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Webtropic

Musings on social media, web technologies and start-ups.


Good design can’t fix …Yesterday

Posted via web from websurfing diaries

Filed under: Miscellaneous
Consumers Trust Their Friends LessYesterday

…social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her. Mr. Edelman believes the Facebook component has “absolutely” played a role in diluting trust levels.

I subscribe to this

Posted via web from websurfing diaries

Filed under: Miscellaneous
Lists bring sanity back in twitter use – Part INovember 24 2009

I have been a big opponent of the vanity twitter use (aka harvesting followers, hoping that “followers” equals “audience”).

In practice, this meant that from a point on,  I completely stopped looking who is following me, did not reciprocate at the cost of being perceived as arrogant and kept my follower/following ratio to 4.

Still not content, I unfollowed quite a number of twitterers (some of them pretty big names)  on the grounds that they were either producing too much noise, or were talking about things I found irrelevant to me.

For over two years now, I keep experimenting with twitter:

  • In the beginning, it was conversations. But as people kept flocking around twitter, conversing became hard, if not impossible.
  • Then it was news tracking which, although useful, it was far from complete. Yes, the news came to me, but not the news I was always interested. And with it came a lot of repetition and nonsense.
  • Then, based on retweets, it was content discovery and evaluation.
  • Occassionaly, it was polls, mini-crowdsourcing, asking questions etc
  • Grouping people allowed to create f

The partial feed sacrilege and the ad benefitNovember 15 2009

 

partial

Image from Flickr by RBerteig

I remember a time (not so long ago) when people were disgusted by partial feeds and most of the major blogs and bloggers abided by this unwritten law. Publishing a partial feed was synonymous to cheap exploitation, putting ad revenues over readership, alienating your readers etc.

I, myself, am guilty of accusing blogs for  this kind of ‘malpractice’.

But things change.

I see more and more probloggers publishing partial feed and very few readers  complaining.

Why?

Because the way we read and follow blogs has changed too. Information is coming to us. And usually it comes in the form of a short sentence with a link in it, something especially true for twitter.

So the trend of reading everything in the coziness of our feed reader is in decline, while reading from the source is back with a vengeance.  Twitter and Facebook are the benefactors of blog ad revenues.

 

 

Posted in social media Tagged: facebook, feed readers, feeds, partial feed, Twitter
Is Social Search a threat to SEO?November 5 2009

I think it is, and I tweeted so  yesterday.  And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.

But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams  from Google trends for websites below.

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies

Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies

While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.

At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely