Twitter is TechCrunch is the Blogosphere

Twitter seems to model TechCrunch:

Graph

and TechCrunch eerily seems to model the blogosphere as a whole:

Graph

Is this meaningful?

Technorati value is in the data

Reply to Stowe Boyd :

Maybe the Technorati company or brand isn’t for sale, but the data is. Since, as Stowe says, the service needs to be re-architectured, maybe someone just wants the data so they can build there own version.

Technorati/Ogilvy announce partnership

Ogilvy and Technorati announced a partnership at Always On Media centered around conversational marketing.
“Geeks are too linear,” says Peter Hirshberg, chairman of Technorati.
So they bring in Ogilvy.
They correctly recognize the power shift to the customer (Hirshberg calls them consumers. . .bad).
“Where’s the fire”, a feature launching on Technorati tomorrow, sounds like a Digg type.
I love Technorati, but these announcements raise an eyebrow. Sounds like they are desparate to come up with a business model. Anything!
They should turn it into a VRM/Attention clearinghouse. Now that would be a modern business model.
Ogilvy?

Links WERE dead: A gesture proof

Over the past year on the Gillmor Gang, Steve has contended that a lotta things are dead, among them, links.

I can’t really speak for Office, but I always took Steve to mean that the future of Office was death, and I also thought that’s where he was heading with links.

Nay.

I’ve come to realize that links aren’t going to be dead, but they have been, even before Steve started talking about them. He was just observing current phenomenons.

Let me prove it.

1. Everyone will probably agree that the blogosphere would be hard, if not impossible to use without SPAM filters.

2. There are two common methods of filtering out blogosphere SPAM (there are three, really but we all know that visual/manual filtering doesn’t scale well with our attention e.g. email)
The two methods are using data from the collective intelligence, and algorithmic detection and often a combination of both.

3. Using collective data and an algorithm to determine the value of something is analagous, if not actually what using gestures are all about.

Conclusion: Links in a distributed social network like the blogosphere are useless without a gesture filter. A link can be a useful tool. Links as a value exchange are useless.

So, all along, even the mighty Google has been using gestures to decide which links have value and which don’t. The game has been over for a while.

In a nutshell, links are useless without gestures, but gestures don’t need links.

One final note: If you are reading this, you have used implict or explicit gestures to come to the conclusion that either the link to this post had value, or that the RSS URL had value. Period.

One final final note: Technorati uses links, no? Yes, but they also filter out Splogs, so the links already have a certain gesture value. I bet you can imagine a more sophisticated blog ranking system that not only took into consideration links, but context and behavior to determine what was up.

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

Geeks are the funniest people

I still chuckle every time I get the technorati error. I gotta say that is creative.
Then, of course, there is the comment in the Wordpress default template CSS stylesheet:

/* “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.” */

Presumably put there by Michael Heilemann.
It’s those inside jokes that makes the big old web a cozier place.