Buzz Variants
I’ve been tinkering with placing RSS feeds (via the fine mt-rssfeed plugin) on the right side of the front page. The Popdex Top five is there now although I considered both Daypop and Yahoo Buzz feeds. Unfortunately, Daypop looks (and has remained) broken based on looking at their front page and the Yahoo! buzz results seemed to focus on rap stars and female soccer players. Blaaaaaah.
The Popdex buzz is what I consider to be herd buzz meaning that a whole bunch of people essentially voted that a topic was relevant by linking to it. Popdex noted that the herd did so and ranked appropriately.
Many folks have an intense knee jerk reaction to herd buzz (think American Idol) because it’s, well, vanilla. Many individuals really want to be individuals and the thoughts of “going with the norm” is abhorrent to them. Here’s a tip for all you individuals out there, the herd may not be smarted than you, but they have infinitely more time. This means they’re much more likely to identify something as buzz-worthy in their collective billions of hours online while you are there sitting there in your underwear, reloading Technorati to see if anybody, anywhere actually linked to your weblog.
The converse of herd buzz is personal buzz — we all love personal buzz because it’s ours. It’s when we find something or create something that we consider to be buzz worthy. TO HELL WHAT THE HERD THINKS — I THINK THIS IS COOL. The good news is that personal buzz is essential for herd buzz to exist. If no one ever notices/creates something cool, the herd will never know. The bad news is that the chances that your personal buzz has a chance in the unfathomably large herd buzz pool is quite low. Still, you never know, your own personal sick joke might catch on. Good luck.
Memefacture
I haven’t taken this apart yet, but Memefacture looks like it’s doing some interesting buzz_like_things.
My first comment is that it’s not painfully obvious how he’s doing automatic trend reporting… might be handy to document this and let folks critique.
Where's the buzz?
I was doing some research on VNC yesterday when I stumbled upon this URL in Sourceforge. It’s a list of the projects on Sourceforge sorted by activity. This link shows a couple of other interesting views including total number of downloads, activity for the last week or all time… Yum. Hot pipin’ buzz.
Why do I love this data? Same reason that I use Google, it shows me the data prioritized by people who have (hopefully) no other motivation than to find data which is useful. When I look at Sourceforge list, I see a fascinating list of the types of open source projects that people want: instant messaging, CRM, tools (Python, JBoss)… it’s a gold mine of zeitgeist. If I was a venture capitalist, I’d keep a close eye on this list because I would suggest that a project with a huge amount of activity is one which is addressing a key deficiency in the marketplace… translation: there is demand which means there is money to be made.
Discovering this list reminded me a set of buzz criteria I’ve been stewing on for months. For any site like Sourceforge, I’d like to have easy access to the following views of information:
1) Most popular — For some given set of entities, show me what has been viewed/downloaded the most in the past week and over all time.
2) Buzz worthy — Show me the entities whose popularity has drastically moved upward (or downward) in the past week and over all time.
3) Favorites — Allow me to say, I care about this entity so that I can sort the list and only see my favorites. Also, tell me when anything changes in my favorites.
This doesn’t just apply to sites which offer downloads, it also applies to meta-weblogs (like syndic8, technorati), portal sites like Yahoo (which already have much of the criteria I describe), and other large databases of publicly accessible data that I’m certain I’m forgetting.
Again, much of this is already available in various ways… all I’m suggesting is that there be a standard so I know that when I go to, say, a popular OS X file download site, I can easily figure out where the hell the buzz is.
POTENTIAL HOLY SHITS
There are currently three ideas which whenever someone brings them up, I’m always interested in hearing about:
1) Technologies or products that attack a problem from a divide and conquer perspective. The best recent example is anything involving peer to peer technology. The original example was the Web. Any time someone points me at a product that takes this sort of approach, I sit up and listen because many problems are easier to solve when you throw bazillions of people at it. Anyone seen anything new here recently?
2) White lists. Less sexy, but certainly useful. White lists are a simple solution to the problem with spam. The idea being that you create a list of mail addresses from which you’re willing to receive mail and everything else is blocked or thrown into a junk folder. This makes it difficult for long lost college friends to find you, but it does mean less spam. It is a trivial idea, but in a web world of increasing useless noise, I often find myself wanting to OPT IN rather than OPT OUT.
3) Universal Identity. Microsoft continues to get it’s teeth kicked in with the Passport solution, but, honestly, they are trying to solve a tough problem here - a single sign-on for the Internet. Too bad they’re Microsoft. This may be one of those problems that everyone agrees must be solved, but doing so involves such a massive level coordination amongst entities with vastly different agendas that it may never be solved and I’ll continued to be forced to keep sixteen passwords in my head. Weak.
One might call these, potential holy shits.
YAHOO BETA
Ahhhhhhhh. Done with the Vegas beast. Now I can write lightweight columns contain ill-formed thoughts based on personal whimsy… mmmmMmmMMm.. weblogging.
Yahoo is showing off it’s new BETA site. The obvious question is, "Welcome to the new millennium, Yahoo… what the hell took so long?" While I have no insider knowledge at Yahoo, I’ve discerned that this requirement was partially due to the David Filo (Co-founder and Chief Yahoo!) insistence that the front page stay lean. This makes good system engineering sense as faster load times equate to less expense, but Yahoo took it to the extreme. In almost a decade of existence, there has been no major user interface change to the front page of the site.
This reeks of engineering owning part of the process/product that they should not. Sure, the front page needs to load obscenely fast, but there are a great many ways to significantly improve a web-based user interface without sacrificing performance. Take a look at the evolution of any number of popular sites and you’ll see a massive amount of changes over the years - you’re not going to tell me these guys are throwing money out the window loading graphics. Or maybe you are.
Sure, Yahoo has done reasonably well with the lean and mean user interface, but the new user interface demonstrates that someone with a clue decided to tackle the difficult task of equating usability with profitability.
Semi-unrelated point. Delighted to see the "most popular" link right next to the search button. More validation that groups of people sift the web so much better than any bot. So much more to say here.
Other sources of hot pipin’ fresh buzz:
http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/
http://www.daypop.com/top/
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/mt/?u
No Title
The topic of "buzz" has been a favorite of mine for years. I currently use the following sites to track a small portion buzz on the Internet
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
http://buzz.yahoo.com/
Buzz. Trends. The term I’d prefer to use would be "Zeitgeist" or "Spirit of the time", but when see folks see/hear that word the expect you continue to speak in German… which I can’t
We will talk about this topic endlessly here because I firmly believe there are valuable ideas to be exploited around buzz, but for now, we wil ramble.
There is a problem with the list of three sites above. The problem is
that they are too broad. They are looking at data sets the size of "every
person
who looked at Google for a month" or "every person who went
to a movie last weekend".
What I’m interested in is three things. First, the beginning of trends. How in the world did Elmo get so popular? What were the three key decisions that someone made to assure the Elmo meltdown of the last millenium?
Second, non-mass-media trends. In the Elmo example, there was A LARGE CORPORATION which was working for years to do exactly what happened (ie: sell a bazillion Tickle Me Elmos). How about trends which start by some goofball in California deciding to sell rocks as pets? (Question to self: Pet rocks were actually a FAD… what’s the difference between a trend and a fad? Is there one?)
Lastly, what advantages does the Internet give someone to watch/learn about/see trends. The small list above is a pathetic example of primal tools which, while interesting, offer no competitive advantage to early trend identification and analysis. What micro-tools could be developed to identify buzz in it’s infancy? How would one get insanely weathly using these tools?
Next up: ‘Fucking Idiots’. We hate them, but they’re paying the bills, folks.
