Starting From Zero: Day 90

So the 90 day period is over, and the result: Rank: 3,130 (818 links from 382 sites). Started at 0 links from 0 sites, with a rank of 1M+. RSS readership is steadily growing, too:

This will be the last post in the starting+from+zero series.

My understanding of the Technorati algorithms is that rank is determined based on a 6 month window, so I willl revist 3 months from now, and see if I get back to where I once was with Get Real. Last fall, my Technorati rank was around 1,200. We’ll see.

12 April 2006 Permalink

Listics - Frank Paynter’s New Blog

Frank Paynter is launching a new blog, Listics, and declares yesterday as Day One with a nod to the meme I started up with the launch of /Message.

Whatever you do Frank, don’t report it mainline. Create a sideblog for your progressive rank changes, or the readers will (rightly) howl at the moon.

29 March 2006 Permalink

Power Laws, Popularity, Authority, A-Lists and the Rest

Robert’s advice to the bloglorn is a bit superficial, focusing on eBay-ish features like adding a picture to your Technorati profile, or catchy headlines. Some of the tips are useful, like using lots of descriptive tags (as that will help search engines index your posts better).

However, here’s my list of what to do to improve your blog, so that your sphere of influence will widen and various rankings will increase. Maybe it will push you into the so-called A-List. [Note: /Message a lowly, lowly 7,379 at Technorati this morning, which is nothing like Robert’s 74, and the best T’rati rank I have ever hit is somewhere around 1200, for the Get Real blog. But still, the techniques I have used to climb from one million plus to 7,379 in the past 35 days (chronicled in the Starting From Zero series) are very different from what Robert is talking about.]

1. True Voice — The absolutely, indispensible, central core of all great blogs is authentic and empassioned writing, clearly expressing a consistent and value-based perspective. If you do not possess this, work hard to see how others do it, and emulate their techniques.
2. Throw Yourself Into Dialog — Do not write in a corner, looking at the walls. Most great posts are a response to the writing of others. You read something (as I read Robert’s post this morning), it sparks some thoughts, and you add to the thread. Then continue on: see if those involved in the thread respond to your addition to the discussion. Repeat.
3. Draw The Line, Over And Over Again — At any given time, successful, engaged bloggers are pursuing a set of themes or topics. These are like an investigative series in conventional journalism, topics that you return to, time and again, successively elaborating your view or arguments. Keeping tabs on the censorship in China, or posting consistently on why certain forms of marketing is immoral, or whatever. State your position and defend it. Howl at the inequities in the world. Shake your finger at the idiots.
4. The Big Idea — Every once in a while, work on one of those big posts, that outlines an idea that may have big implications. This could be asking a hard question, or debunking conventional wisdom, or defining the outlines of a new, emerging market. I recently introduced the Conversational Index, which led to a large cascade of commentary and thinking by others. In past years, I have been lucky enough to click that way with other notions, like last fall’s RSS Readering meme. This is a function of invention, and is hard to channel or predict. But the effect, even of just asking a really hard, important question, can be enormous.
5. Sharpen Your Pencil, And Then Write. The Polish polymath Ignace Paderewski once said, “before I was a genius I was a drudge.” Writing skills sharpen with use, and the sphere of influence also increases through frequency. You should write — at a minimum — every day.
6. Courage — You have to be willing to be called an idiot by some if you intend to be considered an authority by most on the topics you are interested in. Accept the occasional (or even consistent) vitriol from detractors and nay-sayers. If you stand up and say something is great, or pointless, or the most likely trend for the future, you can be sure that there are others that will disagree, and they will be happy to say so. Fine. But you can’t hedge, and middle-of-the-road platitudes or cautious optimism — which may come naturally after a diet of television news and mainstream journo-babble — will simply not break you out of the pack.
7. Technology — By all means arm yourself with technology. Learn how search engines work, and do the obvious things. Expressive titles, especially with people’s and products’ names help greatly. Tagging with detailed terms helps search engines and people alike. By all means, make your blog visually pleasing, accessible, and easy to read. Use graphics when appropriate, such as screen shots or diagrams. Link to all the people and stories you reference, and include people discussed as tags.
8. Timing Matters — I am not suggesting blowing hot and cold on themes, but rather try to build on stories when they are still new and in people’s thoughts. I saw this post of Robert’s, and I am using it as a springboard to collate a bunch of my thoughts on the topic that he opened. If I had waited a week, a much smaller number of people would read it, because next week this will be one of last week’s hot themes. So timing matters.
9. Human Sized Pieces — People are busy, and so your posts should generally not be 20 page dissertations. How long do you expect people to spend reading your thoughts? Can you condense? An occasional “Interesting piece from Robert, check it out!” may be ok, but a steady diet of link-blogging is too low fat for most of us. We need more juice. But only a plateful at a time. Not every thing needs to be a three course meal.
10. Respond to comments — People that comment on your blog are most likely those that are most interested in the topics you are writing about (leaving aside your mom, who just comments to make you feel better). Engage them when they come. But never feed the trolls.

I recently fired myself from an Amercian Marketing Series on social media, because I sensed that a high proportion of the folks that were attending the seminars were approaching the whole idea of blogging tactically: “How little of this do I have to do to be doing an adequate job?” My problem is I only want to talk to people who approach the subject strategically, working backward to the various elements from an analysis of excellence. I bet that those who buy in on that approach will at least find an echo of their own thoughts in these recommendations, and the rest will simply think I am a monomaniacal windbag with too much time on my hands.

15 February 2006 1 Permalink

A True Baseline For Personal Authority (and Starting From Zero: Day 35)

Technorati’s wheels are grinding again, and /Message has been updated, moving from 242 links from 140 sites and a rank of around 10,324 to 340 links from 182 sites and a new rank of 7,379:

Yesterday, I predicted a jump below 5,000, based on the recent surge at BlogPulse. I looked more closely, and the BlogPulse ranking climb was slightly more gradual than I had thought, so changes in one of the two systems are still a fairly good predictor of the scale of changes in the other.

Since Technorati is a hotbed of innovation on authority (see Technorati Authority Filter), it would be sweet if they supported BlogPulse-style graphs, indicating the rise (or fall) of ranking over time, and the comparison of different blog’s rankings over time.

Note that Technorati rankings are that: rankings of blogs. They are not really linked to individuals, except that we know the blogs are written by someone, or some group, by inference. The worst example of that is group blogs and individuals with multiple blogs. Technorati handwaves at the problem, merely associating a person’s profile to the blogs they claim. So, by that approach, one individual — the one that ‘claims’ the blog — gets all the authority associated with a group blog, and the others get none. The worst situation would be a person who has worked long and hard at several group blogs, and who apparently might have no authority at all!

So Technorati needs to create a real personal authority model:

• Blog authority and personal authority are closely related, and in the unique case of a blogger who only writes on one blog and has no collaborators, they are one and the same. But in every other case, they are different. Perhaps very different.
  
  
• Personal authority is tied to the individual, not the blog. That means that an individual should by some means be able to claim their own posts, and own them. This would allow collation of links and references from multiple blogs into a personal authority rank. This would require author identity to be established, in a way similar to blog claiming, and Technorati would have to learn to read the “by Stowe Boyd” elements of blog posts.
  
  
• Personal authority is not just a matter of links. Those who are authorities in their field are widely cited without direct attribution to specific posts. In my own case, just as examples, in the past week Steve Gillmor wrote a post called Idiot Wind that suggested I was a loon without linking to /Message or the post he was incensed about, and something I wrote in early January at Get Real was quoted by a writer at the Guardian. In both cases, my authority in the field should have been impacted. (Of course, Gillmor’s withholding a link might have been calculated to avoid offering me a boost to my authority on the subject, since his contention was that I am all wrong about the subject in question. In my view, it makes an argument like his hard to follow for the reader, since he is referring to comments that the reader cannot click through to read. What he should have done was use a link with a “nofollow” attribute, which is a way of linking without conferring authority, more or less.)
  
  
• Personal authority is linked on the cascading of influence, which systems like memeorandum leverage and display, but which is not well-captured in Technorati. I wrote a post recently about the Conversational Index. Technorati dutifully noted the number of links to the story, and their originators. But that post led to a really large bloom of thought and argument, where ultimately hundreds of posts were written, many of which did not refer back to the initiation point at all. True, Technorati does capture the first order indicator of that meme bloom, but its conceivable that some of the second and third tier authors in that explosion of thought around the CI wound up with similar link counts from similarly ranked referrers. But the originator of a thought and its secondary critics and admirers should are not in general gain the same degree of authority. The innovator should be recognized in a different way, perhaps on a different scale. I think discovery of the source of these blooms is a critical element of authority in the real world and one that is absent in Technorati, today.
  
  

By no means an exhaustive list, but is only an indicator of where Technorati (or others) will have to go before we have established a true baseline for personal authority.

14 February 2006 Permalink

Starting From Zero: Day 28

I sent email to Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, asking about the apparent hiccup in Technorati ranking updates:

[via email]
Stowe,

We had some link count issues over the weekend, and our ops folks have

been fixing things up. I hope that you should see things returning to

normal soon.

We’re also continuing to build out our link counting mechanism with the

goal to make sure that all links and sources are counted at the time

they get added to the index - but we’re still a bit away from that. In

the meantime, we’re striving for updated counts on a daily basis, at least.

Dave

Dave recently reported on the State of the Blogosphere, and all the stats underscore the enormous scaling pressure that Technorati and other blog search engines much be experiencing. The Blogosphere doubling every 5.5 months, a new blog launched every second! Yikes.

But Technorati is such an important appliance that it just has to work; at least for me. I use it every day, to track links, find new voices, check tags. And Dave’s email was two days ago, and nothing seems to have happened. Today’s T’rati ranking for /Message:

Same number of links (138) from the same number of sites (82) as on Day 20, ten days ago. Obviously out of date. I hope they get around to updating in the next day or so, since Day 30 is a big day for the Starting From Zero project.

My bet is that when recalculated, /Message will climb into the top 10,000, at least.

8 February 2006 1 Permalink

Technokarma

Steve Rubel is picking up the technokarma question I have been poking at for the past few weeks today — see Micro Persuasion: You Can’t Take Your Technorati Links With You — where he says

This raises a bigger issue. Lots of bloggers and podcasters switch URLs and blog platforms. Still you can’t take your Technorati metadata with you. If you use FeedBurner you can redirect your old RSS feed to a new one. TypePad and other platforms let you export your posts. However, Technorati does not let you take what you have amassed somewhere else and port it to your new profile. This is wrong. When is Technorati going to step up and let us manage our reputations?

This is technokarma: I am a person who wrote all that stuff at Get Real, but that fact has no impact on the status of /Message. Which is crazy.

The focus of Technorati and other services on the physical dimension — files, links, trackbacks, etc. — leaves them blind to the underlying social reality. Those posts are written by people, they don’t just appear.

Technorati should explicitly create “technokarma” which is tied to individuals, not the physical location of blogs. So, when you start a new blog, or participate in a group blog, you do not start from zero.

3 February 2006 1 Permalink