One of the downsides of the growing importance of web communities is that marketers will attempt to manipulate them to promote their products. That isn’t anything new – people were spamming forums a decade ago, and were probably doing the same since the earliest days of the BBS. The greater the traffic at a site, the more attractive it is as a spam target. Digg.com has seen its share of promotion attempts, as an article that makes the front page of Digg will see a quick and massive influx of traffic. Now, Greg Sandoval of CNET reports in Digg continues to battle phony stories that the social site banned, and then reinstated, one of their most popular users.
Dec 192006
Dec 192006
Web 2.0 is all about user created content, and a new project, We Are Smarter Than Me, aims to take that concept a step farther. The project will let thousands of community efforts write a book on the topic of “on how the emergence of community and social networks will change the future rules of business.”
Dec 142006
The New York Times ran an article, In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them, that explains how web traffic counts have been inflated when pop up or pop under ads bring up content from the originating site. I.e., the popup is a page from Entrepreneur.com, which ends up counting as a pageview and a visit for that site. I didn’t choose Entrepreneur.com by accident – they had their Nielsen unique visitor counts for last April cut from 7.6 million to 2 million. Nielsen found that a large portion of their so-called visits were from Web users who had pop unders from Entrepreneur.com delivered on another website.
Dec 112006
We’ve referenced O’Reilly’s rambling description of Web 2.0 in his seminal post, aptly titled “What Is Web 2.0?” This was really more a set of semi-optional characteristics than a definition. Now, O’Reilly is trying to boil it down to a concise statement in his new Web 2.0 Compact Definition:
Dec 092006
Can Zune catch iPod? is the provocative title of an article at CNN.com. The answer is almost certainly, “no,” at least in the short run. Then again, Microsoft probably doesn’t expect to match iPod’s sales in the immediate future.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article by Katherine Rosman, Blackberry Orphans, about parents whose compulsive email habits have left their kids feeling left out. Although these PDA/phone combos have been around for years, their increasing market share is making their intrusions more common:
Dec 082006
You’d have to be crazy to start a new search engine, right? After all, you’d be contending with Google’s armies of PhDs, Yahoo’s site traffic, Microsoft’s billions, and Ask’s media strengths. Apparently there are more than a few technologists and venture capitalists willing to take on the challenge. BusinessWeek reports in Start-ups rethink Internet search that two new search engines are under development: Hakia and ChaCha Search. The new engines have lofty goals: