Is Yelp Deleting Bad Reviews For Money? I Have No Idea
Friday, October 23, 2009

I've had this story about Yelp allegedly removing bad reviews for advertisers on my mind a lot lately and after Twittering about it today I got to talk to Yelp HQ on the phone. They promise they do no such thing. Do I believe them? I have no idea; I'm going to put “can I trust Yelp?” in the same category as other questions like “is there a God?” and “can Democrats be trusted to make the world a better place?” Questions that cannot be answered, I think. Yelp's argument is that advertisers get to put an ad, a positive review of their choice, on the top of their pages – and that confuses people. They are also very pro-active about deleting reviews they suspect may be fake. I know people get confused about online advertising. How else would Google be making so many billions of dollars? In clinical tests people are unable to identify paid vs. natural search results. When asked “how could it be made clearer?” they say things like “put them on the side of the page, put the word 'sponsored' near them or put them in a colored box.” All things that Google does in fact do. People just don't notice. It's an unprovable, un-disproval allegation ultimately. Would it be crazy for Yelp to do something that would so damage their credibility? It would if it could be proven. It might not if it couldn't be proven. For now I'll just appreciate the positive and negative reviews I see on Yelp and I'll check the review history of people I see posting there. And sometimes I'll just make up my own mind after patronizing businesses. I'd love to see Consumer Reports do a comparative review of Yelp, CitySearch and others. I told Yelp that, too. .. read more..

It’s My Birthday – You Should Make Me a Present
Sunday, October 11, 2009

Well folks, I turn 33 years old on Monday but I'm going to have to work so I'm celebrating it today. It's been a very big year for me: I got married and bought a house! There's a picture of my new backyard there on the right. I love our new house! And I love my wife, very much. A lot of other things happened but those are the biggest. It's been a great year for work as well, I'm learning a lot and having a lot of fun at ReadWriteWeb . What more could a lucky guy like me want for my birthday? I'll tell you what I really need – OPML files! Bundles of RSS feeds I can import into my feed reader. My old Google Reader account is way too filled up with gadget blogs and other things I don't care about anymore and I haven't subscribed to anything that isn't a tech company's official blog in months. It's not right. So I'm starting with a fresh new start, using the Mac desktop reader Vienna . So far the only thing I've put into the reader is the OPML file of hundreds of women tech bloggers put together by Anne Zelenka almost three years ago! (Check out that post if you want to see how cutely naive my writing about OPML was just 3 years ago!) That's cool, but I'd love it if for my birthday you, my friends, would send me OPML files of blogs on certain topics . Something cool. I don't need a file of the top blogs writing about the Semantic Web, I already have that. I don't need a file of the best blogs on youth marketing, I already have that and am not sure how I feel about it. This shouldn't be too hard to do, if you're unfamiliar. Just put a collection of feeds into a folder in any RSS reader and then export. Open it up in a text editor and cut out all the parts outside of that folder. Then send it to me! Or you could drop RSS feeds in this tool , publish, copy and paste into a text editor and send it to me via marshall@marshallk.com It would be so awesome if, for my birthday, a few people sent me really awesome OPML files. It's a curated collection of dynamic sources – a gift that really keeps on giving! Do this for me and I'll build you a really awesome TweepML group for your birthday when the time comes. What do you think? Think anyone will actually do it and send me one?? We'll see! Even if no one does, I still got to get married and buy a house this year – so no big deal! .. read more..

This Real-Time Web Stuff is Amazing
Saturday, October 10, 2009

I'm doing loads of research in preparation for next week's ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a research report on the same topic. I've now talked to 43 companies who are building and/or using real-time technology and have seen some amazing use cases. I wrote about ten use cases last week but as I'm going through my notes now there are three more I wanted to share that illustrate the importance of all this. Real-time data collection is letting scientists find colleagues, related and recommended research in a matter of hours, instead of months or years, using software from a UK company called Mendeley . Mendeley is like iTunes or Last.fm for scientific research, the company even has the founder of Last.fm on its team. There will be someone from Mendeley at the Summit, too. Warner Brothers uses an Adobe AIR app they built to track traffic on artists' websites, media mentions and more, in real time. Catching data spikes in real time allows them to turn on a dime with marketing and product strategies. The RedCross national headquarters (and I'm sure a lot of local offices) use real-time systems to monitor breaking news about disasters around the world and co-ordinate volunteers. Work that used to take weeks is now done in minutes or hours – that means saved lives. Many people at RedCross HQ are subscribers to Breaking News Online , a fascinating service founded by a teenager in the Netherlands and now run by a small, distributed team of scrappy reporters around the world. All of those organizations are working hard at building even faster systems. Real time doesn't just let them do things they were already doing faster – it makes entirely new kinds of work possible. That's what Bret Slatkin, co-creator of real-time protocoal PubSubHubbub says: engineers should build their real-time systems to scale into entirely new use-cases that can't even be foreseen yet. This is really exciting, important stuff. I hope you'll join us at the Real-Time Web Summit to discuss it. If you can't make it, selected sessions will be live-streamed as well. .. read more..

Thank Goodness For Standards
Friday, October 9, 2009

I'm working on a big research report for ReadWriteWeb and decided the other day to start my writing in an outline format, which is unusual for me. I bought a $3 iPhone app that lets me create outlines, so I can work on it when I'm in my backyard or wherever else. I bought it happily because I saw in the description that it supported file export in OPML format, or Outline Processor Markup Language . That way I can send it to myself and edit it using a desktop editor made by an entirely different company. See? Standards enabled me to do work in new ways and gave me reason to spend money on someone's product. OPML was originally developed by Dave Winer . As was the OPML Editor I'm using on my desktop to do my work. OPML is most commonly used to export bundles of RSS feeds, blogs or podcasts but it doesn't have to be limited to “just” those kinds of information. RSS is of course something that Winer was also key in the creation of, as was podcasting (he created the enclosure tag that carries MP3 or other files in feeds) and RSS Aggregators (he wrote one ten years ago). Blogging too. That's all pretty damn incredible. Now Dave's working on real-time, microblogging and a new RSS reader called River2 . Why am I writing a blog post about Dave Winer's work over the years? Just because I was appreciating it again when it was so easy for me to buy that iPhone app for outlining and work with it on my desktop as well. Dave's a controversial guy, and that's probably an understatement, but he's my friend. When I realized that, once again, it was in large part the fruit of his work that I was benefiting from when exporting those outlines – it made me want to make a blog post about it. Thanks for all the work you've done over the years, Dave. It's really made a big difference in my life and work. .. read more..

Social Media Consulting Can Be Extremely Valuable
Monday, October 5, 2009

It's all the rage these days to say that “social media consulting” is nothing but over-priced advice dispensed by know-nothings to insecure companies about obvious things like communicating authentically online. Sometimes these critiques are funny (or very funny ) and some people are trying to defend their practices . There's been so much of this going on in the last week alone that I decided to respond in a post here. There is no question in my mind that my consulting, at least, is extremely valuable and non-obvious. Check out the page of feedback I've received . Below is one example, though. I worked with Sun Microsystems last year to build a blog search dashboard tracking most recent and most-discussed blog posts concerning a list of their products, during the Java One conference. People loved it and only an outside person with my experience and skills would have built it. It was social media consulting that wasn't obvious or just about “join the conversation.” Then I did an audit of the company's huge network of blogs, their wikis, their podcast portal and developer forums. I researched their competitors' work in those areas and interviewed specialists in each of those fields who looked through the Sun sites with me. I gave a rapid-fire presentation to an executive team that blew the minds of some very serious and capable people. They brought me back five times to work on different projects there, sent me 20% of my income for last year and invited me to meet and interview my childhood hero Neil Young when he spoke at an event. So is social media consulting just a joke? Not in my world, it's not. .. read more..

Theory: Twitter is More Likely to Be Meaningful Than TV
Sunday, September 27, 2009

Over the last two weeks I've interviewed people from 32 different companies working on building, leveraging or otherwise engaging with what's called The Real-Time Web. It's preparation for ReadWriteWeb's forthcoming Real-Time Web Summit (I hope you'll come) and a research report on the same topic. Believe it or not, Twitter is not the primary topic of all these conversations (thank goodness) but it does come up a lot both literally and as a metaphor. Many of the conversations aren't even about social networking, but many of them are. User experience and the streams through which real-time data often gets delivered are things I've been talking with people about a lot. In one of those conversations, Kevin Marks (formerly of Technorati and Google, now at British Telecom) told me the following: he believes that Twitter is more likely to be interesting than television because we opt-in to particular streams of other peoples' updates that we find interesting. That creates a positive feedback loop that encourages us to contribute something interesting in return and thus the ecosystem trends towards higher quality content. Do you agree with that? Marks also said this was an advantage that Twitter and other opt-in subscription-stream formats have over things like YouTube comments. What of the “I don't care what you ate for breakfast” critique of Twitter? Marks says that's just people who have an antiquated view of what belongs “in public,” based on a time when content had to go through expensive publishing processes before being broadcast to the public and thus had to be unusually important to be worth it. This is just one of several user experience related conversations I've been having about real-time streams, but I found it quite interesting. I like this theory. I'm not sure whether I agree with it or not (Kevin, let me know if I've mischaracterized what you meant) but I'd really like to know what others think. .. read more..

How to: Follow 724 Tech Analysts on Twitter With 3 Clicks
Saturday, September 19, 2009

I wrote what I thought was going to be a short post about following a large group of tech analysts on Twitter here, but then decided it was long enough and good enough that I should post it on ReadWriteWeb instead . Check it out. .. read more..

I’m Loving Me Some Tungle, Bet You Would Too
Thursday, September 17, 2009

I've been doing a mind numbing number of briefings with companies doing work on the real-time web since we announced the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, Research Report and Month of Special Focus yesterday at RWW. (By the way, check it out.) I found a wonderful service called Tungle.com that syncs with my Google calendar and allows other people to see when I'm busy or free in order to suggest meeting times. My calendar is here and I am SO appreciative of this service! I know there are other competitors out there, like TimeBridge for example but so far Tungle is doing the trick for me. Web apps like this remind me how a good app can solve a problem you hadn't even realized you had. Check it out, it might rock your world too. Related articles by Zemanta TimeBridge wants to make web meetings less frustrating (venturebeat.com) The Top 10 Apps for Scheduling a Meeting Online (readwriteweb.com) Tungle launches non-annoying scheduling service (news.cnet.com) .. read more..

Smart Twitter, Classic Twitter
Tuesday, September 15, 2009

I noticed two things about Twitter tonight. First, as part of the new site redesign there's a new 404 (page not found) error message. It includes a search box – so if you guessed someone's twitter name and got it wrong, you can search from them right there on that page! Brilliant. Sometimes it's the little things. The other thought I just had about Twitter was that it sure is nice when people post personal messages. I know a lot of people complain about mundane “what I'm eating for lunch” posts, but these really are status messages and are sometimes useful as such. I was just pinging my friend Beth Kanter on Skype and after she didn't respond, I checked out her Twitter profile. (After I got her username wrong again, that is.) There I learned that today is Beth's 23rd wedding anniversary ! Congratulations, Beth and Husband. Thus I know not to expect a response from Beth tonight. Good old Twitter, doing its job as a way to share status messages. Keep those updates about your personal lives coming, Twitter friends! .. read more..

30 People to Follow Regarding the Real Time Web – Who Else Should Be On This Lis..
Sunday, September 13, 2009

I'm working on a list of Twitter users working on Real Time Web matters and realized once I hit 30 that I ought to just ask readers and friends for suggestions. Here's my list so far all in one place and easy to follow in one fell swoop thanks to the wonderful new service Tweepml. Please add more names of people who should be included in this list below in comments and everyone will thank you for it. .. read more..

One RSS Feed Everyone Should Subscribe To: Who Favorites Your Tweets
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Favstar.fm is a cool service that tracks who's favoriting your tweets. It's the easiest way to find out, as far as I can tell. Tonight they added RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to see who likes what you're saying but didn't retweet or reply to it. It's so simple and so useful that I think everyone should subscribe to that feed. I wrote about it tonight on ReadWriteWeb . .. read more..

Real Time Web Research: What Companies or People Should I Request Briefings From..
Monday, August 31, 2009

I'm working on a couple of big research projects for ReadWriteWeb concerning The Real Time Web . I am looking for key articles to read on the topic (suggestions welcome) but I'm also interested in suggestions (or volunteers) of organizations or individuals I can request briefings from. I'm interested in the use of real time, web-based information not just in consumer web companies, but also in nonprofit organizations, financial services and in media. I probably have the least resources available in media and financial services. I f you can recommend any people doing exciting work with the real time web in any of those sectors or believe you'd be good to talk to yourself – please shoot me an email or leave a comment below. My email is marshall@marshallk.com. I'm excited to try and do a lot of briefings on this topic and learn a frightening amount about it. Thanks for your help with that. .. read more..

Interaction Hottest in First Hour After Writing? Not For These Augmented Reality..
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Image 1: Traffic for Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere Image 2: Traffic for First iPhone Augmented Reality App Appears Live in App Store They say that interaction with articles is hottest in the first hour after you post them. I've always thought there was some truth to that, but some of the articles I've been writing about Augmented Reality lately make me think that might not be as important as I thought. (Check out this post by Sid Gabriel Hubbard explaining what AR is.) That's probably because they are being bandied about in social networks until they happen to hit a certain threshold of having been shared, then they go to place with higher profile and more traffic. (Front page, most popular, etc.) I imagine that posts not crossing that threshold exhibit a more traditional pattern of traffic. It also makes me think Augmented Reality is something people want more coverage of. That's good because I want to write more about it. I do need to post a poll asking if people think this stuff is stupid or for real, though. Definitely seeing some comments saying it's all hype, the apps so far are dumb, etc. Related articles by Zemanta Augmented reality startups petition Apple for live video interface (digital.venturebeat.com) .. read more..

If You Think RSS is Dead Then That’s Your Loss and It’s a Big One
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Sam Diaz at ZDNet tonight wrote the latest admission that he's not using his RSS reader anymore . I have a lot of respect for Sam's writing, but I am having a hard time believing that he and so many others no longer even bother to read feeds. Twitter, Facebook and aggregators like Techmeme or Google News suffice for Sam, he says. They sure don't suffice for me. I do get a whole lot of story leads, perspective and more from Twitter (something I wrote about in an article titled Twitter is Paying My Rent ) but RSS is no less important for me today than it used to be. I'm hesitant to write about my own research methods, to be honest, because if my competitors want to abandon RSS that's just fine with me! But for other readers here, I will say that social media like Twitter has only added to my inflow – not replaced feeds at all. I will tell you that I no longer use Google Reader or Netvibes. Instead, I use open source software on our own servers that is more customizable, more reliable and more efficient. Our team scans over thousands of company RSS feeds each morning for updates (what news writer wouldn't do that?) and we use an open source customizable meme-tracker to make sure we haven't missed anything important. We use open source RSS parsing software to set up a dashboard tracking all our competitors' feeds, we use an RSS to IM alert system to get some feeds sent to us right away and at least some of us use Gmail Webclips for another layer of ambient feed tracking. We use Postrank to track breakout hits in niche blogs and we use tools like Snackr or the just-launched LazyFeed to keep an eye on specific feeds or general topics. In other words, I use RSS all day long. Anyone who is competitive in their field and doesn't just might be crazy. .. read more..

I got a scoop!
Friday, August 14, 2009

Not living in Silicon Valley, not focusing on business as much as tech, spending half my time on administrative work and being a little more soft-headed than other tech reporters means I don't get big fat scoops very often. Yesterday I did and it was pretty awesome. I heard word that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was backing a new browser, based on Facebook, so I did some digging around and then published this post: RockMelt: Netscape's Andreessen Backing Stealth Facebook Browser . Thankfully I got a screenshot and not just news. Because of that even some people who didn't want to link to me in subsequent coverage did. The moral of the story is that people should tip me off to hot stuff more often. I think I did a good job covering this one and will do a good job covering your tips too. Send ‘em to marshall@readwriteweb.com or hit me up by IM. General tips can be sent to the whole staff at tips@readwriteweb.com but the juicy secret ones can come right here. Thanks. .. read more..

Doing Some Research on the Real-Time Web; Want to Help?
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

I'm doing some research for a number of different projects where I'm going to need a deep understanding of the real-time web and data. I want to look beyond the standard perspective of real-time consumer web companies and learn about how it is being used in non-profits, financial services and media. I'm looking to find out what people want from real-time service providers, what obstacles there are and what kind of potential outcomes we could see unfold. Let me know if you've got any thoughts or pointers to resources you'd like to share. Please also let me know if you're someone with some free time who would like to collaborate with ReadWriteWeb staff on some research projects regarding this topic. Will be fun times. .. read more..

Testing Zemanta by Itself
Thursday, August 6, 2009

In my last post I wrote about testing two rich media popup tools that are very cool – Apture and Zemanta 's new Balloons feature. It didn't work so well to use both in the same post, so this is a post about puppies, popsicles and pennies with just Zemanta markup. If you're reading this by RSS or email and are curious what's going on – it's pretty awesome, but you'll need to click through to the site proper to see it. Update: You can't really use both at the same time on the same blog – Apture hijacks all of Zemanta's balloon links. You probably won't be able to see Zemanta links now, but I'll be posting a full comparative review of the two services tonight or tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb . .. read more..

Testing Apture vs Zemanta Balloons
Thursday, August 6, 2009

I've long been impressed with the rich-media popup tool Apture . If you're actually on my site and not reading this in a feed reader , you can see the little book icon in the previous sentence. Hover over it and you'll see a Wikipedia entry I selected to appear here. It was really easy to do using the Apture plug-in for WordPress . Last week semantic web company Zemanta released a very similar but open source program called Balloons . I'm going to try to install that next here and compare the two services. Alex Iskold got me thinking about it. So far Apture is pretty impressive. I did the wrong thing with it a couple of times, but I think I've got it down now. This post will evolve as I find the time to try out Zemanta. Here's how a link I added to an RWW post about Zemanta looks....in Apture! Ok, Zemanta plug-in now installed. The company says the Balloons feature is automatically included. Let's see. Update: You can't really use both at the same time on the same blog – Apture hijacks all of Zemanta's balloon links. You probably won't be able to see Zemanta links now, but I'll be posting a full comparative review of the two services tonight or tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb . Related articles by Zemanta Introducing Balloons: Free multimedia overlays for bloggers (zemanta.com) Zemanta Gives Bloggers Balloons (centernetworks.com) .. read more..

I Never Unfollow Anyone or Unsubscribe to Anything
Thursday, August 6, 2009

Robert Scoble dumped 100k Twitter friends this week and says the improved signal to noise ratio has changed his life. I'm happy for him, but would never do that myself. (Note that I don't have 100k friends or followers anywhere other than as a member of the ReadWriteWeb team and I don't have to worry about the Direct Message spam on Twitter that he has had to deal with.) I'm a big believer in oversubscibing and then creating groups based on priority and context. The people, feeds, or other sources in the big bulk group? That's where all the more serendipity comes in; where I meet people and sources. I don't worry about reading all that river of news, I just dip my head in it when I can. The really high-priority stuff, like the people Scoble is now choosing to follow back manually, I'll put in a folder or a column or some place where I can read all of it. I think he's going to miss out on the big public space that was his former list of friends, though. His wisdom about who's worth listening to at all can't help but fall short of the wisdom of fate, of the stream. That's how I see it. I'm here on Twitter , come be my friend. I might friend you back. Once I do, you'll stay somewhere in my brain forever, too. .. read more..

10th Largest Site Online To Launch Microformat Integration Network
Tuesday, August 4, 2009

As a part of my ongoing thoughts about blog post titles, I thought I'd see how much traction what I think is a very big story would get with a different headline. Instead of “ MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards ” how about we leave the tech-tarnished name MySpace out of it. It's still the 10th most popular site on the whole internet! From that story yesterday: MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code in order to comprehend what those updates are about and make more sophisticated update highlighting and recommendation decisions. It's a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities – it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too. “We don't want to do anything without semantics, to be honest,” Monica Keller, group architect for activity streams at MySpace, told us by phone today. “We can't afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren't going to like.” At a time when MySpace is in serious trouble and trying to regroup, a home run by Keller and crew could make MySpace more relevant to people again and impact the rest of the web in positive ways radically unlike the impact of Facebook's proprietary software. Here's the rest . Tell me, is this not a really big deal? Maybe people don't have confidence in MySpace to pull such an ambitious plan off – but I suspect most readers didn't even look past the company's name. .. read more..

www.josschuurmans.com: "Rebooting the news" | Dave Winer's and Jay Rosen's podca..
Monday, May 11, 2009

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50 most influential Twitter users in India « Gautam’s Net
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

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Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files
Sunday, January 4, 2009

A great collection of Amit's best advice regarding PDF hacks. If you're not reading Digital Inspiration, you're missing out! .. read more..

Top Spots in Organic & Paid Search = Branding
Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Great write up of an interesting study on the perceptual impact of good search placement. This one's a keeper. .. read more..

A hunger for books | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Monday, December 10, 2007

Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech where she brings up critiques of the web's cultural impacts, among other things. An important read. .. read more..

The significance of Google’s Android
Friday, December 7, 2007

Looks like a good article on Android, 33 comments, consultancy blog. Marked toread. .. read more..

Massive Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Video Recap
Friday, December 7, 2007

Can't wait to spend some time with this one. .. read more..

Thoughts on Seth Godin's keynote at SES [SearchEngineWatch]
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Seth Godin is probably someone I should read a lot more of. He's a marketer, but interesting. .. read more..

Media Bullseye
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Interesting new site for PR and marketing news regarding social media. Chris Brogan an early contributor. .. read more..

The Identity Corner » The problem(s) with OpenID
Monday, December 3, 2007

A long collection of links to critiques of OpenID. Looks real good. .. read more..

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data | Surveillance State - ..
Friday, November 30, 2007

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Nick Carr on Google as Anomaly
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Paul Miller excerpts and links to what's being talked about as one of Nick Carr's most interesting writings in a long time. That's saying a lot, because the iconoclast Carr is very, very smart. .. read more..

Who is afraid of the GGG?
Monday, November 26, 2007

Giant Global Graph? This ZDNet post is a great overview of the recent discussion kicked off by Tim Berners Lee. .. read more..

Help needed: A review of Google-funded 23andMe
Friday, November 23, 2007

Google-backed genetics startup; this blog seeks donations to pay for the $1k fee for the product. Sounds like a great idea to me, I'm real curious about this company. .. read more..

Teaching Online Journalism » Connecting people to people
Thursday, November 22, 2007

A good post about the value of identity on websites. Quotes my post about social network functionality but a plainly valuable collection of thoughts regardless. .. read more..

1. Individual videos I've found to share
Friday, July 6, 2007

1. Individual videos I've found to share by marshallkirkpatrick ( watch show ) 1. Video: Dramatic Chipmunk (marshallkirkpatrick) 2. Video: google final (beth) 3. Video: Video: RSS in Plain English (marshallkirkpatrick) .. read more..