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Better strap yourself in - this is a long post, but it’s full of cool information!
Last week, I attended the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) in Seattle, WA. I signed up for the conference because I wanted to find out some more in-depth information about what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to social media. Little did I know what I was in for! There’s a whole lot more that goes into building a social networking site, tracking blog comments, and analyzing user profiles than I ever could have imagined!
Over all, I thoroughly enjoyed the academic value of the conference. It truly was an academic conference in that all of the presentations were actually original experiments and hypotheses derived by the presenters, the results were shown along with some interesting findings, and the questions presented by the conference attendees were genuine answer-seeking inquiries. I can honestly say there wasn’t a single presentation made that I had already seen in one format or another. There was a great deal of respect shown to all of the presenters by all of the attendees, something which I hate to say does not occur at some professional conferences. All in all, the experience was great, and I did learn quite a bit.
For those of you with short attention spans, I’m putting my bulleted summary first, and if you want more meat and potatoes you can read further 
Some key observations:
Conclusions:
The conference actually began before the real conference took place. The folks who put together the event set up a Crowdvine social network site for all of us who would be attending. When I looked through some of the other folks who were going to be there, I started to feel like Wayne and Garth when they met Alice Cooper (“We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”) These folks were PhD students, college professors, linguists, computer scientists, and research scientists at places like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon U, Northwestern U, U of WA, etc. People hailed from the United States, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Israel, Japan, India, and several other places so it truly was an international conference. And here I was, just a simple sourcing strategist looking for a few crumbs from the table! I looked through profiles and decided there were several people I wanted to meet while I was there, so I sent little notes indicating my desire to meet people. I think it was a great idea for the event coordinators to do this, as it helped with the introductions while we were there.
When I arrived in Seattle, the very first session was presented by the founder of LiveJournal, Brad Fitzpatrick. He discussed some of the differences between social networks and social applications. He talked about how most social networks ‘suck’ today as there is very little privacy and authentication of communication requests amongst people, and you’ve got to sign up for a million new networks as each one promotes its ‘one new and cool feature’, and he discussed the future of these problems and how things like OpenID and OAuth will help with these issues. I found it interesting how someone who designed a product that is utilized by so many people in social media thinks that social media sucks!
Then, we dove head first into the deep end by discussing data mining. And I’m not talking about the data mining that we researchers do when we conduct searches – I’m talking about hard-core, semantic search formulas, algorithms, PLSA-LDA theory data mining. I tried to dumb my notes down as best as I could so that I could make sense of them myself, but some of the concepts of data mining alluded me, so much respect to the presenters for their grasp on these topics! There was a presentation that particularly interested me in that it was an experiment in how users participate in contests/surveys/etc. through social media. The presenter shared that higher awards (bigger prizes, large money pots, etc.) attract more views, but not necessarily more submissions and that the prestige of the contest will slightly hinder participation (higher prestige, higher risk). What I gathered from this conclusion is that lots of people will view a high profile/high stakes contest, but not many people will actually participate because they don’t believe they could win. It made me think of the current SourceCon challenges that are going on.
The presentations that were made on the psychology of social media were fascinating. One presentation was made on the perception of people profiles. It brought up some interesting topic discussion, including how one’s own beliefs and interests may change how they view someone of the opposite beliefs or viewpoints. Here are a couple of notes from this presentation:
So basically, people who don’t post a human photo on their profile are perceived to be less understood. Or, if they post a link to an awful website or person. Interesting! (checking out my links and connections right now….)
A lot of the neatest talks were had during meals and after-hours. I had great opportunities to hang out with several people during our networking lunches and dinners, as well as at a little wine bar called The Local Vine on Monday night. Sometimes, the ‘unofficial’ parts of a conference yield the best information! :)
Day two began with a keynote from Marc Smith, a Senior Research Scientist with Microsoft. He discussed some interesting ideas and findings about the different people who utilize social media. He called them answer people and discussion people. Answer people typically have more outgoing responses to topics but generally do not start discussions, where discussion people typically initiate conversations but generally do not respond to inquiries as much. He showed some graphs backing this information up. We also had a presentation by James Caverlee on MySpace profiles and how to figure out some of the spam and deception that goes on there. Here is a link to that study as it has been made public. The sample search results are VERY interesting! Basically, what they found is that the “fake” profiles on MySpace, based on comparison of text and other factors, modeled the real profiles created by users in their late 20s – late 30s (fake users are really age 26-39, a sad day for my generation! [bunch of spammers and hackers]) Following that, Danyel Fisher presented on space planning for an online community. He said something of interest when discussing the different community members: he said embrace leaders; respect lurkers and that leaders welcome new people. This is important as the lurkers will eventually become active members of your community and quite possibly future topic leaders. By not embracing new folks and/or lurkers, you are in fact alienating your target (and future) audience.
Day three was begun with our last keynote from Technorati founder, David Sifry, who gave a great presentation on developing an effective project management team. The things he discussed I think can translate into how to develop a good sourcing, research, and/or recruiting organization within your company as well. We then moved on into discussions heavy on political news, blogs and tracking. We discussed using blogs to provide context for news articles and what terms produce “emotional charge” and will indicate if a post is charged or not. We also explored the use of social media coupled with viewing television, and how social media has and will continue to impact the methods with which we watch programs. Finally, we looked at the differences in journalistic sourcing between traditional journalism and bloggers. This was of particular interest, since we have folks at Waggener who keep an eye on bloggers in our clients’ respective industries. We concluded with a panel discussion on politics in blogs, and then wrapped up a power-packed couple of days and set off on our merry ways.
Conclusions – I don’t think the conference is for casual observers of social media! There was so much meaty material and much of it went over my head. I am very glad, however, that I attended as I think gaining knowledge of what goes into making a social media application will in turn help me as an end user to be a better consumer of the technology. It was cool to see how the search engine algorithms are developed and how they return results. I would not recommend going to the conference if you’re not REALLY into the math and science aspect of online technology; however, if you want a crash course in the inner workings of social media, this is the place to be!
LinkedIn now has a LinkedIn Recruiter corporate solutions product. That’s old news to most of us. But… according to Mark Hendrickson’s post tonight on TechCrunch, LinkedIn is rolling out company profile pages on Friday morning:
“On Friday morning they [LinkedIn] will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them…The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.”
Think they’ll eventually incorporate something like CogMap to tie it in with individual’s profiles? That might be cool…
LinkedIn has finally given in to its heavy population of recruiters and become a recruiter-friendly job board/social network powerhouse combo I see this being a huge pain in the rear end for the Monsters and CareerBuilders of the world…
Straight from TechCrunch today:
“Facebook announced new privacy controls at a press event at their downtown Palo Alto headquarters today…The new privacy controls, which will launch on Wednesday morning, allow users to do more with Friend Lists. Users can now set specific privacy controls for different friend groups…[they] can create a friend grouping for co-workers, for example, and share different profile information, updates and other information such as photo albums with that group. Users can put friends into multiple groups…Late last year Facebook started allowing users to group friends, but there was little customization that could be done after the grouping. That effectively made it a useless feature. Now, users have tools that they can use to make those distinctions meaningful.”
Since I am mobile this week, working from internet cafes and coffee bars, I thought I’d pay tribute to those establishments who provide free wifi to mobile folks like me Hat tip to Christian Anderson of Jobster for the original note with this video on Facebook. My favorite is the shot of Windows 95 - how old school!
HILARIOUS video from Cracked.com - see what happens when Google’s parents go out of town for the weekend! BIG THANKS to Jim Stroud for sharing this with me.
Warning: If you can get past the language and some sexually-suggestive content (yeah, it’s a little R-rated!!), this video will have you in stitches.
Check this out…there is talk to create a ‘do not call’ list on the Internet so that advertisers will not be allowed to track Internet activity of individuals. The original article from Digital Trend News is below…
Thursday, November 1st 2007 @ 7:00 AM PDT
By Christopher Nickson
Staff Writer, Digital Trends News
Group lobbies the FTC to create a Do Not Track list similar to the Do Not Call list.
You’re probably familiar with the Do Not Call List, that way of making sure you avoid annoying calls from telemarketers. A group is now proposing something similar to protect online users.
Nine privacy groups - the Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Activism, Public Information Research, Privacy Journal, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and World Privacy Forum – have asked the Federal Trade Commission today to start a “Do Not Track List.” Its aim is to protect consumers from having their online activities unknowingly tracked, stored, and used by marketers and advertising networks.
It’s one of several consumer protection initiatives the group has asked the FTC to adopt in an attempt for users to keep control of their personal information.
The Do Not Track List would insist on advertising entities that place tracking technologies on consumers’ computers registering all the domain names of the servers involved in such activities with the FTC. Browser application developers would be encouraged to create plug-ins that let users download the Do Not Track list to their computers. Having the list accessible through a browser application would allow users to prevent any site from tracking behavioral data.
“If you look back at the Do Not Call list, it was at one time managed by industry. But it didn’t gain widespread acceptance until the FTC took it over,” said Pam Dixon, Executive Director of the World Privacy Forum. “The industry has had seven years to prove they can manage online opt-outs. It is time to move toward something structured like the Do Not Call list to address the problems we are seeing, and have now seen for seven years.”
BIG Thank You’s go out to Nathan Gilliatt, author of The Net-Savvy Executive, for his recent posting on AideRSS. According to Nathan, AideRSS is a “new RSS-filtering service designed to help people manage the volume of posts in their subscriptions. It uses a proprietary PostRank metric to group posts from a given feed into Good/Great/Best groups and creates a filtered RSS feed for each.”
The AideRSS site provides a very neat way of describing how its services work:
“Depending on your level of interest in a specific blog or a topic, AideRSS allows you to intelligently pick and filter the incoming news stream. For example, from the diagram above we can see that Dave is professional photographer, hence he likes to read all stories from the ‘Photographer Daily‘. John, on the other hand, who is currently working in the finance industry, is a photo enthusiast and loves to spend his weekends with the camera - he doesn’t want the minute details, but he wants to know what the other photographers are talking about.
In similar fashion, Bob, who is an artist by trade, likes to dabble in photography every once in a while, hence he chooses to read only the great posts. And Dan, who is an engineer, thinks that photography would be a fun hobby, and one he would like to pick up in the future - he just wants to be aware of the community hits.
We all have varying levels of interest in different topics, and AideRSS will allow you to customize your news to match your criteria. Instead of filling up your inbox with hundreds of stories, you will be able to focus your time and energy on the stories that matter. You can still use your favorite RSS reader, simply substitute our custom feed URL and you are ready to go. Alternatively, you can also track the feed on our site, find the authors best content, or flip through the archives.”
Very neat for both the blogger and the subscriber! I decided to try out Research Goddess with this service. All you have to do is provide AideRSS with your feed and it will analyze it for you. Here are my results:
If I am to understand correctly, your PostRank is determined by the number of comments, links via Bloglines, Technorati and IceRocket, and del.icio.us bookmarks. So the more comments and linkbacks you have, the higher ranked the post is. You can then customize your feed and place widgets on your site so people can select what level of interest they would like to subscribe to. The only downside to this is that a lot of times, a great article is posted but there are no comments or very few linkbacks, so the post will not be ranked high and those with a higher flitration RSS will not see the article.
The only concern I would have from a blogger’s perspective on AideRSS would be if using a program to analyze my site traffic, such as Feedburner, would subscriptions through AideRSS be missed by Feedburner or would Feedburner be able to pick those up as well? I don’t want to have to analyze my stats in lots of different places. I could not find the answer to that question on AideRSS’s site, so perhaps someone out there knows the answer to this.
Other than that, this is a sweet tool for those of us who subscribe to tons different feeds!
For those who don’t know what Skype is, direct from the the Skype website:
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Skype created a little piece of software that makes communicating with people around the world easy and fun…it is available in 28 languages and is used in almost every country around the world. Skype generates revenue through its premium offerings such as making and receiving calls to and from landline and mobile phones, as well as voicemail and call forwarding. Skype, based in Luxembourg, has relationships with a growing network of hardware and software providers and is an eBay company.
Basically this is a neat way for you to communicate by chat/voice over the internet, especially if you have international contacts. There is also a video element so you can see who you’re talking to, and you can have conference calls with multiple Skype users at the same time as well. You can call people’s cell phones directly, you can download a mobile version of Skype to your own phone, there are even widgets and things that you can put on your blogs so people can Skype you right from your website.
There are Skype Public Chats as well on various topics. This to me seems sort of like LinkedIn Answers in a live, chat format. You could go into a Skype chat on a topic in which your company recruits and offer some tips and advice to the listeners while at the same time appropriately marketing your services to the entire group.
In addition to all this, Skype has started Skypecasts, which seems to be its own version of a podcast just for Skype users. You can host your own Skypecast and talk about whatever you want, play music, take calls from listeners, pretty much whatever you feel like. As recruiters, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a weekly Skypecast going over positions you have, or perhaps providing tips to job seekers to help promote your business? It’s all free too!
Most of what Skype offers is free for basic use. There are a couple of premium features which are pay-for, such as SkypeIn and SkypeOut. SkypeIn gives you a phone number for people to dial and reach you on your Skype. The cool thing about this is that you can either select a number that is local to you or a number that is local to your customers, if they are in a different part of the world as you. Pricing ranges from $18 for 3 months to $60 for a full year. SkypeOut gives you a choice of unlimited US/Canada calls or a low cost for international calls directly from your Skype account. You can also purchase Skype Credits and pay for things as you go. There is SkypePro as well which takes the best of everything and rolls it into a package deal. Take a look at Skype’s homepage to check out all of the features because there are way too many to list out here.
I’m a relative new user of this neat product myself, so I was playing around with it recently while chatting with a research colleague, and I thought, ‘I wonder if you can use this in research?’ Turns out you can to a certain extent!
Obviously, there is a search feature on the Skype product itself. You can run searches on Skype based on Name, Skype Username, or email address. Let’s say for example you came across the email address ‘hisham.mardambey@gmail.com’ in a quest to find a C# programmer. You might assume that is the first and last name of the person, however you’d like to know where this individual might be located. Plug the email address into the search field and here’s what you’ll see:
You will notice that we now know the location for the person with this email address. Clicking on the profile and we have further information:
We now have a homepage for this person. Looking there we can gather more personal info on him, and plugging his domain into http://www.allwhois.com/, the search yields phone numbers and addresses as well:
X Labs
Hisham Mardam Bey (hisham.mardambey@gmail.com)
+961.3609386
Karakas
Yacubian/Shouran Block A
Beirut, none 13-5657
LB
We can also use Skype to search the web. I learned from Moises Lopez that if you use personal phrases such as “I am *” or “I work for *” you can find personal homepages and possibly personal contact information for people who either hold specific titles or work at targeted companies. I tried this out with Skype and searched using the phrase “my Skype *” and I noticed a lot of my results contained resumes! I started narrowing down further, using C# “my Skype *” and I found a C# programmer in Germany named Eric Bodden. His contact information was listed on his resume page.
You can expand out the search and use additional operators, for example:
~cv “my skype *” -jobs -careers -apply -submit
or
~resume “my skype *” -job (provided by Mike N.)
It’s not a perfect search and there are certainly more search strings (and probably better ones) to try out, but it’s another way to gather additional contact information for people. Lots of people are starting to catch on to Skype and the value it has with helping you to stay in contact with others, and it’s good to know that as researchers we can tap into this resource to find these individuals relatively easily.
I also now have a direct SkypeMe! link on my blog, so if you have Skype, please feel free to contact me!
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