I think of things like this as curating my existing community resources, an all-too under utilized strategy I believe. That’s the kind of thing I’m likely to bring up as a guest tomorrow on Tummelvision.tv, which I cannot recommend highly enough that you check out.

Draw from this what you will. I’ve been reading coverage of the events through Memeorandum, a great source for political news, and the one thing that stands out to me in this visualization is that allegations Palin addressed the nation and not the state she was serving seem questionable given how much she talked about Alaska and Alaskans. It is also interesting to see how many times she used the word “dollars.” She used the word government far more than she did family, though when watching the video of her press conference it sounded like she was really talking about family a lot.

Do you think this kind of analysis can be truly useful? I think that it’s most useful when comparing multiple speeches for content, but even then I’m not sure how to read the meaning of word frequency.

See also a comparison I did in January at ReadWriteWeb of President Obama’s inaugural speech compared the Bushes’ and other past presidents.

Data analysis is fascinating and of course much larger opportunities to engage in it are becoming available every day online. I believe we’re going to see a whole lot of innovation making use of the text of conversations as a foundation for analysis in the near future. Not cute little stuff like this, but big, ongoing, ambitious projects. Hopefully for more than just marketing purposes. Here’s a blog post and great audio interview on that topic, if you’re interested.

Last month I wrote a post at ReadWriteWeb titled “The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter.” It was all about a service called Mailana where you can plug in any Twitter user name and get a chart and graph of the other Twitter users that the user in question has had the greatest number of reciprocal public @ conversations with. It’s a way to systematically identify the influencers of the influencers in any field (on Twitter).

Just to prove to myself that it works in any field, I did a search of user descriptions in Twellow for the words “veterinary medicine” and found one of the top Twitter users in that field. I then ran her username through Mailana and was able to discover 13 people that she speaks publicly with most regularly on Twitter. It was pretty cool.

And so I present for your drag-to-toolbar pleasure…

Mailana – The Twitter Social Network Analyzer.

Please use it for good and not evil. And don’t let anyone tell you that there aren’t serious use cases for Twitter.

You can join me on Twitter here.

1. Use other peoples’ lists before building your own.

A few weeks ago I wrote a giant post titled How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic. It was a big hit and if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend checking it out. It’s all about how to discover the top online blogs writing about any topic, how to find their most popular posts (according to their readers), how to search against their archives as a reference source and how to connect with the authors elsewhere around the web, on Twitter for example.

Jason Falls wrote a similar post a few days later that offered some more good advice, though. One of the biggest things I took from Jason’s post was that there’s no reason to start building a list from scratch, as I showed readers how to do in my post, when you can find existing lists of resources already created. Jason used Alltop as one of his sources of sources, and though the interface there is not good for regular use, someone has done a whole lot of work finding good blogs on a variety of topics. There’s no need to reproduce that work if you’re interested in one of those topics.

Additionally, Googling for the terms list of blogs about topic X will often lead you to existing lists. I’ve also begun exploring Delicious pages like http://delicious.com/tag/list+blogs+eco, where you’ll find links people have tagged with the words list, blogs and eco. Shazam!

2. You don’t have to search against static lists

Google Custom Search engines are really simple but are one of the most powerful tools I started working with last year. I’ve got probably 30 of them that let me search top blogs on a wide variety of different topics.

Whenever I find or make a list, I always consider turning it into a CSE. Did you know, though, that you can make a CSE that’s automatically populated using an OPML URL? Check out http://www.google.com/cse?cref=http://www.google.com/cse/tools/makecse%3Furl%3Dwww.readwriteweb.com/topeducationblogsgreatposts.opml&loading=1.

You can switch out the OPML URL in that link and search against any OPML file you’ve posted or found online. That way if you update the OPML file, you’ll automatically update the sources included in your Custom Search Engine.

Big thanks is due to Marjolein Hoekstra of Clever Clogs for teaching me that, as she has so many things about RSS.

3. Finding industry people on Twitter is easy.

I’m hesitant to share this one publicly, but what the heck. Have you looked at Twellow? It’s a search engine that searches the user bio fields of peoples’ Twitter profiles. That’s cool, but there’s an advanced search feature that’s even cooler.

Let’s say I want to find people who work at any of the Semantic Web companies listed in RWW’s Top Semantic Web Companies to Watch lists of 2007 or 2008. I just opened my browser to those posts, drug the company names off onto a text editor and then did a little find and replace to create this search query:
http://www.twellow.com/search?q=(Freebase)|(Powerset)|(Twine)|(AdaptiveBlue)|(Hakia)|(Talis)|(TrueKnowledge)|(TripIt)|(Calais)|(Spock)|(collexis)|(Irion)|(Knowledge+Concepts)|(Garlik)|(Zotero)|(Celtx)|(Reveltyix)|(ZoomInfo)|(Kirix)|(Rearden+Commerce)|(OpenQabal)|(ThoughtExpress)|(Lifestrea.ms)|(Ontos)|(BooRah)|(Swotti)|(Inform.com)|(Siri)|(Evri)|(UpTake)|(Imindi)|(Faviki)|(Zemanta)|(HeadUp)|(Daylife)|(SemantiNet)|+(ThoughtExpress)”>http://www.twellow.com/search?q=(Freebase)+|(Powerset)|(Twine)|(AdaptiveBlue)|(Hakia)|(Talis)|(TrueKnowledge)|(TripIt)|(Calais)|(Spock)|(collexis)|(Irion)|(Knowledge+Concepts)|(Garlik)|(Zotero)|(Celtx)|(Reveltyix)|(ZoomInfo)|(Kirix)|(Rearden+Commerce)|(OpenQabal)|(ThoughtExpress)|(Lifestrea.ms)|(Ontos)|(BooRah)|(Swotti)|(Inform.com)|(Siri)|(Evri)|(UpTake)|(Imindi)|(Faviki)|(Zemanta)|(HeadUp)|(Daylife)|(SemantiNet)|(ThoughtExpress”)

I then scanned through those search results for people who appear to work at those companies, opened their Twitter profiles up in new tabs, added them as friends, then captured all the tabs as a slideshow I could share with the rest of the team. Just like that we were all following a bunch of people who worked at top semweb companies. You could do the same thing to jump in quickly to any industry’s community on Twitter.

Those are some of the most useful research tactics I’ve discovered lately – how about you? Feel free to post useful stuff right below in comments!

Lego maze photo CC from Flickr user Anvilon

Update: Give it a try, this video may or may not play for you. It was recorded using Jing Project, an application that’s simple to record with but maddening to use once a video is loaded. I get several emails a day saying I’m approaching the bandwidth limits of my free account. I have no idea how many times it’s been viewed or how close I am to that bandwidth requirement though. I can’t resize the file itself to fit into a smaller player, no one has answered my email requesting information despite previous requests from the company for me to try it out again and apparently the only solution to my problems will be to give them a $160 for a year’s subscription. I think I’ll be trying out ScreenFlow instead. But give it a click below, maybe you can watch this video!

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there’s a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding’s research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what’s in h2 tags? that’s probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It’s fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I’ve heard yet. I’m just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I’m telling you – it’s good stuff.

Ding’s vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of “educated agents of meaning” (smart software applications is what I’m seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don’t know what else. It’s got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It’s a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers’ blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it’s been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often – reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it’s nothing to bet the bank on, but there’s some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I’ve contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.

That’s all well and good, it’s a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts – but I know there’s a lot more that’s possible here.

Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I’ve tagged “toread” in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including “good posts”, great posts or only the best posts. Here’s a widget displaying the best posts currently in my “toread” feed, according to AideRSS.

Isn’t that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don’t capture anything personalized – but nonetheless, I think there’s some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren’t always accurate, either – hopefully that will improve.)

Here’s an idea I thought of previously: say you’re looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There’s an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog’s community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers’ reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.

These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn’t want to depend too much on a tool that’s as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.

If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead’s recent post on APML – Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.

Thanks for reading.

It’s not the full text search of blog posts that Technorati is really good for. Google Blogsearch is faster if you want to know if anyone has beat you to a story and Ask.com has much better spam control as it only indexes feeds that have a certain number of subscribers in Bloglines (hello, Google Reader and Blogsearch teams). Technorati has created a whole bunch of awesome experimental features, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. I don’t know how many of the people behind much of that innovation are still at the company but I hope things brighten up over there in the future.

What is Technorati good for? First, the Blog Index section of the site is very useful. Go to http://technorati.com/blogs/wtfeveryourelookingfor and you’ll find blogs that have been tagged as a whole, not on the level of a single post, by their own authors. Sort by “authority” (shudder) and you’ll see the ones with the most inbound links. I was talking to a potential client on the phone last week he asked “are there a lot of real estate blogs?” I knew anecdotally that there were, but quickly visiting http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate told me there were more than 12,000 in Technorati alone! The Blog Index makes it easy to see which, by one standard, are some of the top blogs in any niche. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start.

Unfortunately, OPML export of anything more than the first 10 results of these searches isn’t possible. That looks to me like broken functionality and as the company slashes staff I have to worry that there’s little hope of the best parts of the service being maintained or improved upon.

The second cool thing about Technorati is the company’s partnerships with outside traditional large publishers. Specifically, the kinds of relationships they’ve built like the one with the Washington Post. In some sections of the WaPo website, you can see blogs linking to that article displayed in a little box, curtosy of Technorati. If those are sorted a bit for spam and crap then that becomes great stuff. I know that Sphere is providing related functionality on some sites, but it’s not the same. The ins and outs of this sort of service deserve a big blog post in and of themselves.

Finally, the Technorati 100 is a good thing. I know there’s a whole lot of criticism of it and a lot of that is valid. I don’t like the word “authority” and I don’t like measuring authority by links – but linking does mean something and the fact that Technorati shows off a leader board of that metric is worthwhile. FeedBurner ought to too, if the group feels like separating out blogs from the other feeds they publish.

I know that Technorati has been painfully slow at times, the most recent site redesign is awful and the focus on inbound links is overdone – but it’s an important company that deserves support in my opinion.

“When, magic 8 ball, has my search term been used on…”

LifeHacker StartupSquad TechCrunch GigaOm Mashable PaidContent ArsTechnica CenterNetworks FranticIndustries ReadWriteWeb NewTeeVee and what the heck – http://marshallk.com !

Just drag this link to Marshall’s Magic Search to your browser toolbar or add it to your favorites and kapow! you’re searching some big blogs for company names, concepts, whatever! I regularly search TechCrunch for past posts on things I’m writing about, just by dragging the URL for a google search for site:http://techcrunch.com to my toolbar. Now I can do so much more.

Try it out:

Rootly founder Mark Daher and I worked together to improve the aesthetics, functionality and differentiation of the service. It’s been some time since I sent him my final recommendations and today the site looks totally unlike it did at the time.

The service provides highly customizable, RSS powered vertical news search based on about 1k preselected sources, plus any sources you add by feed. When a source is added by a sufficient number of users it gains trusted status and enters the general index. The search result feeds are good, there’s really easy internal bookmarking, commenting and friends. The best part of it: Rootly accepts OpenID! I can’t take any credit for that, but thank goodness! Who wants to create a new account for every service you want to try out? Not me. (I use MyOpenID, personally. It’s great and local to Portland.)

In the near term future the site will allow OPML import – which has a whole lot of implications – and a customizable widget for personal startpages.

For more information about the relaunch, see the review at CenterNetworks and more details on the Rootly blog.

Results are different from searching YouTube metadata, so subscribing to feeds for both searches would probably be a good idea. There are a number of ways to do that, including Vixy’s YouTube RSS generator or through the official capacity with an URL like this: www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss That’s of course most useful if you want to subscribe to YouTube videos tagged “monkey.”

How many people are going to want to subscribe to searches for words used in YouTube? A whole lot, I think.

The Google Research team at last week’s Euro ITV (the interactive television conference) won the best paper award for research just posted to the Google Research blog. Their topic? Personalized experiences synchronous with mass-media consumption. That means a system where your computer listens to the TV in your living room, compresses the sound for comparison to a Google sized audio database and then offers you services online related to whatever you are watching.

This does not appear to be functional yet, but the paper also seems to assure readers that it does not require much new technology either.

Advertising? Wasn’t discussed. The examples the Google scientists provided fell into the following four categories:

• personalized information layers
• ad hoc social peer communities
• real-time popularity ratings
• TV- based bookmarks

Of course advertising can be contextual to any of those, as is shown in the hypothetical screenshot above from the Google paper. There will also be the option of selecting Two Minutes Hate worth of advertising in exchange for access to premium content. Just kidding about that part. The rest of this is real, though.

“If friends of the viewer were watching the same episode of ‘Seinfeld’ at the same time,” the paper says, “the social- application server could automatically create an on- line ad hoc community of these ‘buddies’.”

The paper assures skeptics that the privacy will be technically ensured.

The viewer’s acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled
proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not “overhear” conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer’s computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be
designed to use an explicit ‘mute/un-mute’ button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission.input-data rates. This is especially important since we process the raw data on the client’s machine (for privacy reasons), and would like to keep computation requirements at a minimum.

There’s no mention of localized versions for China, for example. Can the US government be trusted not to demand access to this kind of data? No. I can imagine the privacy concerns here are going to be huge. People may go for it though. I am open to the idea, but I don’t think I like it. GMail’s contextual advertising doesn’t scare me though.

This seems like a recipe for nothing but shopping and superficial interaction. I suppose I could debate with people in my “snobby snobs” group about the veracity of a History Channel show. So maybe I’m wrong.

One way or the other, this seems like a pretty viable vision of the future.

Here’s some free advice: nonprofit organizations wanting to do issue-based outreach with their blogs would be well served to subscribe to the feeds of organizations like the AP, either for search terms or through a filter. For high-priority items, if you’ve got a fast blogger on your team, set up an RSS to IM/SMS alert system for selected filtered feeds. That way your blog will be amongst the first to cover AP stories of interest. That’s how I wrote about the Technorati/AP partnership announcement before any other blogs did.

Interesting note: when this type of alert system sets me to write a particular post and I’m looking to cover the news first, I ping the key ping servers manually with Pingoat to come and index my new post instead of relying on automated pinging systems. Google Blogsearch has found my post about this partnership in its search results, but despite pinging Technorati specifically, Technorati has yet to discover the post I wrote linking to its own blog. Hmmm…

Another note, this on Memeorandum: the Technorati blog post I covered is on the top of the page, this blog – which does not link to the Technorati post but to the Social Software post that does – is second in the conversation, and the Social Software post I made is third. Interesting. A number of conclusions could be drawn from that.

I just interviewed Robin over at Net Squared. If you’d like to hear him explain the big picture of NewsMastering in his own voice and words – here’s a quick sound clip to go allong with the text write up. The full interview has lots of good details and links for online research in general.

Robin Good on NewsMastering (1 minute 30 sec)

I think that’s a pretty cool idea. It’s like in SnowCrash where people suck up “intelligence” information freelance about everything, submit it to the Central Information Agency (privitized CIA) and get paid whenever someone pays the CIA to access their intel. Hmmm…maybe that’s frightening.

Regardless, let’s try it.

If people tag their favorite online productivity product, service or application for Web 2.0 style info-management/research with the tag tools4marshallk – I’ll pick my favorite one of the month and the person who submitted it gets one year of premium subscription to any web service of their choice on me, up to fifty bucks. For two runners-up I’ll pitch in twenty bucks towards premium subscription to a web service of your choice. High stakes stuff, huh? I think it could prove more than worth it. And fun! At the end of this month I’ll profile the winners, their submissions and their selected services. Unless I have less than 20 submissions, at which point I’ll extend it to one month from this post. It’ll be great, and did I mention fun? Since it won’t be a for:marshallkirkpatrick tag, anyone can see the submissions here. Heck, if this works well then we could all vote on which submissions are best. But this whole idea might be really stupid, or at least in need of continual evolution.

Update: the tagging has begun! Check out the first submissions at http://del.icio.us/tag/tools4marshallk

I read that Randy was deluged with submissions, so I want to be specific and say let’s just tag a certain type of thing. Here’s some examples of things I love and would have been thrilled to find in a process like this:
blummy.com
MonitorThis
Stephen Downes’ OPML Generator
Feed Digest

Those have all made a big difference in my life and work, so I’d gladly help other people subscribe to some web services they might not have otherwise in exchange for getting turned on to some more things like the above list. What kinds of services might you subscribe to if you submit a winning tool?
How about…
Flickr
StatCounter, or a better blog traffic stat program.
NetNewsWire or FeedDemon
FeedRinse
Something tasty from eHub

Oh there are so many options – and this could be the meme with legs to turn us all on to so many more! I think people should pay money for premium level service of good apps (not internet service! apps on it!) because innovators deserve to make money and financial support = more innovation.

Ok, so that tag again is tools4marshallk – but of course they are tools for everyone, ’cause everyone can see all the submissions.

I do reserve the right to disqualify you if you are submitting huge numbers of stupid links. Maybe this won’t work and there won’t even be 20 after a month? I hope not. Just keep it in the back of your mind when you’re tagging cool things you see.

It’s an experiment, and perhaps one evaluating the efficacy of a hybrid social good/personal gain model.

Tags: Web2.0, collaboration, contests, applications

Check these out-
Google search for: good blogs
Google for: how to use tags
MSN search for: use of tags
MSN search for: Intro to RSS

I don’t see much in Yahoo right now. So all of the above search results can and will likely change – but when I visited them they looked pretty darned good. Count search engine optimization as one more reason why blogging is a good idea.

Technorati Tags: blogging, SEO, search,