Saturday, March 18, 2006

The Great Comment Count

Jason Kottke has a piece about stories that get record numbers of comments. In my experience writing and running Apple Matters there is a great thrill in seeing stories take off with a ton of comments. Indeed, the thrill is so good I sometimes found myself thinking about it while writing. I could also tell that some of the other writers on Apple Matters were doing the same thing. This is dangerous. Trying to write for commenters leads to stories that aren’t genuine.

So I decided to set a policy for the site and make it clear to everything. As a publisher I would much rather have a well-written piece on Apple Matters that doesn’t get a lot (or any) comments than a story that is just inflammatory.

That said, the site is as much about the readers (and commenters) as much as it is about the writers. Building community is important, and if stories aren’t getting any comments (with the occasional exception) I feel like we aren’t engaging our reader base.

Not sure though, care to comment!

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/18 at 07:30 AM
applematters • Blogging • community • (4) Comments • (4) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, March 10, 2006

What is your EQ?

A great piece on Guy Kawasaki’s site about entrepreneurial quotient. I got most of them right. Give it a spin! It would be great to see a follow-up quiz that focussed on questions for the lone entrepreneur who is starting out at a smaller level.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/10 at 09:24 AM
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New Ways of Searching

Buzzwords aside sometimes examples are the best way to describe what Web 2.0 is about. A great example is search.

In the old days (which aren’t, really that old, they are still present and with us!) the best place to find something was a search engine. For example, if I wanted to research the Avian flu virus I could go to Google or Yahoo and type in Avian Flu Virus. The search results that I am given are provided by a proprietary algorithm that the search engine sites have worked thousands of hours to tweak, tune, and twiddle.

In the Web 2.0 model I can go a couple of different places to find information about the Avian flu virus. A great example is Technorati. Technorati indexes the real live web by checking the RSS feeds of the blogosphere (as well as the traditional press) constantly. Unlike Google which goes out and spiders sites on an un-real-time basis Technorait is the real time web. Let’s take a look at the same search on Technorati. The latest story is about the Avian flu virus is 11 minutes old, and the rest are all within the hour. Must more timely than Google. This is all powered by the ubiquity of RSS.

Another great example of Web 2.0 is searching through tag sites, the best known being delicious.com (recently acquired by Yahoo). Here websites are tagged as interesting by the larger delicious community. This is human-rendered search on a large scale. Real time search is not the result here, but filtered links are. Look at our same search on delicious. We don’t have the 100’s of pages of results that Google provides, but we do have a filtered list by the community.

Both these examples (and there are many more!) are examples of typical use cases being disrupted and enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies and phenomena. In this case RSS and community. Have any other examples?

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/10 at 09:20 AM
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Friday, March 03, 2006

Newsvine Launches

I had a peek at this before it launched and was very intrigued. Newsvine is up and running. What is interesting about Newsvine is that they have taken the model that Digg and Delicious are well known for, community-based tagging of information, and taken it to the next level. You can participate in Newsvine by just tagging, but you can also create your own Newsvine page where your links will appear, and, you can also use it as your own blog. What is interesting is that Newsvine is planning on sharing any ad revenue from your Newsvine page (90 percent, which is a nice cut!) with you.

This model of allowing people to not only tag content, but create unique pages out of it and add their own content could either be the next evolution in tagging, or simply just too much. At the very list the model of taking Digg to the next level and not only showing stories based on how many vote they get, but exposing the first few sentence of the stories content is a step in the right direction.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/03 at 11:49 AM
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