Filed under: social software

Filed under: AJAX, collaboration

Filed under: social networking, social software, social news

Filed under: search engines, social networking, reputation

Filed under: mapping, mashups

Filed under: companies, web 2.0

Filed under: companies, e-commerce

• First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now?  "Great customer!  Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again.  What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
• Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers.  Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
• Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context.  It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
• Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search.  Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
• Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing.  Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues.  Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
• Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers.  How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store?  I'm guessing not very much.  Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.
  

Filed under: citizen media, MSM

Filed under: aggregators

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

• Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
• Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
• Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

• the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
• the number of items listed
• the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
• the total number of comments listed on the front page
• the estimated number of registered users in the system

• divided the average number of points held by each item on the front page of each service by the estimated number of registered users. This could be called the chance that any single item on the front page was given a point by any single registered users. This may serve to roughly estimate the breadth of participation in the system - a system where the items on the front page have received a relatively large number of votes relative to a relatively small number of users is one where there is greater agreement amongst users about what is important. This number may be more precise if it were calculated with the number of recently active users than total registered users.
• I did the same division as above with the number of comments listed. This may provide some insight into the amount of conversation that occurs on the various sites, at least regarding the items that are on the front page.

Four memediggers compared

Digg

6923 points on 15 items = 461 points per item on the front page

Oldest item listed is from 1 day 3 hours ago, 2nd oldest 21 hours ago.

832 comments = 55 comments per item on the front page.

There appears to be 178,625 total registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users equals 0.04. That could mean that one out of roughly every 20 registered users has given a point to an item that is now on the front page.

Total comments divided by registered users equals 0.005. That could mean that one out of roughly every 200 registered users has left a comment on an item that is now on the front page.

Notes on Digg:

• There are 5955 pages of users. Users Thuglife and Diggitydank both appear after the 1000th page of most active users, in case you were wondering.
• The nearly 180,000 registered digg users is a far larger number than the 60,000 subscribers to Tech Crunch, lest you use the latter number to measure the impact of Web 2.0.
• Google search for site:http://digg.com/users has aprox 4 to 5 million results.

Reddit

3179 points on 25 items front page = 211 points per item

There are several items listed as from 1 day ago.

777 comments = 51 comments per item

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. Google search for site:http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

Note: Reddit has many additional features beyond news moderation.

Meneame, Spanish-language digg clone on tech

1882 points on 20 items = 94 points per item

Oldest post is 1 day and 10 hours, second oldest 1 day 5 hours.

192 comments on 20 items = 10 comments per item

There appears to be 4940 registered users.

Total points divided by total users = 0.38 That could mean that there is a roughly 40% chance that any single user has given a point to any item that is now on the front page. This could also mean that a high percentage of registered users continue to engage in ongoing use.

Total comments divided by total users = 0.04 That could mean that approximately 1 out of every 20 users have commented on a front page item.

Notes on Meneame:

Google site:http://meneame.net/user.php gets 22,000 results.

There were items with zero and 1 comment on the front page, both with more than 80 votes.

The site also includes a wiki for discussion of the service.

Hugg

92 points on 15 items = 6 comments per post on front page

Oldest item is from 1 day 3 hrs ago, 16 hrs is second oldest.

8 comments on front page.

There are 93 registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users = .99 That could mean that every user has given a point to an item on the front page. The fact that this is unlikely demonstrates the inadequacy of this formula. I believe it indicates instead that the many of the relatively few active users find almost every item they give a point to appearing on the front page. Clearly the front page is of far less use to these readers than in other systems.

Total front page comments divided by total users = 0.09 That could mean that 1 in ten users have left a comment on an item on the front page. It is likely one or a few users have left more than one of the 8 comments.

Notes on Hugg:

Hugg is a project of the environmental blog Treehugger, for which Technorati has found 9,298 links from 2,943 sites. This indicates that the large Treehugger community is not into Hugg.

Of the 15 items on the front page, all were contributed by a total of 5 users.

One of the items on the front page when I visited was titled Jesus 'healed using cannabis'. I found that funny.

There are loads of big ads on Hugg, including from some of the biggest environmental organizations in the US.

Other memedigger or community moderated news sites that may be of interest:

Muti "Muti is a site inspired by Digg and reddit but dedicated to content of interest to Southern Africans or those interested in Southern Africa." See also the site's cool mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News on Africa and elsewhere.

Crispynews Crispynews is hosted digg-clone software used by a wide variety of communities of interest. American Idol fans, Mormons, Brazillian hip-hop fans, etc.

Filed under: mashups

Filed under: nptech, social networking

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile.  No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results.  The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

Filed under: wireless media

Filed under: RSS

Filed under: blogging

Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

Filed under: citizen media, podcasting, aggregators

Filed under: social networking

Filed under: Yahoo

Filed under: wireless media

Gordon Cook: How do we get from "here" to "there"? He goes deep here. The killer piece (at the end of a bad link I hope G will fix soon) is Personal Fabrication: a Talk with Neil Gershenfeld of MIT. Neil's work reminds me of my friend Marshall Burns' "Napster fabbing," which he talked about at the first P2P conference.

Windows Live testing video search  —  Windows Live.com is working on some interesting new features in their beta search service, most notably video search.  It's not on the front page yet, but on the section of the site ironically missing the word beta on its logo: beta.search.live.com.

Source:   TechCrunch
Author:   Marshall Kirkpatrick
Link:   http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/24/windows-live…

Techmeme permalink

So over the past couple weeks, spiking yesterday with the release of industry market share numbers showing we outgrew the market (in my new role, I've been counseled, not by our general counsel, to avoid saying "we spanked the market"), I've been getting a lot of questions going the other way - wanting my view on why our peers are shrinking or troubled.

My answer? I have no idea, go ask them. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I can tell you why I believe we are succeeding, however. I do spend a lot of time understanding our pipeline, wins and losses.

We've been saying for a while, for the customers we serve, innovation is about the only thing that matters in winning business. Cost of acquisition is a nit - compared to the cost of operation and management. A cheap Ferrari doesn't help a transport company that needs to move 10,000 people every day. They want a bus.

And no, this message doesn't resonate with everybody. It goes over like a lead balloon when you're selling to a flower shop in a shopping mall. Or a dentist's office or restaurant. They want a cheap box. But that's not our core market, that's someone else's. In my view, they're both going to stop buying infrastructure, anyways. Here's my CRM advice for both: shut down your servers, go directly to salesforce.com. We at Sun will then focus our time on salesforce.com. And believe me, IT matters to them. And they are spanking the market. Sorry, handily outpacing the market.

Secondly, the proprietary and expensive moniker is now dead. Dead dead dead. Solaris is open source, and gaining huge share (to my friends in the analyst community: you should stop saying the x64 market is characterized as a Windows and Linux market - when it's obvious there's a growing Solaris market on x64 systems). SPARC is now open source and gaining its rightful place in the industry standard server market - with Niagara's focus on eco-responsibility and energy efficiency seeming awfully timely. Our new lineup of UltraSPARC IV+ systems are cheaper and faster than IBM's Power systems (one customer just told me, "they're appropriately named when you get your electricity bill.") And our Opteron lineup is just, plain, awe inspiring:

But then there's the most fundamental answer to why we're gaining share.

I was sending out a note of congratulations to one of my staff members this week, when we first got wind of the data. And then I figured, it wasn't just his team, it was both our hardware/systems teams. And our software team for Solaris. And our marketing team, and our global sales and service teams. And our amazing ops team. And the corporate functions keeping the wheels on the bus while we're restructuring it. It was every one inside Sun, and all our supporters in the market.

Great products take great teams to gain share. So why'd we gain share?

We had a few good people focused on it. It's amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it.

And just in case you missed the news, here's a couple good articles:

Sun's server sales soar, while Dell bores in Q2 -- The Register
Sun Overtakes Dell In Worldwide Sever Revenue -- InformationWeek

Filed under: Laptops

Programming challenge:

Write me a function with this signature in C#:

public (unsafe?) long Reverse(long i, int bits)

...to flip the endian-ness (LSB/MSB) of a long, but just the # of significant bits specified.

Example, if the input is 376, with bits=11, the output is 244 (decimal, base 10).

376 = 00000101111000
244 = 00000011110100

Example, if the input is 900, with bits=11, the output is 270.

900 = 00001110000100
270 = 00000100001110

Example, if the input is 900, with bits=12, the output is 540.

900 = 00001110000100
540 = 00001000011100

Example, if the input is 154, with bits=4, the output is 5.

154 = 00000010011010
5   =00000000000101

And make it FAST...;)

Test text.

The official online form for the Apple Battery Recall is here. I filled one out for an iBook and a Powerbook with no troubles, except for actually having to lift up the keyboard for the iBook to find the serial number. The one listed in the "about this mac" section was actually another serial number.

All you need is your laptop's serial number plus your battery's serial number for the first page. On the second page, your personal information such as the address you want the battery to be shipped to.

Word of warning. Make sure you confirm your address is correct before you submit the second page. There's no confirmation page that will say "Are you sure this is correct? Hit back if you are not." If you screw up, you'll probably have to contact Apple again to correct your address. Either that, or camp out at your neighbor's house daily for 4-6 weeks. – Jason Chen

Battery Exchange [Apple]

BoingBoing has covered Mikey Sklar's projects before. He RFID chipped his hand and also built a trampoline controlled flame thrower. He was on The Daily Show yesterday for a segment on nano machines along with Ray Kurzweil.