Category: BlogStreet

The New York Times writes:

Sites like ThisNext and a handful of services like Kaboodle.com, Wists.com and StyleHive.com are spearheading a new category of e-commerce called “social shopping,” that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and social networking. These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some shopping-related technology twists included.

Social shopping is just the latest solution to a chronic problem for online retailers and shoppers: many shoppers arent sure what to buy, but they know they wont find it on the sites of mainstream retailers like Macys, Amazon or Wal-Mart.

Brad Feld writes:

Ive had plenty of experience observing this at Judys Book, working with several new content companies that Ive invested in, and closely following the discussion that made the rounds about the 1% rule as it applies to Digg (e.g. 1% of the Digg users generate most of the Diggs resulting in Jason Calacanis offering to pay these 1% of Digg users to bookmark for Netscape.)
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[The 19%] is the golden segment. If you can figure out how to engage these folks, you win. If you dont, youll have a site driven merely by the 1%, which ultimately wont scale. While theoretically the law of large numbers should apply (e.g. as N (= number of users) gets big enough, life is good), I hypothesize that if you dont figure out how to engage this 19%, you wont drive growth in N that will get you big enough to have the law of large numbers effect deliver you to happiness. Theres a virtuous cycle here the 1% disproportionately seeds the activity of the site, the 80% consume content, and the 19% sit on the fence. If you can get the 19% to engage, this drives more vibrant content, which increases reach, which increases N, which means the activity driven by the 1% and 19% increases, which drives more content, etc.

Tom Evslin writes:

Everyone always told me that networking is a good thing. But Im a nerd; I didnt really believe that until I made the spreadsheet to prove it. Now Im convinced. Specifically, if you want the rank of your blog to climb towards the left end of the long tail, you want to find a way to join a group of other bloggers who are advantaging each other in some way. But the lesson has implications far beyond blogs.

To start with the conclusion: if a subset of blogs were to organize themselves into a network and they were the only such network in the blogosphere (aint gonna happen!) and if they each favored each other only slightly in terms of links, in the absence of other factors (also aint gonna happen!), those blogs would rise directly to the top of the blogosphere.

Ross Mayfield writes:

Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing — MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in. I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders. Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven’t missed something big. That’s the real value I derive from TechMeme today. But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.

[via Vinu] Nancy White writes: “We have identified three forms of blog based community, the single blog centric, topic centric and community centric. Now lets look at the implications for those thinking about designing and nurturing blog based communities. Can they help us strategically?”

Todd Zeigler writes how newspapers can improve their websites. One of the nine ideas:

Link to Relevant Blog Entries. Sites like the Washington Post are already partnering with Technorati to show “Who’s Blogging” about the story you are viewing (see left). Why bother? If I’m a blogger writing about a news event, I’m going to link to the Post story as a way of promoting my entry. It is a great way to facilitate discussion about (and links to) your content. In addition, the “Who’s Blogging” feature serves as a real time letters to the editor page.

Mike Rundle of 9rules writes:

At 9rules, were not interested in the hits, were interested in the best niche content. Many blog networks start new blogs on technology, gadgets, and gossip not because theyre bringing a fresh perspective or brand new content to the arena but because theyre emulating existing blogs on those topics that they consider to be hits, or, blogs like Engadget, Techdirt, or The Superficial. The problem with emulating existing hits is that they are hits for more reasons than just their content, in fact Id say that most of the Technorati 100 are on there because of external factors that have nothing to do with their content.
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On the Web there are millions of choices for content, and the people who consume this content dont care if its coming from a 14-year old in Germany or The Pope himself, as long as 1) its interesting to them, and 2) its of a high quality. Look at how much time people spend browsing through YouTube videos or reading MySpace profiles compared to how many hours of TV they watch or how many newspapers they read, thats the sign right there that in this near-infinite supply of content readily available, consumers will find the content they like the best and not what other people *tell them* is the best. This Long Tail of content consumption on the Net is where blogs fit in perfectly, because no matter how obscure your content subject or niche, there will always be an audience looking for your content.

WebProNews offers some ideas:

Use Your Own Content

Almost ANY web based content can be transformed into an RSS feed. The only real requirement is that the information changes regularly.

News Headlines

Typically, the main use of RSS is to present headlines and a short introduction to “newsy” stories. Create an RSS feed on your site featuring your company press releases, site updates, etc.

Upcoming Events

RSS is a great way to let people know of events and activities that may be happening soon. It’s easy to turn an “events” page into an RSS feed.

Techcrunch writes:

Heres whats cool about Wizag. The services semantic analysis pulls topics out of each post in the feeds you are subscribed to and lets you click to read all posts in your feeds related to the same topic. Most feed readers have a search function, but Wizag finds likely topics and lists the number of other items in subscriptions that discuss the same topic. Its a smart automation of possible searches before they are even performed.

You can tag, comment and vote on any item in your feeds. Its a shame that this metadata stays inside Wizag, but item ranking, or determining the order that items appear in your reader, is done through an algorithm that incorporates the click-throughs, votes, comments and subscriptions you and other users have gestured with.

Dave Winer writes:

“Targeting” customers is the wrong metaphor for the future. Instead make it easy for the people who lust for what you have to find you. How? 1. Find out what they want, and 2. Make it for them and 3. Go back to where you found out about it, and tell them it’s available.
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User-generated content is actually on the road to nirvana, but it’s not a sustainable model in itself. In all that content, which today’s companies view as frankfurter meat, undifferentiated slurry, a medium for unwanted hitch-hikers, is the idea for the next iPod, or the formula for peace in the Middle East, the campaign platform for the President we’ll elect in 2012, perhaps even a solution for global warming. You just have to believe that intelligence isn’t concentrated among the people who rose to the top of the 20th century’s ladders to believe that there are nuggets of wisdom waiting out there for the taking, among the minds that created all that UGC.