Social Media Now: Blogosphere No More!

Two indications that the heyday of the “blogosphere” is over this week.

First came the rapid rise and seven figure sale of WallStrip. From an industry perspective this is vlogging’s “Dan Rather” moment. I expect a lot of heat around vlogs in the next few months. DIY Internet media always proceeds from easiest to produce/lowest bandwidth text based stuff, up through harder to produce bandwidth hogs. Its time for strong, semi-pro vlogs to climb up into the mainstream the way political blogs did a few years ago.

Second comes today’s Technorati redesign. Technorati founder Dave Sifry writes:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we’re using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.

Technorati made itself the arbiter of success in the blogosphere by inventing a kind of blog economy where links were the currency. But the company’s own research showed the growth of blogs slowing and new kinds of metainformation (like tags) replacing links in the value chain.

Steve Rubel’s experience summarizes the situation nicely:

…I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007.

At the heart of the new Technorati is the goal of truly live search of the live Web across all its platforms (text, audio, video) and all it’s meta-information sources (keywords, tags, directories), a universal search that goes head to head with Google’s strategy, a losing proposition to Rubel who says “the heyday of dedicated “live web” search engines like Technorati is coming to a close.”

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reads the redesign similarly:

This is also a clear move by Technorati away from blog search, although many of the media search features have been around for a while. It may be an acknowledgment that they can’t beat Google Blogsearch over the long run, or it may be a strategy to go after a larger potential market for time sensitive content. Or both….

All signs are that Technorati is continuing to look for a replacement to Sifry, the founding CEO, and rumors that the company is looking for a buyer persist despite denials from the company.

But Robert Scobble kicked the tires at the new Technorati and was impressed:

Technorati does “Live” search MUCH MUCH better than Microsoft and even better than Google’s Blog Search.

I predict that, with this update, Technorati will become a quick takeover target. If I were at Microsoft I’d be spending a few corporate hours wining and dining Dave Sifry.

Technorati is so superior to all the other blog search engines now that it isn’t even funny.

Can’t wait to spend some time with it.

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Social Media Now: Spanning the Blogosphere, Selling In Second Life, Valuing Facebook

Spanning the Blogosphere: I’m not too fond of the phrase “Live Web.” First, I’m not convinced that the so-called static web era was all that static—links were live, after all, and pages were updated regularly, and message boards and other sorts of multiway communication platforms existed. Second, even as multifaceted as it has become—with widgets and clients offering all sorts of live interaction—Web-based information is just one source of information flowing into the message stream in which we all swim, a message stream that includes e-mail, IM, voicemail, text messaging and more, an environment not tied to http or the browser.

But for Dave Sifry, whose business, Technorati, is Web based, “Live Web” is the phrase of choice although he is still titling his quarterly report “The State of the Blogosphere.” There are some fascinating nuggets: There’s the enormous growth of blogging in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, as illustrated by the fact that Farsi has now become the 10th most common blogging language. There’s the  growth of tagging as bloggers’ ontological system of choice (although still only 35% of blog posts tracked by Technorati include tags). And blog spam is seasonal, peaking during the Christmas buying season.

Two other things worth noting. There is at least one sign that blogging may have peaked.  Technorati tracked an average of 1.3 million daily posts in October and 1.5 million this month. That’s slower growth in per day posting than the survey has found in the past, but not a slide in the number of posts per day as Steve Rubel suggests. It IS a slide, however, in the percentage of blogs that account for daily postings. Using Sifry’s numbers (which sometimes seem to be moving targets) it seems like the rate of daily posts per blog was  2.3% in October and  2.1% in April. 

Also, Sifry continues to highlight a distinction between blogs and so-called “mainstream media” that I think is no longer useful. Blogs ARE mainstream media, at least users experience them alongside traditional media and draw less and less of a distinction (as Sifry notes). No consumer surfing for information about Zune players would consider  Engaget and ZDNet to be in different information categories. The blogging world has to get the chip off its shoulder about “mainstream media.” Bloggers try so hard to say they’re different it sounds like they have an inferiority complex.

Selling in Second Life: GigaOm has an absolutely fascinating piece, written by Wagner James Au, about the failures of traditional marketers to make hay in Second Life. The piece jumps off from a small scale survey (200 repondants) by Komjuniti, a SL brand consultancy. There’s not much news in the survey (when asked people feel marketing is intrusive and uninteresting, I mean, duh!),  But James Au’s suggestions to marketers using SL are fascinating. To wit: Because teleportation is the primary mode of transport, forget billboards, no one sees ‘em; just like in RL, events, giveaways, and the like are necessary to draw people to your location; and finally, join the fantasy:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

….as the Komjuniti study suggests, they can keep building sterile shopping malls, and continue wondering why Residents prefer nude dance parties, giant frogs singing alt-folk rock, and samurai death matches– and often, all three at the same time.

Valuing Facebook: There’s a suspicious meme making the rounds started yesterday by Mark May, an investment analyst at Needham & Co (is Facebook beating the bushes for buyers?). In a report May argued that Yahoo made a terrible error in December abandoning attempts to acquire Facebook to the tune of $1.5 billion, because now Facebook is worth many times that number. At Barron’s Online Eric Savitz picked up the ball and ran with it, quoting May:  Facebook is no doubt one of the most important Internet companies to have been created in the last five years.

No doubt. But is it worth more than $1.5 billion? Not according to Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St:

Comscore says that Facebook as 16.7 million unique visitors a month. Even better, the site has 24 visits per unique visitor, putting it just behind Yahoo! among all web properties.

…The New York Times digital properties have a unique monthly audience of almost 40 million. The market cap of the entire New York Times Company (NYT) is only $3.4 billion. It even includes those worthless big newspapers.

Maybe Facebook is worth $1 billion, maybe less. But more? No way.

But McIntyre is still basing the entirety of his valuation on pageviews. Meanwhile at ZDNet, Larry Dignan got his dander up about arm chair CEOs piling on Yahoo:

Now time for a reality check.

If News Corp. still can’t figure out how to monetize MySpace (it’s getting there) how can Facebook be profitable enough to justify a big valuation? My hindsight indicates that Facebook should have taken Yahoo’s dough and ran. It’s one thing to build an audience it’s quite another to make money from it.

Facebook is the “in” thing for now. Let’s follow May’s logic and assume Yahoo did pull the trigger on a Facebook purchase (of course we’d all pick that apart too.) Guess what would happen when Yahoo bought Facebook? It would be an “out” thing. Consumers are a fickle bunch and will leave in a second. Suddenly that valuation doesn’t look so hot.

Is social media really all that? I know it’s heresy to think that social media may not be the second coming of the Web boom, but there are a few areas of concern. Perhaps Mozilla’s social media meets browser effort hurts traffic at MySpace and Facebook. Perhaps someone cooks up a technology that allows you to take your profile–and all of your friends–somewhere else easily. Bottom line: We don’t know how much money social media can make.

I’m with Larry on all but his last point. Social Media really IS all that.

 

Link Love:
MySpace Music Players: MySpace Speaks

Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups

Reko Launches - More Social Networking in Firefox

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Social Media Now: MySpace to Offer Social News

The idea of MySpace launching a news aggregator is hardly surprising. After all MySpace parent Newscorp is not only one of the world’s largest newspaper and TV news companies but also one of the most creative. (FoxNews changed the tone of TV news forever. I’m certain Newscorp is more comfortable than most with blog-style news that mixes information, opinion and personality.)

Terry Heaton, who had the first post on MySpace News, says the service will gather stuff from websites, blogs, and members, combining Google News-style and Digg-style functionality. Om Malik offers the phrase social news.

The story comes a day after an enormous thread centering around a Doc Searls’ post recirculated all the old saws about traditional vs. citizen journalism–everyone’s a reporter, its the relationship that matters, etc.

Most of the conversation around the impact of Web 2.0 on news focuses on the newspaper’s role as producer of information and the impact of citizen journalism on professional journalism.

That impact is real and enormous and barely hinted at by the creeping blogification of newspapers (Chris Heuer wrote about USAToday’s makeover this week). Socially-enabling national newspapers has had an impact on the way newspaper people work. A friend at The Times said that there is competition in the newsroom to be at the top of the daily “most e-mailed” list. That competition is a kind of social feedback. So to are comments (but only when editors and reporters are involved in the conversation).

But social news does more than just undermine the news gathering primacy of traditional journalism. It also unwinds the aggregator function of newspapers.

Ten years ago technology gave people the power to be reporters of their own lives. Today technology enables community aggregation. That’s what Digg and Technorati and del.icio.us allow–something beyond the self-selected aggregation of RSS feeds. Tagging, ranking and sharing create public hierarchical lists of information. That’s what newspaper editors used to do. The Internet is an enormous, on-going Page One meeting.

Can any one aggregation service capture all that? We’ll find out. So far efforts to pull together that kind of grand unified shared aggregation haven’t lived up to the promise. Maybe MySpace News, which will have both the problems and benefits of serving a closed group of members, will show us how it can be done.  Will it be to all sources of information or just those with which it cuts deals? How will it exploit it’s members input? And most of all will newspapers feel the influence?

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Social Media Club Phoenix:Revolution in Marketing Mini-Conference

Damn, we did it again! Although about five people who had signed up called in sick, about fifty people who hadn’t registered in advance showed up, and we blew the doors off the room for the third month in a row. When I asked people to raise their hands and tell me if they were producers or consumers of social media (by which I meant “do you already participate, or are you hear to learn?”), the room was divided almost equally in half.

Because of the enormous amount of interest in social media, we are holding a mini-conference the morning of March 1 at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. Chris Heuer will come down to give us some good definitions of social media, followed by three case studies of Arizona organizations who are heavily involved, and keynoted by the grand old man of the space,  Robert Scoble and his better half. You will be able to sign up next week, but in the mean time you can save a spot by emailing me at francine@stealthmode.com.

Because we were talking about the Social Media Press release tonight, we had many PR people in the room, and one former BusinessWire employee who defended the traditional wire service method of distribution. We also had a radio talk show host who said she had never received anything but the traditional press release, and she reminded us that the revolution may not have really begun. I think some of us needed to hear that.  We live in our own little word of podcasts and BlogHauses.
We talked a bit about the elements of the press release–which of them were new and which were just additive to traditional releases. It then became clear that while most PR practitioners now felt comfortable with links in a press release, most still weren’t familiar with services like Digg, Technorati, or Deli.cio.us (sic), nor would it occur to them to, say, embed a video in a press release. Moreover, many people felt uncomfortable with giving the media “too much” information, which could mean losing control of the corporate messages.
Unfortunately, I’m a horrible moderator because I like to hear myself talk and I lectured on far too long about why everyone needed to know about what’s “out there” in the social media space and how it could be used to communicate with more than just media — with customers, constituents, shareholders, etc. But finally I shut up and let everyone network, and when I left, the room was still full.

We are begging everyone from Phoenix to sign up in advance for Feb. 8. We may have to cut off reservations.

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