as no life will be changed and no one will listen, to me”.

This simply is not true. Don’t deceive yourself. Words, on a blog, in a newspaper, on a protestor’s sign, have the power to influence behaviour. Your words have the power to cause another person to say enough is enough. To cause that person to take action, perhaps an action as simple as sharing her newly found inspiration with another. The chain of events that ensues may ultimately save a child’s life, a family, a community, perhaps a nation, and since we are all connected, save our world.

If you read this, please join bloggers from around the world, on May 15th, and blog about human rights.

We all at some point fall into the pattern of thinking that it just maybe doesn’t matter.

Yes, you may hear the voice in your head saying, that “it won’t matter if I don’t blog on May 15th.” When you hear that scoundrel, remember these words: IT DOES MATTER. YOUR VOICE MATTERS. Together with thousands of bloggers we can change our world.

While you may not see the direct results of the lives you touch. And while you may be troubled by this, given that we live in an instant gratification society, rest assured that as a result of bloggers uniting on May 15th, and as the result of your blog post, at least one life will change. That life, very well, may be yours. 

And because you were changed, ask yourself the question, “how will it affect the world around you, your children, your friends, your blog readers?”  Yes, it does matter,  your voice matters!

Long live Google! Maybe not?

BlogCatalog launched its Social Search today. The search results, from Social Search, provide a fascinating view into the online social network activities of close to 100,000 bloggers. While doing a search on Wikipedia, after the launch, I came across the entry for Social Search Engine. The entry describes a Social Search Engine, in part, as:

“… a type of search engine that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. Example forms of user input include social bookmarking or direct interaction with the search results such as promoting or demoting results the user feels are more or less relevant to their query.”

Under this definition, Digg, Delicious and Wikipedia, while visibly different, are all social search engines. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, Google with their backlink algorithm could also be considered part of social search “because PageRank is relying on the collective judgement of webmasters linking to other content on the web. Links, in essence, are positive votes by the webmaster community for their favorite sites.”

After reading Wikipedia’s definition, it occurred to me that this traditional definition of social search engines, and social search, should be adjusted to more accurately reflect changes in online social networks and the underlying technologies. That is, the rapid growth of social networks and the opening up of much of their member’s social activity data through APIs, now makes aggregation and therefore search of this activity data possible. Social Search isn’t just a relevancy issue. Social search is the search of this aggregate social member activity data.

Whereas traditional search engines spider and index what tends to be relatively static data, a social search engine aggregates social activity data. The operative word is activity. It is a social member’s activity that is most relevant to social search. Social activity data includes the blogosphere but is not limited to the blogoshpere. Social activity data includes anything from blog posts, to diggs and stumbles and tweets to the many other online social community activities that take place.

Unlike the traditional definition of social search, where social activity determines relevance, under this proposed definition of Social Search, social activity drives the results. Social activity isn’t just a factor in determining relevancy. Social activity makes up the data set.

Social search is exciting because it brings us closer to receiving personal recommendations and insights into topics. This type of personal recommendation already occurs, on social networks in different ways. For example, you can submit a question on LinkedIn’ Answers and within minutes receive a number of answers to your question, or you can join one of the many groups that exist on MySpace, Facebook and other social networks.

However, the promise of social search is not that you will have to submit your question to LinkeIn, or join a group on Facebook, to access the knowledge of the social graph. Instead, social search will reach a point where there will be effective and efficient aggregation of the social activity data, such that a social search will result in relevant, personal and up-to-the minute recommendations, opinions and articles about topics from across the entire social graph. The results will filter the personal activities of perhaps 100s of millions of social network users, giving us access to the live, thinking part of the web.

We appear to be witnessing the early stages of social search. This early stage will progress from what the data sets are and how to aggregate and display them to relevancy. Given the massive amount of data on the social web, relevancy will become a critical issue though unlike Google’s current algorithm, it is likely that relevancy will be determined by a persons’ social community reputation across all networks that she belongs to. There are many reputation agggregators on the social web. It is not clear who will come out with the gold standard for reputation management. Whoever achieves that goal may be the company that ultimately drives search on the social web.

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Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship requires creativity, ideas and the willingness to embrace the unknown.

For every entrepreneur a seed was planted. A moment of inspiration occurred where the entrepreneur was possessed by the idea and could not escape its seduction.

When this happens the entrepreneur doesn’t possess the idea. The idea is the possessor, causing the entrepreneur to think of nothing else for days and weeks, to go nights without sleep, and for those who are willing to embrace the unknown and act on the idea, it changes the entreprenuer’s life forever.

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Goals...

We all have them whether we know it or not. I have gone though periods where my goals were laser focused and other times when I drifted around. Today, I’m drifting in Mexico, reminiscing about this past year and the crazy ride the blogcatalog team has been on.

A year ago, when we purchased blogcatalog, it was a down-and-out directory of blogs. There was no social network and the site looked as though it had seen its best days.

It is no secret that much of our initial inspiration came from MyBlogLog. During blogcatalog’s early stage existence (from Feb. 2007 to Jan. 2008) we were like a little brother looking up to our big brother, to learn how to play the game.

We received a lot of flack for this approach. However, whether wrong or right I believe that if you see someone doing something well, model their behaviour until you get it right and then once you know what they do, find someone even better to teach you. We did that with MyBlogLog.

Goals, though, need to be specific. One specific goal we had was for blogcatalog to pass mybloglog in traffic and alexa ranking. Nothing against MyBlogLog, I truly admire the founders for what they created. I think their influence over the social web hasn’t been recognized to the degree they deserve. There are an untold number of social applications that are inspired by what the team at MyBlogLog did. Nonetheless, a major goal of ours was to pass MyBlogLog in traffic and alexa rating.

That goal has been accomplished and during the past month we have consistently ranked higher than them. Alexa ratings can, of course, be dismissed as a crude measure, however as crude as Alexa is, it still provides a way of keeping score.

The results, though, are no accident. With blogcatalog’s recent string of new feature releases, it is apparent that blogcatalog is no longer playing in the shadow of its big brother. It is also apparent, to me, that the blogcatalog team has grown up and is willing to take greater *risks than ever before.

* MBL, post Yahoo acquisition, is evidence that not doing anything, may be the greatest risk of all.

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What the ph... does it mean?

My first real job out of college was as a financial analyst at an international bank. I remember thinking, I understand how business and finance works, it’s pretty much based in common sense, however why does everyone use such complex terms to describe basic business concepts.

It’s 22 years later, I somehow found myself, like the rest of you, immersed in the world of social media (not sure how since I don’t really know what the term social media means) and yet again I find myself wondering why basic business and social concepts are given such complex names. This separation, at least it feels like that to me, between reality and terminology often makes me wonder if I am working in the right field. Shit, I don’t even know what the social graph is, yet I’m running, with the help of great team, blogcatalog, one of the the largest social communities for bloggers on the internet.

Sometimes I think, perhaps, this lack of deep understanding of key terms will inflict great harm on blogcatalog. Especially since our entire team seems to be on the same wave length of let’s do what will benefit blogcatalog members most and not being tuned in to the terminology of the day.

Two weeks ago we launched a Dashboard area for our members. We did this because Daniel & Oscar thought it would be really useful for our members to be able to quickly see what their friends were doing on other social networks as well as on BlogCatalog.

It was common sense that our members would benefit from this. What we didn’t realize though is that we had entered the world “Lifestreaming”. I’m not even sure Daniel and Oscar or Angie, my partner, know what lifestreaming means, or care to know. What they do know is that the Dashboard and News Feed features we launched for blogcatalog, make blogcatalog much more useful to our members.

Lifestreaming Ive since found out is the place to be. The discovery that blogcatalog had become a lifestreaming company was a marketing gift to us. It meant that we were able to promote the BlogCatalog Dashboard as a Lifestream, through press releases and blog posts, and social media experts would listen.

So while the tool was great, before we knew the name of what we had created, discovering that we had created a lifestreaming application simply made promotion of the blogcatalog Dashboard that much easier.

We did it again. Last week the blogcatalog team launched a News Feed widget. We didn’t launch it because we had discovered lifestreaming, we launched the News Feed widget because it was a logical next step.

Once we had the Dashboard, we asked the questions, why not let our member’s display their social network activity on a widget that can be placed anywhere they want? And, why force their readers and followers to have to come to blogcatalog to see their feeds? The answers are obvious. The result was the News Feed widget.

To say we were thinking “data portability” is to say we had plans to merge with MyBlogLog; why help them out. We just knew that our members would like it because some had told us they wanted it and I’m a big widget geek. I love widgets.

The launch of the Lifestream News Feed widget brought marketing Christmas back to blogctalog, as we could now claim to be a “social network aggregator”, offering truly “portable” member data. My friend Rich Becker, from the PR firm Copywrite, Ink., has written an insightful post about Data Portability.

After 22 years of resisting learning technical terms, I have come to realize the real power of these terms lies in the ability to use them in marketing your product to a “demographic” (this term still messes me up) that thrives on buzz words.

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Your Own Personal Recommendation Assistant

Social search is in. Traditional search is out. Social search is about recommendations and trusted people. Traditional search is about algorithms and PhDs.

While almost 100% of my search used to be done first on AltaVista, then AOL and then Google, over the past year this % has shrunk to perhaps 20%. Most of what I am looking for today comes from my blogcatalog friends, posts on their blogs, and via twitter tweets. Is this trend true for you too?

If true, then the key to finding what you like on the social web is first to know who to follow and second how to access their recommendations without having to search around their blogs and myriad social network profiles.

Twitter is one solution. Though, when it comes to a recommendation engine, it is incomplete. It enables you to quickly keep up with what people you are following are doing. Their tweets, provide you with quick glimpses into their life. Twitter is more like cocaine as it comes in short bursts, and often times leaves one hungry for more; perhaps Ive used the wrong drug in this analogy.

Various sites, including blogcatalog, have created lifestreaming apps, where you can track what your friends are doing on all the social networks they belong to. This is cool but you still have to visit your friend’s personal profiles to see what they are liking on the web.

BlogCatalog’s News Feed widget (was installed in sidebar..though lost in the tumblr somehow) shows what your friends are doing on the social networks they belong to without you having to visit all the sites they belong to

The News Feed Widget fits into Social Recommendation model perfectly. Your readers/followers want your recommendations. Sometimes they read your blog posts, other times they see your blog favorites and blogroll, they may be notified via twitter or visit your digg page. What they really want though is a quick way to find out what you like.

By having the News Feed widget in my sidebar I am able to give anyone who wants to know what Im doing with Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, New Posts I have added on all my blogs and other social networks, a quick and easy way to see what I’m “recommending”.

The News Feed at its core is a Personal Recommendation engine. It automatically broadcasts each of your daily recommendations to your blog readers without you having to do any additional work.

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Too much cash can kick your business butt...

Too much cash in a business for an undisciplined operator leads to management by throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.

For the entreprenuer there are few things in business that provide guidance and discipline as much as operating out of operating cash flows.

Aside from the experience and pain associated with blowing through cash in a business and seeing that it doesnt necessarily lead to increased returns and growth, what other mechanism is in place to provide an entrepreneur with operataional discipline when one day they are bootstrapping their operations and the next they have millions in the bank?

Operating out of available cash flow provides the necessary pressure on an entreprenuer to carefully analyze all the opportunities available, generate new opportunities, and intensely focus on both selecting the next step to take, one that has the greatest potential to move business forward, and executing. This compares to the fully funded start up where the entreprenuer isn’t forced to pick the next feature and instead can have multiple features and products being developed simultaneously along with major marketing and PR efforts being implemented. While the multi-development process seems like it increases the chances of success, the more than likely outcome, for most entrepreneurs, will be luke warm developments and far less cash in the business.

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Sweet

Tumblr rocks!

This is how blogging was meant to be.   So easy and sweet.

Finally, I have a blog to list on BlogCatalog