8 year olds now have blogs

I thought it was ridiculous when kids got their own cell phones, but now they're starting to have their own blogs as well. See here for details.

At least my traffic numbers are better than the 8 year olds - for now at least!

The Half Life of a Good Post - About a Week

Last week I went to the MIX07 conference and blogged a lot. I acted like an intrepid reporter, posting up reviews of each session as I went to them. MIX07 became a top ten search term in technorati, so I received quite a bit of traffic to my blog.

So I wanted to find out - what is the half life of a successful blog entry? How much time does a blog entry live?

My conclusion - the half-life of a successful blog entry is about a week. After a week, traffic is almost completely gone from sites such as technorati, shoutwire, digg, etc. In addition, there doesn't seem to be much loyalty factor at least for my small blog - I haven't built enough brand power yet that I'm getting a lot of repeat visitors. Almost 70-80% of my visitors are brand new to my blog.

I'm not sure if this is typical, but it shows that attrition is very high and that bloggers who are not committed to posting every 2-3 days are not going to get any follow through in traffic. Its either post or perish in the blog world!

Finding People Across Multiple Social Networks

In the past year, we've had linked-in, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. all register hundreds of thousands of user profiles.

I'm currently on linked-in and facebook heavily. I haven't tried myspace or twitter yet. In addition, there are dozens of other user profiles floating around the Internet in blogs, web pages, etc. And there are still old-school sites such as Classmates.com which provide people finding services through a local service.

Finding people on the Internet is actually reasonably hard to do. Simply googling a person's name might find the person, but if your name is "John Smith" then your out of luck. In addition, let's say you want to find everyone in your high school class (a typical facebook or classmates use case) - doing this using Google is really really tough because of the need for very structured meta-data against a person which google doesn't index.

So what about creating a search engine that uses metadata based searching to find people? For example, in facebook you have employment information, high school information, etc.

Here are a couple mock-ups to illustrate what I'm thinking of here...





In addition, what about linking profiles between networks so you could see an aggregated profile of a person's blog, facebook page, myspace page, every video they've posted to YouTube, etc.

A couple of issues:

1. Unique identifiers - there would to be a way to uniquely identify someone across networks. The most obvious identifier to use would be email address since this is commonly included in most user profiles.

This is a common problem in health care and there are already good solutions that use probabilistic scoring algorithms to analyze meta-data based on linkage business rules determine that two profiles are really the same person. A simple obvious example - if two profiles have the same email address, we can probably assume they're the same person. It gets more interesting when trying to match without a unique identifier and you're dealing with scoring of a variety of attributes such as gender, date of birth, first name, last name, postal code, etc. Given the rich profile detail on most of these network sites the ability to match profiles should be very strong - if you two profiles with the same gender, date of birth, last name and geographic indicator such as postal code, its pretty safe to assume that they are pointing to the same individual.

2. What information gets aggregated - this is a trickier problem. One solution would be to simply require participating networks to have an opt-in/opt-out ability to syndicate their profile information to the aggregator. This is similar to what Facebook or LinkedIn does today - the user gets to decide which information is public. Another option would be to enable any user to see their own aggregated profile and at least diagnose where the information is coming from. Then at least I can easily tell in a single view what is being syndicated and change it.

3. How I get contacted - all networking sites have different rules on how they allow contacts in order to prevent spammers, stalkers, etc. Again, one simple solution would be to simply delegate the contact rules back to the local network. If I find a facebook profile and want to contact that person (adding them as a friend) then I would follow the facebook process to do so (which is quite different than LinkedIn). This would also allow networking sites to compete on features but still provide a common meeting point.

4. Indexing additional information - it would be great to see additional general information from Google but optimized for people searching. There must be some interesting algorithms that could be developed for analyzing any web page for common profile meta-data. For example, take a standard web based discussion board. Each message might have at least a name, an email and the message content. If you can make a match on this, then you could aggregate this content together to see what people have posted over the past 6 months.

I think there are tonnes of possibilities here, and with the increase in meta-data from these networks, we should be able to do a lot better than standard google searching and having to go from network to network to search for people.

Where Will The Cool Kids Be Hanging Out Next?

Friendster and MySpace is no longer a youth hang-out. Over 50% of the demographic for MySpace is now over 35 years old. No cool teenager wants to be hanging out in the same space as their mother, so most have moved onto cooler pastures.

Facebook now seems to be going through the same transition. I can measure it quite easily because I'm on the cusp (I'm 33 years old) and over the past 3-4 months the number of old high school contacts has been increasing steadily. This shows that people of my age group are invading what used to be the cool youth hang-out.

How will this impact those of us who are interested in marketing to the online audience? From my perspective, it depends on what demographic you're interested in. If you're interested in the youth market it means an increasing shift from site to site as a fickle audience moves from one trend site to another (as with any other youth oriented product). However, if you're interested in an older demographic, it means that social networking sites should be viewed as finally completely mainstream. Facebook, YouTube, MySpace are now longer fringe cool clubs but are the equivalent of the suburban mall. This presents a great opportunity to market to those adults now using these technologies to network.

A good example of this is LinkedIn. There are 6 million+ users in LinkedIn, and the demographic is largely urban professionals with a bias towards technology users. For a recruiter, this presents an opportunity. For $145US a posting, you can post your job posting to all 6 million users. In addition, those users that are connected to you via the LinkedIn network can get to you through your network connections and help further the conversation. We tried our first LinkedIn posting for a couple positions at the Foundation and were quite successful - I received about 15-20 resumes for 2 positions and they generally ranged from decent to excellent.

Is it a Web Site or Blog?

Tecnorati claims they are monitoring 57 million+ blogs. In the past 30 days, I've seen news.com, nationalgeographic.com, wired.com, yahoo.com, cnn.com all show up on blog search engines.

Is a blog simply now a web site with postings? Isn't that any web site with update-able content?

How do we define a blog if everyone is now "blogging" including large corporate editorial boards?

Even wikipedia's definition of a blog seems really out of date now that corporate blogs have jumped on the bandwagon:

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Isn't this just a web site these days? Is a newspaper site a blog? News.com and Wired certainly seem to want to claim this and they do show up in most blog search engines.

My prediction is that in a year from now the whole idea of a "Blog" will be ubiquitous and therefore an irrelevant distinction.