Digital Likeness » featured

What is a “Popular” Post?

Andrea Hill — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:29:02 +0000

The other day, I posted a list of the Top Ten Posts on this blog. I used Google Analytics’ measure of “top content” to create that list.

Top Content according to Google Analytics is page views. But does that really equate to popularity?

Aside: Postrank tried to change our perceptions of “top” content, looking at visitor engagement rather than merely visits. I loved the concept, but unfortunately had trouble with hosting the widget on this blog and finally removed it after several months of no results.

So how do you want to define popularity, or top content? Really, it depends on what you’re hoping to achieve. If I want to know what posts are bringing people to my site, the list I posted is appropriate. If I want to know what posts elicited a response in people / caused them to forward, retweet or comment, that would likely be an entirely different list. Arguably, determining what it was about those posts that interested people would be a bit more challenging: and if I really wanted to geek out about it, I could figure out which posts elicited the most feedback per eyeball by cross-referencing the two lists.

There are plenty of tools out there to get data about your content or activities online. The tricky part is figuring out how to turn the data into meaningful information, and how to learn from it.

Online Recommendations: Then and Now

Andrea Hill — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:35:47 +0000

I’m online; I come across an interesting site on a topic I’m passionate about. I fire up another browser window, and submit the site. Title, link, brief description, save. There! Now I can refer back to it, as can others who are interested in this topic.

Quick: what site did I save to? Delicious? StumbleUpon? Digg?

Nope; it’s 1999 and I just added a site to the Open Directory Project. And you thought that all this “social sharing” stuff was new…

The Open Directory Project (a.k.a. “dmoz”) is touted as “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” These volunteer editors would take on particular topics, and find, review and list sites in the directory.

I was a dmoz volunteer editor myself a decade ago: my editor profile is still available at http://www.dmoz.org/profiles/afhill.html. When we speak now about social media and influence, I think back to what we were doing then. We were trying to provide quality resources based on our areas of expertise. My name was listed at the bottom of each of my categories, identifying me as the author. Is that not the same as looking up a tag I use on delicious? Social sites like those mentioned above are taking off, yet the ODP has seemingly lost its relevance.

According to compete.com visitor stats, visits to dmoz.org are on a steady decline:

If my actions as an active Web citizen have been the same for 10 years now, why is the platform changing? Why aren’t all those using StumbleUpon or Delicious just working on their own category on the ODP?

People don’t choose to edit the ODP because:

Content: The ODP is about multiple editors forming a single directory. Sites like delicious are about everyone creating his own personal directory.
Obligation: Maintaining a shared directory means following established guidelines. How I choose to use StumbleUpon or Delicious is up to me
Responding to Submissions: As an editor, you would receive submissions (often, many, many times) from people wanting you to list their site.
Bias: My personal resources contain bias, because they’re mine. A directory like the ODP should not (despite the fact my editor name is associated with my category)
Influence: We recognize certain “Twitterati” or Power Digg users, but Dmoz editors don’t seem to rise to any sort of special web celebrity for their efforts.

Surely if the ODP was considered a strong resource in which to be listed, individuals would devote some time to the effort. However, that compete.com report above noted that one of the top destination sites from dmoz.org was geocities.com. That was where I built my first few websites back in the 90s, and I don’t believe anything on geocities would now be considered a “top resource” for anything.

Beyond the content, the site on the whole has been unable to keep up with the changing landscape. Years ago, it was enough to have a directory that listed sites, but with the breadth of content available, we need to take it a step further, to having ratings and rankings (rather than just include/exclude with an occasional “best of”). This is where true social bookmarking and sharing sites shine. The “wisdom of the crowds” comes in as more people add content and it can be aggregated. The best known example is the front page of Digg, but Delicious also highlights “popular” articles.

So while my basic actions online to collect, classify and share information didn’t change, there is a shift in how the information is used, and how my actions relate to others. To some extent, this relates back to an earlier post I had on Social Media vs. Web 2.0. The ODP offered information to read from a single source (individual editors): sites like Digg only offer value when a critical mass start using the site.

Digg’s ‘about’ page proudly proclaims its difference from the ODP: “You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.” We can’t ignore the value of power users, but we don’t want to offer them complete control. As our system of categorizing and sharing information becomes increasingly complicated, with algorithms that take into account a multitude of factors, we can only guess how we will find, filter and assess value to content in the future.

5 suggestions for print designers moving to web

Andrea Hill — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:05:10 +0000

I’m not a web designer, by any means. Sure, I have a graphic design certificate, but my design skills pretty well peaked in 2003 when I completed the online program (although my portfolio is still featured on the sessions.edu site!)

But as someone who’s been taking amazing designs and making them functional for close to a decade, I have some ideas as to what makes design work for the web.

1. Anticipate changes

Who reads webpages anymore? People want content to be updated frequently. That means limit the custom typography or graphic headers (or at least consider how to use custom fonts on your site. Look at blogs: they are really text documents, perhaps with an image inserted. If the image isn’t there, the page is still available. If every page on your site requires a custom graphic before it’s published, you’re slowing down your time to release. Similarly, don’t build so rigid a design that the change of a word or phrase will throw off the entire page layout. Things change

2. Respect the medium

Unless you’re building an RIA (rich internet application), these are PAGES. They should read like a page, with a title and body copy. Think about your content as you would a text document: is it logical from a glance what the hierarchy of content is?

3. Be consistent

Unlike a print ad that may stand on its own, a website is a complete entity. Use the same conventions across the site, in terms of fonts and layout. If you deviate from it, make sure it is intentional and of benefit to the site visitor.

4. Anticipate people arriving on any page of your site

With Google indexing every page of your site and people being able to share pages with friends, you must anticipate that not everyone will visit your home page first. Does your site make sense to someone arriving on an interior page? Can they navigate elsewhere through the site?

5. Get an interaction designer to help

…yes, it’s a cop-out. But one key feature that web offers over print is the opportunity for interaction. There is no equivalent in a print design for error messaging, progressive disclosure, or user flows. I see the evolution from print to web design as both a widening (you are designing a series of pages that are related) and a refining (you are designing components or micro-interactions within a single larger design). Many will argue that an Interaction designer uses none of the same tools as a graphic designer, and I shouldn’t assume a straight-forward transition. Yet I’m not sure that every team can have both an interaction and a graphic designer, so at some point those skill sets need to merge.

As Jakob Neilsen stated back in 1999:

Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design.There are so many differences between the two media that it is necessary to take different design approaches to utilize the strengths of each medium and minimize its weaknesses.

Print design is based on letting the eyes walk over the information, selectively looking at information objects and using spatial juxtaposition to make page elements enhance and explain each other.

Web design functions by letting the hands move the information (by scrolling or clicking); information relationships are expressed temporally as part of an interaction and user movement.

Social Networks: Too Much Drama

Andrea Hill — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:11:09 +0000

So opine the teen girls on the SxSW panel “What Teens & Tweens Want In A Web Site/Application”. When high schoolers bemoan that social networking sites like mySpace and Facebook are too much like high school, does social networking have a future?

This is not to say these teens aren’t on social networking sites at all: several boys on the panel used mySpace, primarily for the music features. As one precocious teen explained, “I’m kinda a music producer, so I use mySpace for promotion”. Several of the girls explained their mySpace-related activities involved creating layouts or custom code. But many of them had left the social networking sites, citing “too much drama”.

For these youth, social networking sites aren’t for socializing with their current networks: rather, they are a platform for self-expression and creativity, and promotion thereof. Surprisingly enough, it appeared more members of the audience (skewing an older demographic) had more silly games and applications on their facebook profiles: the youth generally had ‘mob wars’ and little else.

eMarketer estimates that 82% of US teens ages 12 to 17 and 43.5% of children ages 3 to 11 will use the Internet on a monthly basis in 2009. At the same time, nearly two-thirds of teens and nearly one-half of tweens own a mobile phone.

This isn’t to say they teens aren’t using digital channels to communicate and be entertained: they all text message, and many of them engage with long-distance friends via their gaming platforms (primarily xbox). Almost all of the youth watch video or television and play games online. (The teens use Stumbleupon in class to find game sites that haven’t been blocked by the school). When quiered about avatars, many of them felt that avatars helped to reinforce the idea they were chatting with real people.

We know that our conceptual skills evolve as we age, and I couldn’t help but wonder if some of this is at play now: the teens favor more tangible engagement when possible. If they can associate with friends in real life rather than virtually, they do. Avatars help with adding that visual frame of reference in other cases. Of the highly-tech-savvy panel, only one member had even heard of twitter, and although she described what it was, it was apparent that she didn’t understand the value thereof. All of the mySpace and Facebook users update their statuses on those sites, yet the benefits of sending out updates into the Twitterverse was lost on the youth. (None of the students were familiar with RSS, another abstract concept)

For many of us, facebook is a way to communicate with friends from our past. On the whole, these youth see their friends and peers on a daily basis. They do not need this added layer of communication channel to do so. Think about it: how many work associates do you engage with on social networking sites?

It may be assumed that as they age and move into different circles, these youth may find merits in social networking sites. But unlike most of us, they already have the email address and cell phone numbers of their close friends. They will have to find value in using a platform for interaction, beyond what they currently have at their disposal.

Session attendees patiently lined up to ask the panel questions, eager to have a small focus group at their hands. One of the most interesting observations for the web developers in the crowd was that none of the youth used the Internet Explorer browser. There is hope!

Unfortunately, the hope faded a bit when I asked a bit more about the use of the term “New Tech” in the students’ school names. These youth are enrolled in a special program with a focus on technology. They learn Dreamweaver, PhotoShop and C++. Anytime you hear the word “rubric” roll easily off the tongue of a 16 year old boy, you know you’re not quite dealing with ‘regular kids’. This is not to say their insights aren’t valuable, but their average 2-4 hours a day online (not including their time in class, where they do all their work on computers) is not the norm. As panel organizer Anastasia Goodstein of YPulse stated, these are our future employees: these are youth well on their way to their 10,000 hours.

Like the teens themselves, social networking sites are still maturing. But is the drama a function of the social networking platform itself, or the users? Will future students encounter the same struggles when engaging online, or will the platform mature to avoid such backlash? We can only wait and see…

Develop an Effective Online Marketing Campaign by Asking ‘Why’ Not ‘What’

Andrea Hill — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:11:45 +0000

We hear it again and again: “I want a widget”, “we need to be on facebook”. A development team will say “ok”. A good online partner will ask “why”.

Some companies just want the development team, they will drive their own initiatives. But if you want to develop a strong online campaign with demonstrable success, you need to focus on “why”, not “what”.

I spent close to a decade as a Web developer, and I will be the first to tell people that they can make the greatest website in the world, but it’s useless if no one is aware of it. To ensure success of the campaign, you need to determine the focus of your efforts. Traditional marketing may speak of the stages of awareness, interest, trial and repeat. In an online world, we may talk about attraction, interaction and growth.

A widget can help with growth: a site visitor places the widget elsewhere online. By doing so, he is indicating his support to his online connections. This trust and reputation can help affirm the value of the resource. Great, we have a plan! There are only a few questions I have:

how did that initial site visitor find your site?
what does he get out of sharing the widget?

It can be hard to believe that not everyone is as passionate about your organization as you are. But the reason why there are so many reports about brand applications failing on Facebook is because they’re developed with the brand, and not the user, in mind.

For many people, social media is a land of opportunity: millions of bloggers out there just waiting to advertise your product or service. But bloggers are people too, and they need to have some incentive to spread your message. Again, we’re back to the “why” question.

Why should people subscribe to your news feed? If you don’t have a good answer, perhaps a news feed isn’t what you need. Why would people join your Facebook group? Why do you want to be on Twitter?

These aren’t easy questions, because they force an organization to understand the merits of these different tactics. So what if you focused on your desired outcome, and let others be concerned with how to get there? Ultimately, you wouldn’t say “our campaign was successful because we built a website”, you would want to demonstrate the value thereof. A partner knowledgeable in the application of social media tools can help you identify your objectives, determine how success will be measured, and then figure out how to get there for you.

The only question left is “why not?”

The difference between social media and social networking

Andrea Hill — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:45:02 +0000

When the New York Times infers that social networking helped Barack Obama get the most powerful job in the world, you know there is a serious paradigm shift underway.

So when you decide your organization needs some of this “social stuff” for your own, how do you know what to ask for?

The social part is easy. You know you want a way for people to connect. Hopefully they’ll talk about your organization and your fantastic products and services. But what’s the difference between social media, and social networking? What do you need?

Social media is still media: a means to transmit information. The difference is that social media offers the opportunity for anyone to create or disseminate the information.

Social networking refers to people with some shared characteristics associating together, and social networks or social networking sites are where this happens.

We don’t think of television or radio as places; they are channels for communication and we can access the information at our home, in our car, or at our favorite sports bar. The message may be pervasive: it isn’t tied to a specific location. It is the message that is primary. Media isn’t a place.

Networking tends to be more context-focused. When we speak of social networking sites, we speak of Facebook or mySpace. In real life, we may think of where we like to spend our time: the golf course, the gym, the local starbucks. We may go to these places because of the people and the atmosphere, because it gives us the opportunity to engage with others with similar interests or experiences.

Do you want to create a radio station, or a coffee shop? Do you want to offer people an easier way to spread your message, or do you want them to hang out? Don’t worry, it’s not that easy a question to answer. It depends on what you want to accomplish, and who your audience is and what THEY want to accomplish. But getting comfortable with these concepts is a first step towards social success!

Six Services to Enhance Conversation and Community through Comments

Andrea Hill — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:56:03 +0000

For many, the difference between a blog and a webpage is the ability for site visitors to leave comments. The major blog platforms (wordpress, typepad, blogspot, livejournal) all come with commenting enabled, to stimulate engagement and help build community.

Commenting is a big discussion point (no pun intended) – who owns comment content, and where should it live? Like pretty well everything else in social media, there’s no wrong way: every blog maintainer and comment poster may have to come up with their own strategy and approach.

The following services can help to track and maintain comments and commenters, regardless of where they are posted.

Disqus calls itself “webwide discussion”. Blog maintainers may add the disqus comment service to their blog, and the comments are stored with disqus. Individuals can register with disqus to track the comments they leave on any disqus-enabled blog, and find new blogs and conversations more easily. As well, commenters may get notified when someone responds to their comment, which helps keep the conversation going.
IntenseDebate – I’ll admit, I wasn’t familiar with IntenseDebate until I saw it was being used on http://change.gov. Some quick research helped me see it’s a Colorado-based company that was recently acquired by Automattic (makers of wordpress), so my interest is even more peaked! Like Disqus, IntenseDebate is embedded in a blog, and commenters then register with the service itself. Each comment also includes the user’s reputation points, and the ability to give the comment a thumbs-up or down. There are also many widgets a blog maintainer can grab, including the ability to list the top commenters or top commented-on posts.
Unlike the above two services, SezWho does not replace your existing comment service; it adds onto it. This is significant for people who believe that comments (and the resulting keywords and googlejuice that rich content offers) should live on the site they were posted on. Like Disqus and IntenseDebate, it is also based on the notion of a user account that enables comments to be associated with a given person, regardless of where they are commenting.
The above mentioned services require a blog owner to have signed up with the service and installed it on their blog. BackType takes a different approach: it is purely targeted at commenters, not blog owners. When you sign up for a backtype account, you list the URLs you would use when responding to a comment on a blog. BackType then does the hard work of mining for those URLs. BackType also offers widgets for users, so they can display where they’ve been commenting. It is also easy to find and follow other commenters, and see where they’re commenting.
Blog owners may also want to explore importing Friendfeed comments to the applicable post. Both wordpress and Movable Type now support plug-ins to do so. A secondary benefit is that comments places on the blog may easily be sent to Friendfeed as well.
The CommentLuv Plugin is another way for blog owners to ‘reward’ commenters. After their comment, a link to the commenter’s latest blog post (provided they have supplied a URL with a valud RSS feed) will be included. This little bit of added promotion may serve as valuable motivation for visitors to leave comments.

While a blog post may be written by a single individual, it is the ability for readers to ask questions and share their own thoughts that really make blogs “social”. Investigating the above-mentioned tools may help to further the discussion as commenters are increasingly recognized for their own contributions, which can be tracked and further elaborated upon.

Buzz metrics monitoring and reputation management

Andrea Hill — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:14:07 +0000

Sometime last Spring I fell in love with the term “buzz metrics monitoring”. As a developer at Resource, my role was to build, not to validate the effectiveness of our campaigns, but it was interesting to see how our work was being seen by others. Many of us haphazardly set up google alerts or monitored twitter for reference to our projects.

At Podcamp Ohio last June, the session by Bill Balderaz really helped me to see how buzz metrics monitoring could help in assessing the success of an online campaign. The key, of course, was knowing what to be monitoring for.

Many folks consider the motrinMoms mess of last weekend to be a two-sided failure: a failure to test the message before release, and a failure to monitor how it was received.

While I like to speak of “buzz metrics monitoring”, others gravitate towards the more serious-sounding “reputation management”. I realized that I wasn’t sure of how the two were related, so I asked the twitterverse: “buzzword alert: what’s ‘buzz metrics monitoring’ vs ‘reputation management’?”

Fortunately for me, last year at iCitizen I was introduced to Tom O’Brien of MotiveQuest, a “new kind of research company that uses online anthropology to explain consumer motivations”, and Tom was kind enough to help me understand things a bit more:

Tom’s response was enlightening, and helped remind me that they key to buzz metrics monitoring is that it is just metrics: you can gather all the data you want, but it is what you do with the data that makes it useful.

I had been thinking that buzz metrics monitoring was something you could farm out to a third-party to do, but reputation management had to be handled in-house. This was a naive view based on the assumption that the positioning of an organization would not be handled externally. I should have looked at the activities as practical vs strategic, and not made assumptions as to the nature of the parties that would be responsible for those levels of activities.

As a computer scientist, it is difficult for me to think of things outside of the scope of projects or campaigns, which may be another reason why I gravitate towards the more tangible “buzz metrics monitoring”. This is an activity that can take place for a given amount of time, and then may be considered complete. Reputation management is much more strategic and open-ended (and therefore potentially best handled by those who are skilled in the nuances thereof).

SEO is dead, long live Social Media?

Andrea Hill — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:53:12 +0000

Yesterday at the Thin Air Summit, I attended a panel entitled “Search Engine Optimization with New Media.” Panelists were Brett Borders, Elizabeth Yarnell and John Fischer, and the session was moderated by Micah Baldwin.

The presentation consisted of a slide overview by Brett, some general recommendations by the other panelists, and then a few brave audience members submitted their URLs for review.

This is the second time I’ve heard Brett speak, and I am always impressed with his depth of knowledge. At lunch he’d mentioned that he’s actually looking to shift from reputation management and SEO to social media promotion.

This shift makes sense to me, although I don’t feel as strongly as Micah, who, after the conference, boldly stated on twitter that If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of business or irrelevant in 3 years.

He elaborated in a blog post today, that he feels that “the act of SEO – adjusting the code and content of a website with the primary purpose to be ranked highly in search results, is on its way out.”

For me, a site optimized for a search engine that employs clear language, semantically-correct mark-up and content that can be interpreted by a non-human reader is going to offer a better user experience for everyone.

One of the fundamental premises of social media is the notion of reputation and recommendation. Before the Internet, we looked to our local social circle for advice or guidance. With the Internet came this glut of information, and we had access to much more information. The challenge is no longer “search”, it’s “filter”. I can find hundreds or thousands of results to my query, but how do I find those that are most relevant or informative? We are now looking back to our social circles for guidance in these matters: the difference is that our social circles now have the possibility to be significantly larger.

So is SEO still relevant? Yes, because someone still needs to be the initial “finder” of the information. Optimizing a site for search engines can help humans find and categorize content, as well. How often do you run a search for a specific article or site you know you’ve seen before? Search is not only for the discovery of new content, it can also serve to recover previously visited content. Yet if you don’t recall the exact terminology on the site, or all the content of the site is cloaked in images, your task will be more difficult.

As content providers, do we not want our content to be available to anyone who wishes to find it? Therefore, we would do well to optimize: for search engines, for screen readers, for human consumers. It’s not just search engines that benefit from a well-crafted title tag, so too do the people you want to attract.

Some of the folks I heard from this weekend stated simply that SEO was boring, and social media was more interesting. But the enjoyment of performing a job should not be correlated with the necessity of its completion. Creating a site that is easily indexed and recoverable is never a negative thing, although I will admit that there are other factors that should also be considered in site design, development and promotion.

Micah’s perspective appeared hinged on the fact that SEO should not be the duty of an external consultant or agency, which does fall in line with my views of user experience and accessibility. These are core principles that should be considered throughout the project, from inception through implementation. But I feel it is not suffering from death, but rather on the cusp of a rebirth of legitimacy, wherein planning for accessibility and indexability will become standard practice.

Google devaluing Human-Filtered Directories?

Andrea Hill — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:03:50 +0000

At the Mile High Social Media Club meeting tonight, speaker Brett Borders mentioned that the google webmaster guidelines had been recently updated to remove a recommendation to submit to “relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.” I tweeted this nugget of information, and @theguigirl asked if I had any more information.

I don’t, officially, but I can speculate, and I also googled

When DMOZ was brought up at the session, I volunteered that I had been an editor back in the day, and I guessed that the recent update to the guidelines was due to the lack of democracy-an editor can maintain their section autonomously. Indeed, I was solicited to serve as editor when I submitted a site I maintained. When the volunteer pool is folks who have a vested interest in their own site(s) being promoted, how objective can you really expect the directory to be? While there are certainly ways to “game” digg and stumble-upon, at the very least one some level the wisdom of the crowd should offer some level of checks and balances.

A secondary consideration is the whole basis of google – the PageRank algorithm (math and stats and computer science). I’ve read a fair amount from the google folks, and it appears their preference is to automate, automate, automate. Yahoo! was a human-powered directory that was super-ceded by Google because Google was able to offer better, more accurate results, more quickly. PageRank is based on authority: inbound vs outbound links, and the quality thereof. As a directory, DMOZ links out far more than it’s linked to. The algorithm must therefore be tweaked to assign a weighting to a directory like this. So how much ‘authority’ do you assign to a listing in DMOZ, when they let anyone, even Canadian college kids, be editors?

I do recall a bit of an uproar months ago about a blog post that claimed that Google was to punish pagerank for digg stories. Although it’s never really been verified as coming from a legitimate Google source, the warning seems to make some sense: sources that were found to be manipulating social bookmarking sites to unfairly promote sites would be blocked. Don’t be evil, kids, and you’ll be fine.

What I feel makes the story really interesting, however, is the buzz shortly following that Google was planning to acquire digg. Was the “leaked” blog post a way to devalue digg in the eyes of SEO folks? Or does google really recognize the importance of social bookmarking? A Stanford 2008 survey actually found that 25% of the sites posted to del.icio.us have not yet been indexed by the major search engines. That’s pretty amazing. I would love to have seen if Google incorporated digg rankings into their algorithm, or kept digg as a complimentary service and simply used it to help find new sites to index more quickly. Assigning authority to individual users would be very, very interesting!

So why did Google update their guidelines? Hard to say. But it may be because:

Google sees directories as having equal credibility as other sources, so there is no need to distinguish them in the guidelines
Google sees human-classified directories as having less credibility than other sites
The Google algorithm needs to take into account many more sources than simply directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ
Google wants the demise of all non-Google entities