April 15, 2008 at 8:06 am · Filed under: community culture relevance Rushmore Drive search Search Engines targeting
Corvida wrote an interesting post on a new ethnically targeted search engine called Rushmore Drive. She talks about it not being right to differentiate search based on skin colour. When put in that context it is hard to disagree with her thoughts. I commented there on her post but I wanted to expand on it here further.
Theoretically the idea is sound though if looked at in a different context - different cultures like (or search for) different things. That’s why they have different cultures, how bland it would be if we all wanted the same things! It’s natural that someone with a certain culture would use a search engine that is tailored to them - not because of their skin colour but because it finds them the results they want. Of course, it is a bit chicken and egg.. the service was designed for a certain community which you might be able to differentiate by skin colour, and yet it meets that community’s requirements. It may not be ethically a good thing differentiating software on skin colour but African-Americans (in this case) would be happier I bet to use a search engine which finds them what they want rather than have to search through Google.
That was the reason I left Altavista for Google in the first place.
I think over time though this specific search engine is irrelevent - Google (and the other major search players out there) will highly likely introduce profiles that tailor it’s results based on you (equally I would hope you could switch this off if you did not want Google to know that much about you).
April 11, 2008 at 7:37 am · Filed under: attention email facebook friendfeed life stream relevance services social networking
Dylan Fuller (from A Fuller View which I highly recommend subscribing to) commented on an earlier post asking what was the difference between life stream aggregators do and standard social networking - and even more importantly should he join them.
My short answer, was not right now. Here is the more longwinded answer!
Firstly, life stream aggregators vs standard social networking. Let’s list some of each to start with:
Standard Social Networks:
1. Facebook
2. Bebo
3. MySpace
Life Stream Aggregators
1. FriendFeed
2. Tumblr
3. Social Thing
If you look at the standard social networks they all offer pretty much the same thing with different emphases (MySpace was music, Facebook was connecting with friends). Here are some of the things they offer:
1. Ability to connect to friends
2. Photos
3. Public (and private) messaging
4. Status updates
5. News feed of events (usually) done by your friends.
Amongst Internetphiles, people have been moving more and more away from Facebook and towards individual specialised services and until recently there has been nothing to bring it all together.
Life stream Aggregators brings many of the different items (and more) listed above into one feed for all your friends across the web and across services. The real problem is one of scale.
It has one single feed and treats everyone the same. The feed gives so much information that you can never keep up with everything - and worse most of the information is not relevant. It suffers from the same issue as Twitter - if you follow too many people you lose the value of the service. What is needed is a way of saying I want to see in my main feed photos, news, mutterings from Group X, and only shared items and posts from Group Y. Even better I want to be able to have multiple feeds. Once this starts to happen, this could become a great tool to manage your attention data (ie see what you need to see at the right time).
In the meantime, if you are using specialised online services such as Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, Seesmic etc it is worthwhile keeping an eye on life stream aggregators (especially Friendfeed and Tumblr) and even worth trying with a small group of close friends.
On a separate note - I wonder when email will get integrated into this stream..
April 3, 2008 at 8:30 am · Filed under: email spam
The BBC wrote an article on spam which you can read here.
Some key takeaways - according to Spamhaus more than 90% of email is spam 
BT, Bulldog, Wanadoo and Tiscali are failing to tackle the problem of botnets (spam sent from ordinary household computers that have been hijacked by hackers).
I’m not sure whether it is an omission or whether the 2nd and 3rd largets ISPs (Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse) in the UK are doing a better job of dealing with this.
