PhilGo20

As the web enters a more user-centric era where conversations can be gold mines,  you will soon need the ability to filter content and news based on the influence level of the messenger to cut through the noise. If you are looking for good blogs or discussions about Django (my current framework of development), you should be able  to see any post/tweets written or commented by  Jacob Kaplan-Moss (one of the lead developer) at the top of your search results.

To do that, you first need to determine who has some influence online around that topic. There is currently multiple web services to evaluate user ranking, and I’ve reviewed some here. Klout is another of those services and a pretty popular one. Main problem with most of them is that they usually have no concept of relevancy : they evaluate your reach, influence, activity and other parameters as a generic score, without any relation to a topic or domain of influence.

I’ve just performed a search for ‘Django’ in Klout’s topics search box. Number one influencer on this somewhat niche topic is … Tara Hunt aka MissRogue. For those who might not know here, MissRogue is a successful author/marketing consultant/entrepreneur with a somewhat decent audience of … 29757 (Dec 1st 2009)followers on Twitter. She probably knows more about Django than the average person, but I would have expected Jacob Kaplan-Moss or some of the bloggers in my Django links collections to be slightly above her in such ranking…

klout django influencers

What happened is probably that she tweeted that keyword several days ago and the Klout engine pick it up, putting here in their Django topic basket and by looking at the outstanding number of followers she has, promoted her to the top of the list. A more complete analyze of her tweets would have been enough to avoid this error. Further analysis of shared link would be even better, but slightly more complex.

User Ranking methods and technology will most certainly become ubiquitous in a near future and evolve into something solid and relevant enough to be used as a content and conversation filter, as well as for targeted advertising purposes. A great example of the relevancy concept can be found in Traackr from which I just got a demo. They still do some manual intervention for quality assurance, but they have included a relevancy score related to the queried domain, as I would expect. We talked a little bit about their roadmap and they seems to have some pretty interesting stuff coming up.

Are you planning to use some kind of User Ranking in your applications or web strategies ? How ? What are you expecting from such tools ?

When trying to identify early influencers and pool of knowledge around a certain topic or industry, finding early poster/commenter is one simple trick often used. Not very complex, but it often leads to other links and users and help shape how the information started to spread. Backtweets is great to see who shared a link on Twitter (despite the limited timeframe available), but Delicious gives a very different type of results and the ability to research much older content to see who picked up on it first.

Delicious

I am (still…) an heavy user of delicious. By clicking on the number of persons who shared a link in delicious, you access the bookmark history page. On top of this page,the ID of the first user to share this link is displayed and the date when he shared it. It also gives you a basic timeline to look at to see when the url popularity took off. Despite a clear drop in popularity, there’s quite a bit to be said about the usefulness of the data in delicious. Something to try…

Note : Because Delicious development has been pretty stale (cough) lately, I find myself using Diigo more and more. My favourite feature is the ability to create private groups to share links with clients and partners on specific topics and projects. Main problem is that I still search for links in delicious and the auto-tagging feature is not as relevant as there is less links shared on Diigo…

I’ve also recently found out about a new startup in Montreal called Wajam offering the same kind of bookmarking tool, but haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet.

I am back from a 2 weeks trip with no cell phone, no laptop and no PDA and I survived. Pretty well in fact.

It made me wonder how was I handling everything before this “online world”. And realized that we sometimes forgot details of the process we modified along the way.

Nowadays, you are probably using a web application/ service or technological piece of hardware for most of your important process, whether it’s related to communications and booking, marketing, accounting, leisure, sales or product and project management. Before you decided to drop the old fashioned way of doing things, you probably balanced the pros and cons during long hours. After all, the old fashioned way had got you that far, was probably not totally broken and you had grow comfortable using it.

On top of that, maybe there was some information or nice feature you had to drop because the new way was not offering them yet.

It took you some time to get used to the new thing but you most probably gave hope of going back after a short while and soon you had totally forgotten about the “old way”. And it’s ok.

But maybe it’s time to check what we dropped along the way and start using it again or improving the new way. With UrbanSpoon, Praized, Yelp and others, who still goes up to the hotel concierge to get a restaurant recommendation ? It might know and have an extra pair of tickets for the theater tonight. Who knows

Go back to what you dropped and see how you can improve the new way.