razorshine
by riaz kanani
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..
January 16, 2008 at 8:59 pm · Filed under: email from address gmail relevance
It has been common knowledge among email marketers that the “Friendly from name” is more important than the subject line. People scan the friendly from name to decide which emails are from people they recognise. If it is from someone they know then they are less likely to treat it as spam.
Roll on my Gmail junk folder. It was getting big so I thought I’d take a quick scan before deleting them. Of course with the emails being in the spam folder, I had only the from name and the subject line to go on - the images themselves are obscured. So I see “River Island” and “M&S” and thought I might want to see their emails in the future and click the “not spam” button. No sooner do I look at them with images do I know immediately it is spam and Google got it right.
Darn! I should have expanded the friendly from name so I could see the actual from address. It was obvious this was not from the sender it purported to be but this is hidden by default in the Google Apps version of Gmail. This doesnt seem to be the case in my standard gmail account.
December 24, 2007 at 12:57 pm · Filed under: attention facebook information outlook relevance rss twitter
It’s more than a year since I gave a talk on Attention based management systems and how I envisaged they would become key to managing all the data that is thrown at us everyday. If anything attention as a buzzword has decreased in the past 12 months, whilst the amount of data has increased massively thanks in no small part to Twitter and the Facebook newsfeed.
It would be interesting to see whether a prolific rss reader like Scoble saw a decrease in the number of posts he read compared to last year. Back in September, the BBC reported that the time required to use Facebook has come about at the expense of worker productivity.
So why are attention tools not getting attention? (sorry!) It is actually rather simple. It’s built into everything we use already.
The very Facebook newsfeed that has increased the amount of data we see, is customisable to show what we want to see. Facebook rolled out the ability to give feedback on what you do and do not want to see (I trust it will be used eventually as it doesnt seem to be yet!). It is early days but this very newsfeed allows you to keep in touch with more people using less time.
The major reason more people have been using Google Reader is the flexibility it gives you to read blog posts efficiently. I definitely read more posts now then I used to with Bloglines a year ago. Fav.or.it is another RSS reader that attempts to place content most relevant to you in front of you.
Even the workhorse of the office worker, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has taken a huge step with its task features. It now places tasks both in a new right hand panel so you can see it immediately as well as the relevant tasks in your calendar. I used tasks sporadically before but could not do without it now.
As for the applications I looked at a year ago, Touchstone (now Particls) and Attensa still exist and I’ll take a closer look at both in later posts.
Oh and one last thing - just like in marketing, attention is all about relevance.
December 4, 2007 at 6:20 pm · Filed under: aol apophenia demographic google marketing relevance
apophenia wrote an article about “who clicks on ads? and what might this mean” which talks about that common phrase from people - “I never click on ads”. It then concludes that the majority of people clicking on ads online are from the lower socio-economic groups online, taking this conclusion from a study produced by AOL. Go here to read the full article.
AOL’s customer base has traditionally had a bias towards this demographic and this would certainly lead to them having a skew towards this demographic clicking on ads. Even more so, marketers advertising inside AOL seem to understand this and display banners suited to this demographic. Yet those same marketers do not seem to do this in the wider Internet. If this demographic is clicking in the majority on online ads, then surely the majority of agencies are wasting their client’s money online?
I don’t agree with this conclusion, not just because doing so would mean Google’s valuation would very quickly collapse 
People do click on ads online, but they do so only when it is of interest to them (or to put it another way, when they benefit from clicking). Whether it is because they are in the market for a car and see a car ad they liked, or because they have seen a film trailer they want to find out more about. Marketers everywhere are trying to show an ad to the right person in the right place and at the right time. Achieve this and click-thru and economic returns would be sky high. This is why Google is doing so well, its technology is able to place adverts in front of you at a time when you are interested in a specific topic.
Designed by Peter Andre Jensen. Edited somewhat by Riaz Kanani.
