The power center of the axis of evil has a blog. You can post comments. :)

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يادداشت هاي شخصي احمدي نژاد

Information overload has become the typical issue of anyone using the web to access or search for nuggets of information. Both the search and the subscription paradigms lead to countless results, posts, articles that one needs to sift through to extract relevant facts. Using Attention metadata (blog subscriptions, document hyperlinks, URLs and keywords entered by a web user,…) is one of the mechanisms infrastructure providers will use to elevate relevant pieces of information – as demonstrated today by the first generation of meme trackers (like Memeorandum, TailRank,…).

This sounds like an interesting conference. I am going to follow that happens with the Attention stuff. This is data we could use, and provide. We've already been trying to approach the situation in a similar manor since 2001.

Also check out this Steve Gillmore article about Attention.

Jeff Clavier's Software Only: SDForum Search SIG: The Search for Attention

noteworthy wrote:

If you compare johnny cash and thomas friedman over the last two months, you'll find that Thomas Friedman has about as much "influence" on the blogosphere as the late Johnny Cash. Interestingly, you'll also find that a curiously large percentage of the peaks and valleys coincide on the two graphs, suggesting that other factors are at work. The same can be said for sheryl crow. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. This isn't exactly a well-groomed data set.

All your points are valid.. BlogPulse isn't exactly the greatest way to gauge interest in a given subject accurately. There are cases when you can see a sudden surge of interest, but that's about it. The hurricanes are a good example of that. However, there is another metric available to us that is quite telling.

In the web statistics for MemeStreams, we have seen a very noticeable surge of inbound search engine traffic for all posts that mention NYT columnists such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. This implies that people are looking for posts in the blogs that are quoting material from their columns, via bloggers who are actually paying for the TimesSelect service. This post will get a significant number of hits just because I mentioned their names.

If there is any dispute that Johnny Cash is way more important than Thomas Friedman, it would be a slightly refined version of your query that searches for "thomas friedman" as opposed to just "friedman". Johnny Cash is part of the background radiation of American culture, where Friedman is at best part of its more informed business and foreign policy dialogue.

Johnny Cash is way more important than Thomas Friedman

Technorati's current top search term is "Bush Defrocked". It appears they have become a victim, or perpetrator, of an effort to manipulate people into having a false view of what the public is interested in. There are no blog posts coming up for that search term, no news taking place which would make it a "hot topic", and other blog search engines are not showing results either.

I'm guessing their list of top search terms is based on the number of queries they receive for any given term, rather than the number of posts in their index for a given term. That would make it pretty easy for an external entity to manipulate.

At the time of this posting, these were the other terms:

2. "Web 2.0"
3. Earthquake
4. "Paul Krugman"
5. "David Brooks"
6. "John Tierney"
7. "Grand Challenge"
8. Flock
9. "Leo Laporte"
10. Serenity

Lately, "Impeach Bush" had been one of the top terms. I always though that was kind of strange. That term's absence in the presence of this one leads me to theorize that their entire top term index is being manipulated, and the party behind it just changed the term they push.

But then again, who knows.. Technorati is known to exercise editorial control over their index. Nothing would lead me to believe they do not exercise it elsewhere. A number of popular blogs are omitted from the Top 100 Blogs List, for as best as anyone can tell, "bloggy" political reasons. Slashdot and Scripting News are examples. I'm sure there are more.

I don't really trust Technocrat. Not to mention, they are exactly the type of company I worry about someone buying with a history of using media to manipulate people for political purposes. This "Bush Defrocked" thing is proof that there are people who want to do just that. I'd like to know who is behind it. I worry about situations where things will happen that people can't see coming. Significant manipulation of public perception over specific issues can be carried out with a high degree of subtlety.

This is a good example of some of the issues we have to be concerned about in regard to the design of social web tools. I'll be talking about this stuff at the "Information Warfare for The People" talk at PhreakNIC later this month. There is also a possibility that Industrial Memetics will be sponsoring the hotel's conference TV channel and providing content.

Update: "Bush Defrocked" has disappeared from Technorati's top search terms. Looks like they took notice ..

Technorati top search terms are manipulated

"It's all about the 'memes,' " says Stan Jonas, head of interest rate strategy at Fimat USA in New York... "Those guys say it and about a week or two later, the guys on Wall Street pick it up."

The Big Picture: WSJ: Economists Join Blogging Frontier

an interesting force-directed visualization demonstrating how two-thirds of the websites & blogs devoted to France's recent referendum about the European Constitution favoured the 'No' campaign. the original dataset contained 12.000 sites, of which only 295 sites commented on the referendum. the graph shows the hierarchy of hyperlinked connections between those blogs, & explores the potential influence of blogs on the referendum & its aftermath.

From the information aesthetics blog.. The original article can be found here in its native french.

blog impact visualization

Recently, discussions about business models surrounding indexing the blog-o-sphere have been popping up. Much of this has been surrounding Technorati. Doc Sears has a great starting point. Wired has an article about how Technorati is becoming a "utility".

Tom Foremski kicked it all off with this account of a statement from a Technorati PR exec:

"It's all about getting the right algorithm" he said at one point, arguing that Technorati's sophisticated automated services would enable corporations to find out what is being said about them, their people, products, and to respond to bad news very quickly, by engaging bloggers in conversations.

Mr Hirshberg's pitch very much played into the fear that most corporations and their media relations teams currently wrestle with: how do you deal with millions of bloggers acting as journalists? How do you control your corporate message?

Well, Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the "wrong" message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate "SWAT" team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers.

Here is his followup.

Also.. I noticed something of interest today. Slashdot is no longer listed in the Top 100 Blogs list. It previously held one of the top spots. I asked about this in an IRC channel that is frequented by a number of Technorati people, and the response I got was that they don't consider themselves a blog, they don't ping Technorati, so they don't get listed. They had only been listed previously due to the inbound linkage from blogs Technorati indexed.

I do find this strange. Slashdot is a Weblog by any definition, aside maybe from one clouded by some type of bloggy politics. If they don't call themselves a "blog", its probably because they predated all the post-2000 blog uber alles. They seem to pay attention to the space, even if they don't adapt every practice.

I think we should be liberal with the semantics of weblogging. In this context, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and is found with other ducks.. Might as well consider it a duck. Fark makes the duck list. And Fark is more like a Platypus than a Duck. Hell, maddox's page barely touches the animal kingdom and its #11 on the Top 100 Blogs. He pings? He doesn't seem like the type to ping.. He certainly does not have anything nice to say about blogs.

Several points:
1) Technorati has clearly designated itself an opt-in service. This has the side effect of walling up the blog space as its importance as a tool grows.
2) Its largely unknown how they intend to leverage their data on the blogosphere, by all appearances they seem to be chasing the business model of Moreover, only with a more narrow take of what data they are concerned with.
3) I smell the worst kind of politics.

IN a perfect world, the Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers would be a proper carnival you could take your kids to, with cold lemonade at the Parkway Rest Stop, sword swallowing by Mister Snitch!, dunk-the-blogger booth at Mary's Lame Attempt at Fame, house of horrors at the Bad Hair Blog and the rest.

But then who in New Jersey contemplates a perfect world? So, absent perfection, for another glimpse of New Jersey Ascendant, check out the weekly assemblage of all things Jersey that has taken on a life of its own on the Internet.

In New Jersey, Blog Carnival Is WWWeird

The Supernova buzz has begun, and MemeStreams is the talk of the town.

"Going forward, trust (will be) the thing that makes the Internet possible. Reputation management will be more and more important."

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? How long do I have to wait?

Trust thy Internet neighbor

Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like MemeStreams have got Google worried about the reputation agent becoming the new search.

Slashdot | The Importance of RSS