Category: Uncategorized

Like most bloggers, I diligently analyze my logs to see how readers are responding to my rambling. I use the Clicky, which I’ve found quite nice even if it isn’t free (but it does provide real-time updates).

Here are the stats for the past month:

• 48%: directly or through bookmarks
• 25%: links from other sites
• 15%: RSS readers and social media
• 12%: (non-paid) search results

Note that I don’t find out who is reading the blog through RSS readers; I only see log entries for people who click through the readers, e.g., to read or post comments.

The searches are certainly the most entertaining  bits in the log. Here are a few I found particularly amusing:

• channel for inspired people
• english sex channel
• how to make pipe quick
• “keep yourself on the gravy train for life”
• psychology of noisy people

I would be curious to know more about who is reading the blog through RSS readers. Anyone here have advice on how or whether it is feasible to do so?

Note: my asserting that my eulogies for privacy nothwithstanding, I respect the anonymity of my readers and will only disclose log data in forms like the above, which do not disclose any even remotely personally identifying information.

The offline story of how former Nasdaq chairman  Bernard Madoff evidently took $50B from investors in a massive Ponzi scheme has been been a staple in the press since the story broke last week. But what caught my eye today was an article in the Wall Street Journal. The title, “Madoff Exploited the Jews“, strikes me as a bit glib, but it’s the subtitle that struck me:

Networks of trust are vulnerable. No law can change that.

Diving deeper into the article:

His contacts and connections, his religion and affiliations, his public and private positions, all worked to make his funds look legitimate and exclusive. And he knew how to play his prospects, when to turn potential clients down, when to give something extra.

And finally the closer:

The violation of trust at the heart of that story — of trust by those with the greatest reason to trust — cries out for sympathy. It illustrates the limits of law, not the need for more of it.

The stories of con men (and the occasional con woman) go back centuries, and perhaps there’s nothing new to see here. But I think this story should serve as a wake-up call to those of us who see trust as the foundation of building value in online social networks.

A common criticism of online social networks is that they are less robust than offline ones because there is no substitute for the trust we build through offline interactions. But perhaps the real problem is that we have never learned how to reliably calibrate trust, offline or online. The efficiency of online communication, ideally suited to keeping us more informed, can also propagate disinformation at unprecedented rates (cf. information accountability). We need to learn how to manage our trust more rationally. Perhaps technology can help.

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve recently started blogging more about search engine optimization (SEO). I’m not an SEO expert, and I confess some misgivings about the whole endeavor. But I’m enough of a realist to play by the rules of the attention economy rather than just rant about them.

One of my resources is the SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog. This collectively written blog covers the wacky world of SEO, marketing through education to promote the expertise of the consultants at SEOmoz. Yes, it’s a corporate blog–and in a sketchy industry, besides. Yet, despite these two strikes, it’s a excellent blog, well deserving of the awards listed on its about page.

Here are some posts to give you a flavor for its content:

• Headsmacking Tip #10 – Incentivize Links
• Why a Google Monopoly is Bad for Search Marketers
• Why Companies Are Investing in SEO During the Economic Downturn
• How to Find Out What Search Engine Users Are Really Asking
• Ranking Factors Version 2 Released

There’s a lot of SEO snake oil out there. These folks seem informed and serious. Check it out if you’re interested in learning more about SEO.

Note: I have no professional relationship with SEOmoz. I will always disclose any relationships with the companies I blog about. Absent such a disclosure, you can assume I’m an independent (if opinionated) observer.

An article in Search Engine Land today describes how “Ask.com Plays The Google AdWords Arbitrage Game“:

Rather than promoting its own product (as with the Cashback example), or drumming up some incremental searches for its site (as with the apples example, or by saying something like “New Hampshire Hotels? Try Ask.com For Better Results”), Ask is using specific text to make you think you can conduct and conclude a purchase at their web site, when you cannot. Instead, what you are far more likely to do is click on a Google ad that Ask carries, earning Ask money (and almost certainly more money than they paid to get your click from Google).

It’s clever, though pretty clearly in violation of Google’s AdWords policy. And at best it strikes me as a short-term play: it will annoy users–that is, if Google doesn’t shut this down sooner. But I am morbidly fascinated by this race to the bottom in the online advertising business.

An article in today’s New York Times entitled “Your Privacy Is Protected Only if You Are Really Sick” describes the guidelines that the Network Advertising Initiative, a trade group that represents two dozen companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, has adopted for how ad networks use data about Internet users. The upshot:

Networks only have to ask permission if they want to collect “precise information about past, present, or potential future health or medical conditions or treatments, including genetic, genomic, and family medical history.”

The one word “precise” is restrictive enough to ensure that, the guidelines have no real impact, since the vast majority of pages about health topics on the Web are not exclusively for people who suffer from particular conditions.

Privacy advocates are understandably concerned. As I’ve blogged here ad nauseum, I have no real expectation of privacy on the web: I learned long ago that the only way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone.

What I’d prefer to see, however, is more transparency about the process. Most users have at best a naive understanding of how their data is collected and used, and they are unlike to read privacy policies, let alone opt out of being tracked. The fact that those who collect data don’t believe users would willingly opt in to data collection suggests that the status quo is untenable, and relies on the asymmetry of information between data collectors and the data collectees. Education may be a slow process, but eventually we’ll need to find a solution that is acceptable to all informed parties.

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be organizing the Industry Track at SIGIR ’09. For those unfamiliar with the annual ACM SIGIR conferences, SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the broad field of information retrieval.

I’m working with general chairs James Allan and Jay Aslam to put together a program that connects the information retrieval research community to the work going on in the hottest area of applied computer science.

If you have ideas about what you’d like to see at this event (topics, speakers, format), please let me know. It’s still a work in progress, but we will probably follow the example of the CIKM ’08 Industry Event, incorporating a day of invited talks into the main conference program.

The Wall Street Journal, reeling from its controversial coverage about Google, Larry Lessig, and net neutrality, published an article about “The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World“. Here are the “secrets” they enumerate:

• Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.
• Give consumers a reason to participate.
• Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.
• Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.
• Don’t control, let it go.
• Find a ‘marketing technopologist.’
• Embrace experimentation.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so harsh; common sense isn’t always as common as the phrase would imply.  And the “let it go” advice is probably controversial outside of social media circles. Still, it boggles my mind that these principles aren’t just considered part of online marketing 101.

According to a Ponemon Institute report on the 20 most trusted companies in the United States, Americans trust Facebook more than they trust Google. A look at Ponemon’s press release shows Facebook ranked at #15, while Google fell out of the top 20 from its rank of #10 in 2007.

I don’t know enough about the study to evaluate its methodological soundness, but I found it astounding that “do no evil” Google would score lower than the company that tried to bring us Beacon.

But perhaps there’s a method to the popular madness. While Facebook may raise more privacy concerns than Google, it seem to be pursuing a policy of transparency in how it exposes and uses the data it collects. Google, in contrast, tends to be a bit more cagey about its policies. I may be reading too much into this one data point, but I’m tempted to see a lesson that users value honesty and transparency over privacy.

Oscar Berg just alerted me to a nice post on the Connectbeam Social Computing Blog about “Micro Economies of Attention” that, in turn, discusses a work by researchers in Hewlett Packard’s Social Computing Lab evaluating the motivations of employees to participate in organizations’ social software applications.

I’ve been preparing a series of posts about the macroeconomics of information and attention, so these subjects are top of mind. This article addresses the complementary microeconomic side of the discussion.

I was just reading an article in the New York Time about how “Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites” and saw this brilliant quote from SocialMedia Networks co-founder Seth Goldstein:

“Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”

I think that sums up the problem of having advertising as the foundation for almost all online information and entertaininment. The arms race cannot escalate indefinitely. Eventually we will have to move beyond the tyranny of free.