Web 2.0

Steve Rubel says search is broken…

10/16/2007 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Very little time to post at the moment but a quick note about a good post from Steve Rubel who recently opined that search is broken… and I would have to agree with him.

In a nutshell, search, as we know it, trawls traditional (web 1.0) content very efficiently – as it always has. But now the sheer volume and complexity of user-generated content across – and within – a range of different platforms is challenging the effectiveness of traditional search algorithms.

As Steve says:

"We need a secure, opt-in web version of Google Desktop that can find
all the bits we generate online, even if they are behind walls."

The interesting thing here is that while we evangelise the fundamental changes technology is bringing to the way we do business and organise our companies; knowledge and information, we often overlook some of the key tools we use everyday.

Search is pretty much the cornerstone of our daily web-activity… but like everything else is being out-paced by the sheer speed of technological development.

Technorati tags: Search, Steve Rubel, Web 2.0, Technology

Set organisational bloggers free….

10/02/2007 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Fantastic post from Jeff Jarvis demonstrating that while more and more
organisations are understanding the intrinsic benefits of blogging they aren’t
understanding the instrumental benefits.

Jarvis applies his argument to newspapers – an ideal industry to
generate significant numbers of corporate bloggers – and suggests that while
newspapers are rapidly adopting blogging as a communication channel they are
burying their bloggers deep inside the website hidden under layers of ’proper’
content and unmemorable URLs.

The solution, says Jarvis, is to serve up newspaper bloggers as
individual units of blog content and connect them to the newspaper’s main site
as part of it network. So, to use Jarvis’s idea floated earlier this year: have
the newspaper homepage as a hub for loads of really useful, interesting and
timely networked content.

As Jarvis puts it:

“Architecturally, this returns to the idea that news
sites shouldn’t be sites at all but larger, looser networks and not just of
stuff they make but also — who can afford to make it all — stuff others make.
It also points to the problem of presuming that sites can and should still
consider themselves destinations; this, I argued,
is one of the lessons of the death of Timesselect.”

By doing this the newspapers can reap the rewards:

lots of blogs at lots of
addresses means lots of people creating lots of brands – all for the newspaper
An element of separation
between blogger and newspaper makes it easier to write content with a human
voice, not “the cold voice of the institution”
The only way for these
bloggers to spread and grow is to join in and link to other conversations

In Jarvis’s own words:

“We are seeing the links and
the voice. But the architecture remains a problem … The blogs may be getting
more plentiful and they are getting better. But now they’re ready to move out
of the house and find homes of their own.”

Now apply this thinking to
corporate or organizational blogs. All too often the in-house marketing manager or PR agency wants a blog to tell the firm’s story to the world. They will hopefully
understand the intrinsic principles, but what about the instrumental – or
‘architectural’ – principles?

Technorati tags: Jeff Jarvis, Newspapers, corporate+blogging, networks