Archive for March, 2007

Geni and the joys of digital economics

March 13th, 2007 Comments(0)

I picked up this link from O’Reilly Radar and it’s impressed me. Geni is a site where families can collaborate to create their family trees. The usability of the site itself is terrific (it’s all built in Flash) and it took almost no time to create the first few sections of the tree. It’s really easy to put relatives’ email addresses in, and collaboration is almost unstoppable, which is surprising me. The least digitally literate members of my family are participating, and I only set it up 24 hours ago.

I did read on their blog that they’ve raised $10m in funding recently, and I’m really intrigued as to what they plan to do to develop the idea commercially. I expect it will be ad-backed, but they’re not collecting marketing consent on the sign-ups, so it can’t be email related.

What I think is that they’ve designed something very infectious, something that only works if it’s done by a community, and that will lead to a lot of registrations and a lot of traffic. In the short term, that can lead to great advertising revenue if they can monetise it, but whether they can sustain traffic depends on what they do next to keep people coming back.

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Night work at Waterloo

March 10th, 2007 Comments(0)

So why don’t electronic signs have spell-checkers?

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Time to vote again … Jpgmag

March 08th, 2007 Comments(0)

Jpgmag voting time has come round again.

I don’t know why I’m so pleased with this, but it’s a really nice close-up. Please vote for it!

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Wikipedia and the credibility of UGC

March 06th, 2007 Comments(0)

Reading this Register article, it’s prompted me to ask how we can be sure of the reliability of content that’s been created by volunteers, and moderated by volunteers, almost entirely in their own time.

A prominent contributor and editor, whose profile claims two PhDs, turns out to be a 24 year old with no PhDs at all. He’s clearly an expert in something, he’s accrued a lot of support in the Wikipedia world, but nonetheless he’s not what he said he was, and you have to question anything he’s written or moderated on that basis.

Surely it’s common sense to be sceptical when you’re unsure where information has come from. Yet many of us rely on Wikipedia for all sorts of information. Is it an exception? What else do we rely on today that could be coming from questionable (or at least unproven) sources? Is there something intrinsically better about relying on the Economist, Oxford University Press or the BBC because it’s their job to tell us about the things they tell us about? What does this story tell us about branding and the value of brands? Is it important that some person’s or company’s income depends on something being right, when we’re deciding whether to trust it?

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Some user generated content…

March 04th, 2007 Comments(1)

… is good, and some is just weird. This is the latter.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFP0q4qzGw4]

I don’t really understand why Seth Godin told us about this here.

This is a very odd unicorn film, watch at your peril.

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Shoot Experience kicks off its 2007 schedule with Shoot Portobello

March 02nd, 2007 Comments(0)

We entered Shoot City last year, and 2 of our photos were included in their exhibition.

Their first event of 2007 has just been announced, and it’s on March 31st, centred on Portobello and Notting Hill in West London.

You can register here.

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Social Search - where’s it going?

March 01st, 2007 Comments(2)

I was asked the other day what I thought about social search, Yahoo! Answers etc. Here’s what I replied.

There is a belief that algorithmic search, of the sort that Google etc use, isn’t good at certain kinds of operations. An example would be that some affiliate sites rate very highly for searches on certain kinds of product when, to a real person, it’s obvious that the site isn’t offering anything of use. Try looking for support for a mobile phone if you want an example, and you’ll get lots of links to sites that are trying to sell you something, with 1 or 2 useful responses.

The idea of social search is that real people will give you the useful results, not the ones from the sites that are good at gaming with search engines. There are some decent examples of this on a small scale. In a way, technorati does this for blogs. It’s how digg and del.ic.io.us work. The problem is that once a site starts to get decent traffic, it starts to get gamed by the people trying to make a buck. This is why comment spam is becoming common in blogging, and you can already see examples of it at Yahoo Answers.

The people who invented wikipedia are developing a social search engine too, called wikia, and it’s possible they have ideas to address this commercialisation. Another interesting development concerns the evolution of what are called semantic search algorithms, which understand pages better and can sort the wheat from the chaff more effectively. Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the world wide web, is spending a lot of his time today on how we tag pages to show their meaning more clearly. It’s going to be a big area of development.

As an advertiser it comes back to balancing commercialism with providing valuable information to consumers. All the current solutions can be gamed, and I expect there will be a cat and mouse aspect to this business for a while to come.

What do you think?

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