Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: Metadata

Showing posts with label Metadata. Show all posts

Thursday, October 15, 2009

New Technorati rules encourage you to blog well and blog often

Stumbled on the latest update to Technorati today (the site that ranks blogs and their authority) and was somewhat shocked to discover FasterFuture's 'authority' had jumped by around 1000% to 423.

Its rank in the blogosphere has leaped by a similar order (13,896 of all blogs - where I recall it languishing around where you could pretty much could add a zero to that.

I had put a slow decline (the authority was once 120 and the ranking 70K ish) over the last year or so down to me blogging less and tweeting more.

The big change now is that Technorati is only gathering its data over the last couple of weeks or so - not the last six months as was it's methodology.

Which means if you've got a decent rank and authority - and want to maintain it - you'd best blog often as much as you blog well. It's helpful to those of us seeking individuals with particular interests AND authority, too - because the results are much closer to real time (as Stowe points out on /Message)

Technorati needed to cut its costs, this method not only does that (less intensive number crunching to do) but it also encourages a reverse in the decline in blogging - something very much inline with Technorati's needs, too.

And since blogs remain the single least silo'd way in which we express metadata and connect one to another in communities of purpose (the only silos in blogging are being online - or not - and language) I'd have to give that my blessing.

Well, that and the nice high ranking FasterFuture has acquired.

UPDATE: Oct 19, 2009 I'm going to keep track of this: Since time of first writing the rise has continued. And then some.
Today's stats show fasterfuture as

8312 highest rank blog on't planet (though I note this is of 825,402 indexed, as opposed to the 300m thought to exist). Guess these are those worthy of indexing in the past few weeks, as opposed to those created ever), Authority has risen to 464 (for context it would need an authority of 760-odd to make the top 100).

Update: Oct 27, 2009:

Today the authority is 485 and the rank is ???,??? - honestly, couldn't find a way to get that number today. I notice though that a little green badge has been apended: 'Top 100 (small business)'. It is of course nice to be in the top 100 of anything - but I'm a little baffled as to why the Technorati algorithm selected this blog for that category?

Update: Oct 29, 2009.

Today we have an authority of 506 and a ranking in the top 5000 (4965) - and that's after a fall! Gulp. The small business Top 100 badge still lives on some views on Technorati, too.

Update November 3, 2009:
Despite the red down arrow (which indicates we've been even higher since I last checked) FasterFuture is now has a ranking of 4214 and an authority of 522.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

What if everyone on twitter followed everyone on twitter?

Image via CrunchBase

Having lots of followers on Twitter is a good thing. No really, it is. Don't knock it. I won't say no to more (but please don't assume that means I'd like regular spamming from those who promise they can find me 100, 1000 new followers a day... I'll stick to the organic and relevant, thanks...)

Managing real time relevance is the only issue: how do I find what matters to me, right now, among the deluge of human thought.

Imagine if everyone on Twitter followed everyone on Twitter (except for the spammers, obviously). That's around 40m people following everyone else. The number of peer-to-peer connections are calculator boggling.

Apart from giving @ev and @biz heart attacks, the result would be a very close match with the real-
time expression of meta data required to bring together communities of purpose on a global almost-out-of-the-silo; people who care enough about an issue and are available right now to collaborate to do something about it.

If all you do is read your own tweet stream this will prove difficult. Picking the relevant out of a 40m strong stream would be all but impossible.

But that's where improving Twitter search comes in.

The follow mechanism is a great way of lassooing a pool of people who are very likely to share your any- given-purpose. And through open conversation, this group is always fuzzy edged. In this way Twitter helps us find people we didn't know we needed to know.

But our focus on the followed/follower means we may miss out on the bigger win.

It is perfectly possible to go looking across the whole of Twitter for people sharing your purpose right now. That's search and automated alerts.

But how many of us are ready to try this in reverse? To understand that each tweet is to everyone and a can be a call for people like you to come together with them, to act?

That requires us to actively use search to search for people calling out for people like us to help them on something we collectively care about.

That's a search engine with some new and heavily human (and likely semantic) fields; such as -

is like me;
is trustworthy;
is helpful;
collaborates well
etc

Currently the followed/follower mechanism is our best human-powered version of just such a search engine. I'm sure it and our other recorded social interactions could and should be included in that future engine.

But what I'm also fairly sure about is that the followers/following model is not robust enough and can't, alone, scale to deliver the real time connections we need to access the greatest value enabled by global, real time communities of purpose.

Can it connect me with anyone anywhere who, like me, wants to solve problem x right now?

That's where our future lies.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Lego Man: Why the next web is about meta data, first

The next web, the one that really counts, will connect us all via the real time expression of intent through meta data.

It will find ways for us to find each other through the things we find interesting. It will automate, cut down technical barriers and be available to all.

And the way we will cut through the unimaginable clutter of everything everyone finds interesting is to focus on the real time and focus on intent.

The more we can make relevant, intent related connections, the more value we bring to the network (for example, communities of purpose vs focus groups)

The first step is to connect in ways in which you can express your real time intent to others. All others.

That requires a simple ability to connect, a ubiquity of connection and perhaps (in the first instance) a focus less on the human expressing the intent and more on the meta data (content) being expressed.

Zemanta is giving us an intro to this right now: Less who is friends with who?, more what is interesting to who?

It is what the semantic web seeks to achieve, taking us beyond the node-focused world of social networks and towards the meta data (connections) of the networked world.

So we shift from focusing on social networks as some kind of goal towards a mission to enable our transformation into global digital social beings, constructed from and expressed as meta data across a silo-free web.

But for all this, we must not lose sight of the human.

Ideas don't act, humans do. It is our discussion of ideas that leads to the creation of new ones, new action and new value.

But in so much as we exist on the web, it is as a bundle of ideas which we choose to express or which are bundled with us through our interactions with others. Hence the initial focus on meta data. Hence the ever-deconstructable, reconstructable Lego Man. (image courtesy freezelight)

The next web has to retain the sovereign self while acknowledging the multiple complexity of that self.

Content, metadata, can and should seek out related ideas, provided those ideas come with a human attached.

Focusing on real time expression of intent of course misses a cornucopia of value stored in latent, indirectly expressed intent, which when shared will add thousands, millions more nodes to the potential communities of purpose that could form.

But let's see how we handle expressed intent first.

I'm meeting with citizensonline.org later this week with a view to joining as a trustee. It's mission is to add nodes to the network.

And really, this post has been about reminding myself about what is valuable in that endeavour.

But it's also my expression of metadata on these themes. I await the connections it makes with both interest and purpose...

Thursday, January 29, 2009

TwitterFriends - joining the dots

TwitterFriends. If you tweet, try it.
Twitter is a fantastic enabler of adhoc real-time self-forming communities of purpose.

Which means some connections are more important/relevant to you than others on a daily/hourly/by-the-minute basis. Some have more influence.

TwitterFriends helps you visualise that. The image here is just one of the many ways in which it cuts up and displays the data about the networks you share.

It's the kind of thing that has the potential to be really valuable in enabling the measurement of influence - something which is essential in empowering conversational marketing, but which also changes by the minute and by the interaction.

As I noted previously, measuring influence is complex (not complicated) it depends on:

Me sticking to my brief – you trust me to talk social media, future of publishing, impact of the power of the network etc. If I start giving you tips about horse racing you’re going to treat them with caution – at the very least.
I remain consistent: If I give you a series of bum steers my value to you will rapidly reduce.
2 and 3 can mix. If I start giving you horse racing tips AND I am consistently right – you’ll value this new aspect (I’ll even attract new communities of purpose as a result.
The result of 2 and 3 mixing can impact on those who followed me because of 1&2.
The value of my influence can only be measured from the receivers point of view – recommendation happens in the mind of the receiver.
My influence among those who are yet to connect with me, but have the potential to through meta data is somewhere between 0 and infinity.

The toolkit to make THIS work is coming together... TwitterFriends gives us a glimpse.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

P2PR Community open meet - Wednesday evening

Image via WikipediaThe P2PR community meets in person for the first time on Wednesday evening (Jan 28, 2009).
In some ways it's an example of how all this digital meta-data sharing works.

It started as a term, a set of ideas and an ensuing discussion on this blog.
It became a fully-fledged social network of its own.
And now it's taking on physical form.
You'll find us upstairs at the Coach & Horses, Greek St, London, from 7pm.

The internet is here to make our reality better - not to replace it.