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how the military is using online networks

1/16/2005 By

David Weinberger observes that the web is a world, not a medium. Dan Baum reports in the New Yorker on What the generals don’t know that the U.S. military is learning this also.

“Lieutenant Keith Wilson, for example, read a “be on the look out” posting about insurgents who were wiring grenades behind posters of Moqtada al-Sadr, counting on Americans to detonate the explosives when they ripped the posters down. He spread the word among his men, and a few days later a soldier whom he’d sent to peel a poster off a wall peeked behind it first. Sure enough, a grenade was waiting.”

Key lessons from this article:
- People on the front lines know more than people above.
- Speed saves.
- Bit literacy is life literacy.

Filed Under: News, Success Stories, Tips, Web 2.0 Industry

Technology is Morally Neutral: Guns and Jeers Used by Gangs to Buy Silence

1/16/2005 By

The NY Times reports that: Guns and Jeers Used by Gangs to Buy Silence:

“And in each city, CD’s and DVD’s titled “Stop Snitching” have surfaced, naming some people street gangs suspect of being witnesses against them and warning that those who cooperate with the police will be killed. To underscore its message, the Baltimore DVD shows what appears to be three dead bodies on its back cover above the words “snitch prevention.”

CDs and DVDs are apparently the modern equivalent of a horse’s head on the bed.

Filed Under: News, Social Network Research, Web 2.0 Industry

Mapping the Culture of an Online Community

1/14/2005 By

This paper from Patrick Lambe on “Mapping the Culture of an Online Community” is a great overview of the sort of characters that inhabit almost any online community.

When reading it, I recommend ask yourself: which character are you, and which character do you aspire to be?


Via John Maloney on WebCommunities

Filed Under: Social Network Research, Tips

Search engine optimization for your blog

1/11/2005 By

My friend Kimberly D. Wells recently asked this question in the Blogging for Business forum on Ryze:

Is anyone else finding that their Blog is getting heavy traffic from search engines? Any tips for Blog SEO?

A pretty good chunk of our traffic here comes from search engines. Here are some tips for optimizing your blog for search engines:

  1. Keyword research- What are the most popular terms around your topic? Use Overture and WordTracker for research.
  2. Keyword-rich category names – Text in hyperlinks gets preferential treatment. Category links are going to appear on every page, so they’re going to get a lot of exposure. Also make sure that there are hyperlinks to the category name(s) in each post of the category(ies) that the post is in.
  3. Hyperlink titles to the permalink – In plain English, that means make sure your headlines are linked to the permanent URL for that post. Blogger, by default, doesn’t do that — instead, the timestamp is the permalink. Wacky, useless convention. I have instructions on how to fix this here (see step 2). Warning – it’s pretty technical – probably going to be a challenge if you don’t know HTML.
  4. Use Trackback/pingback to notify other bloggers when you link to their blog. Some will automatically display a link back to your post.
  5. Put titles in an H2 or H3 tag – H2/H3 tags will score better than just big bold text created with CSS.
  6. Make sure each post can be its own page – If each post is on its own page, your keyword density (one of the criteria for search engine rankings) will be higher, since each post will talk about one fairly narrow topic. If all you have are weekly/monthly archives, and each post is a bookmark, you’ll have long pages with a variety of topics discussed, and your keyword density drops.
  7. Leave comments on other people’s blogs – Don’t spam them just to get a link. Contribute to the conversation. But you can usually put a link to your blog in when you leave a comment, and that helps build link popularity for your site.

An important note is that Blogger.com (and many other free services) really isn’t well-suited for much of the above. Most of the things I describe above that you do on your own blog either aren’t there by default (heading tags, hyperlinked titles) or aren’t supported at all (categories, single pages for each post). That’s why I generally recommend using WordPress or Movable Type on your own domain if you really want to get the maximum marketing benefit out of your blog.

For more on this topic, check out Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google

Filed Under: Blogging, Chapter 09: Blogging, Chapter 22: Number of People in Your Network, Tips

Rathergate = Blog-gate

1/5/2005 By

Corey Pein reports in the Columbia Journalism Review that “Yes, CBS screwed up badly in ‘Memogate’ — but so did those who covered the affair”. (via Fark) Although many in the blogosphere were excited to see this alleged triumph of the “Power of Many”, the truth is that the truth is hard to find. The provenance and problems of the memos in question are still very much unclear.

Filed Under: News, Web 2.0 Industry

Current and Future Leaders in Social Software

1/5/2005 By

I had a busy week in Israel. You can download here my presentation to the MIT Enterprise Forum on Current and Future Leaders in Social Software. The Powerpoint includes a taxonomy of social software companies, lists of the major players in each sector of the social software industry, and examples of 12 different business models for blog companies (based on Scott Allen’s and my research). We would greatly appreciate your feedback on this!

Also, you can download here the slides from my talk to Tel Aviv University/Recanati Business School Alumni on “How to Quadruple Your Sales with Social Software“.

UPDATE: Haaretz wrote (in Hebrew) about the social network talk at MIT.

Filed Under: Events, News, Tips, Web 2.0 Industry, Web 2.0 Sites

Best and Worst of Social Media 2004

1/4/2005 By

Cynthia Typaldos posted to her excellent Web Communities Yahoo Group her best and worst of the social media in 2004:

BEST:
Dogster
Amazon.com’s Listmania: the best way to find what you really
want even when you don’t know what it is
www.paidcontent.org great newsletter/blog about the content industry
The Social Software Weblog by Judith Meskill
All of Robin Good’s stuff (MasterNewMedia)

Dogs that Blog and the dog blogroll- there are now 6 dogs in the dog blogroll (which I maintain), 3 of which are written from the dog’s point of you. Yes, laugh all you like, but a major newspaper will soon be publishing a story on blogging pets. This could be the hot social networking topic of 2005.

WORST:
Social Networking website business models (are there any?)
BzzAgent (NYTimes article)
Too many social networking sites

Cynthia is one of the long-time experts in this field, for whom I have tremendous respect (we worked together before), but we don’t always see entirely eye-to-eye. Here’s my list in response:

BEST:

Have to agree with Cynthia on:
The Social Software Weblog by Judith Meskill
All of Robin Good’s stuff (MasterNewMedia)

I’m also a big fan of:
- Corante Many2Many and GetReal
- About Weblogs, the most consistent and thorough blogging resource site I’ve found
- Lee LeFever’s blog’s Technology in Plain English category. Especially see Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities.
- Judith Donath and danah boyd’s Public Displays of Connection
- AlwaysOn Network
- Ziad Abdelnour’s Global Capital Access Club on Ecademy (my vote for best network/group/club within a social networking site)

And my bit of shameless self-promotion:
- The Five Keys to Building Business Relationships Online is really good (and some other people think so too).
- [UPDATE March 30, 2005: The Five Keys is no longer available, but check out our new book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online]
- I think it’s pretty cool that my coauthor and I have a monthly column for FastCompany.com about online business relationships / social networking – so far as I know, the first in a major publication (OK, it’s online only at the moment, but that’s still a big step):
     Crossing the Social Networking Chasm
     The Next Generation of Contact Management Software
     I Am Not a Number!

WORST:
I agree with Cynthia about Too many social networking sites – there are too many that are entirely undifferentiated. Technology doth not a social network make. Going back to Cynthia’s 12 Principles, the one thing missing from so many of them is a clear and abiding purpose.

That said, top of my list are: :-)

1. People saying there’s no business model for social networking, when Ryze, Ecademy, Tickle, Contact Network Corporation, et al., are profitable. Others, like LinkedIn and Tribe, haven’t even tested their models yet. To say there’s no business model for social networking simply because some of them haven’t made money yet is just in utter denial of the facts. What about the 2,000 people who have signed up to pay $4,500 – $5,000 for Ecademy Blackstar membership? If they add 250-300 a year like they plan to, that’s $1.5 million a year for that program alone. Regardless of your opinion of Ecademy, that’s not bad for a 6-person company running open-source software.

2. Corollary to the above: people saying that social networking sites don’t work. The truth is simply people don’t know how to use social networking sites. Pundits can say all they want to that they should be intuitive, but the issue is not the use of the site – it’s the social practices online. The typical 40-something professional has around 200,000 hours of experience interacting with people face-to-face, and less than 5,000 hours interacting online. As the human race, we have tens of thousands of years of face-to-face interaction, and barely 30 online – 20, really. What do you expect? It’s we who need to learn how to interact online effectively – the social networking sites can’t do that for us. They’re a tool – nothing more, nothing less. And most of us can even learn to use a hammer more effectively.

The worst offender regarding the above?

Far and away, it has to be PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak, who has posted multiple rants about business networking sites, blogging, Cluetrain Manifesto (talk about killing the sacred cow!), and instant messaging. There’s so much good commentary out there about how off-base he is that I won’t even
attempt to list it here.

It might help if these people actually talked to someone who’s using them effectively instead of just ranting about how inadequate they are based on their own experience. Talk to the people who it is working for. Seems simple enough, yes?

Filed Under: Web 2.0 Sites
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