Want the opportunity to create and develop the next hot local guide app for the Web and mobile devices on someone else’s dime? Citysearch is holding a nationwide contest challenging developers to create a new local guide application for the Sidewalk.com domain. The winner will receive $10,000 and possibly, the opportunity to develop and manage a new business venture with funding of up to 1M. See the official rules for more details.

The first stage is to submit an idea. Those who submit an acceptable idea will be declared semifinalists and will be provided a developer kit to create a prototype. Finalists will be selected from those who submit prototypes. Finalists will be awarded a trip to Los Angeles to present their concept to the panel of judges.

Is this the best way to find a great new mobile app for local guidance? It might be. Nobody has really defined the ideal user experience for local guidance yet, and it’s possible that one or more entrants will have creative ideas that, even if not fully realized in the contest, can be incorporated into a final product.

The deadline for idea submission is July 17, 2009. Full contest details are here.

Size. The most obvious difference is size – Pubcon South is a regional conference with half its attendees from Texas; the numbers looked to be in the mid-hundreds. SXSW draws attendees from all over the world and was expected to approach 10K. That made Pubcon fairly intimate while SXSW was a bit more impersonal. As one might expect, SXSW attendees were a lot more diverse in many ways.

Registration. Pubcon registration in Austin was smooth sailing. SXSW was a lengthy ordeal involving long lines and a couple of intermediate wait periods – first one had to pay, then stand and wait for a photo, then stand around again to wait for the badge. Clearly, registering thousands of people is a bigger task than signing in hundreds, but I’ve been to shows like CES and Comdex that dwarfed SXSW in size but got people through more quickly. I missed a panel I had hoped to attend because of the hour-plus delay in registration.

Venue. Pubcon’s venue was perhaps the most intimate setting in years – a small, suburban conference center with a large ballroom and two smaller conference rooms that allowed three session tracks. It seemed to work out well – most sessions were well attended, which wasn’t always the case in the six-track Las Vegas Pubcon. A bonus of the location was outstanding food, at least for a webmaster conference. One lunch featured bar-b-que, an Austin specialty. Attendees used to the dry, cold sandwiches served up by the Las Vegas Convention Center raved about the food.

SXSW is held in the Austin Convention Center with some sessions taking place in the neighboring Hilton. For a city of Austin’s size, the convention center struck me as unusually large, and most walking is around the lengthy perimeter of the building. The scale felt more like McCormick Place than a mid-size city convention center. I’m sure McCormick has more exhibit floor area, but navigating the Austin CC seemed to involve as much walking as some of the bigger venues.

Exhibits. SXSW had a good sized exhibit hall for film and interactive, and the people showing their wares ranged from CCNY Journalism to Google. This Pubcon had a few small displays from local vendors, but did not attempt to create the exhibit space offered in Las Vegas.

Presentations. This was the most interesting area of contrast. At each conference, I was able to take in only a small percentage of the panel discussions due to multiple tracks and hallway networking, but I did see a difference. Befitting its mission of helping webmasters, entrepreneurs, and businesses of all sizes get traffic and generate revenue, Pubcon sessions had titles like, Top Ten Techniques For Writing Headlines That Rock! and Organic Link Building Campaigns. SXSW, on the other hand, delved into topics like Minority Report is Real and Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam.

All of the Pubcon sessions I attended had panelists who were well prepared and wanted to give their audience some serious takeaways. Just about every Pubcon presenter was a hands-on expert in the topic being discussed.

SXSW panels, in contrast, varied tremendously and ranged from brilliant to boring. The worst were panel discussions where there seemed to be little or no preparation by the panelists. No slides, no conscious thought to what the audience needed to know, just people chatting at a table in front of a huge room. Tiny talking heads are not engaging or informative. And it wasn’t just me – several of those sessions started out with packed rooms, and saw massive attrition during the course of the discussion. Advice to panel moderators – be sure each panelist has a plan, a presentation, and takeaways for the audience, and that each panelist’s content complements that of the other panelists rather than overlaps. (At Pubcon, Lawrence Coburn of Rateitall.com moderated the Consumer-Created Content panel in which I spoke, and he communicated with me and the other panelists multiple times in the leadup to the event.)

One could argue that SXSW is less about “takeaways” and more about stimulating thought and discussion, but losing half the audience in the room accomplishes neither objective.

Despite some dud panels, though, SXSW had some that were indeed great examples of speakers who not only knew their topic but came prepared to communicate. In Politics, Technology, and Pop Culture Change v2 Lawrence Lessig showed that he is a Jedi master of Powerpoint, wielding his slides with precision as deadly as Obiwan’s light saber.

For me, the highlight of SXSW was Presenting Straight to the Brain featuring Cliff Atkinson, moderator (Beyond Bullet Points), Craig Ball (craigball.com), Jared Goralnick (AwayFind / SET Consulting), and Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users). The panelists all demonstrated their preso expertise with their own creative slides. Craig Ball showed how simple PowerPoint animation can bring concepts to life for an audience.

In short, the Pubcon panels were very audience-friendly and were loaded with useful info. SXSW packed more star power into their panels, but the quality varied. The best were very, very good.

Parties. SXSW is definitely one of the better party conferences. Generally, there were multiple “official” parties per evening, with plenty of private events taking place as well. The party action was scattered around downtown Austin. Only complaint – at events like SXSW, people want to mingle, talk, and network, but many of the venues seem to feature music so loud that one has to yell to be heard, and to repeat almost everything more than once. My vocal chords were shot after the first night at SXSW.

Pubcon South was a pretty weak party scene (no big blowouts like a night at Rain in LV!), but its final networking event at Logan’s in downtown Austin (the classic “pub con”) was perfect. Great local brews on tap, heavy hors d’oeuvres for those who came on an empty stomach, a venue that was cozy but easily held the crowd, and not so noisy as to hinder conversation. I don’t recall a reception/networking event at any other conference that worked as well as this one.

Twitter. One similarity between Pubcon and SXSW was the massive adoption of Twitter. It was very common to see many, many laptops open to Tweetdeck during panel sessions and keynotes. The hashtags #pubcon and #sxsw were usually in the top 10 trends while sessions were ongoing. In fact, there was so much live-tweeting that at SXSW most panels announced a separate hashtag just for that panel so that the participants in the room could interact more easily. It was common to see a live Twitter feed on the screen at both events. Some may question whether Twitter has hit the tipping point for the population as a whole, but clearly it had hit critical mass among the digital media types at these events.

Summary. I hope that the back to back scheduling of these events can be accomplished again next year. Both Pubcon and SXSW offer unique content and opportunities, and the ability to blend the two without additional travel is great.

Apparently, the folks at SXSW didn’t get the memo that you design your site for your users. I received an email invite to rate the panels I attended at SXSW, clicked on the link to go to http://rate.sxsw.com/, and got this:

For a presumably high-tech conference, creating a page that rejects the browser with the largest usage rate is just, well, weird. Is this some kind of elitist “we don’t like Microsoft” attitude at work? And whatever you think about IE, or Microsoft, or any other software product or company, should it influence the experience of your site users in a negative way?

Ball State University, the alma mater of David Letterman that has been developing a reputation for advanced media studies, Thursday unveiled a major initiative designed to advance the study of emerging media and to better prepare students for careers in a rapidly changing digital economy. The program, backed by $17.7 million in funding over the next five years from a combination of institutional and private sector sources, is another in a series of commitments the Indiana state university has made to become an area of academic excellence for the media industry.xxx

Ball State has long had a very strong communications and broadcasting program. A few years ago, I toured the school and found both their faculty and studio facilities very impressive. More recently, they have focused on new media, a nice segue from traditional mass communications efforts.

Between their ongoing new media efforts and having their first nationally ranked (and undefeated) football team, Ball State is generating plenty of positive press this year.

Yelp is a perfect example of the stakes in the reputation trade. Founded in 2004 with coverage of San Francisco, the site is now active nationwide, with 4 million reviews of everything from corner cafés to dog groomers. While it’s not yet profitable, Yelp’s pledge — “Real People. Real Reviews” — makes for an attractive business model. The company has raised $31 million and was recently ranked by TechCrunch as one of the VC-fueled startups most likely to weather an economic downturn.

Yet Yelp has also become a target of criticism. This past summer, a clutch of members of a Silicon Valley women’s networking group were banned from the site. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says the networkers had a “you review me, I review you” arrangement, which violates Yelp’s terms. Adryenn Ashley, one of the deleted, denies it. She promptly registered the site Yelp-sucks.com and recruited some 200 business owners for a potential class-action lawsuit, alleging their incomes were hurt and freedom of speech infringed. [From FastCompany - The Perils and Promise of the Reputation Economy by Anya Kamenetz.]

In my community building presentations, I’ve been citing this problem for years. As the stakes go up, the incentive to post biased or completely false reviews increases. The sophistication of the posting techniques is certainly on the rise, too, if the Yelp experience is any indication. We’ve come a long way from the competitor who registers a username and puts up one post to trash a rival.

In the long run, the anonymous review is doomed. The FastCompany article notes,

Ethan Lowry, cofounder of restaurant-ratings startup Urbanspoon, says in his experience “haters” and “shills” write most user reviews. So Urbanspoon bundles consumer votes with content indexed from professional critics and food bloggers. The latter are clearly Lowry’s favorites: “They’ve given up their anonymity and opened themselves up on some level to criticism that keeps them honest.”

Amazon also highlights reviews from those with verified identities. Traditional communities have dealt with this issue by reputation within the community – hang out in a forum for a few months, for example, and you’ll learn whose opinions are the most trustworthy. Certainly, the first post from a new member wouldn’t be weighted at the same level as one from a member with a history of 5,000 posts.

Today, though, reviews are used mostly by those unfamiliar with the community and who have little basis for evaluating credibility. Review content syndication may further separate the reviews from the context of the home site. Trying to effectively separate the good reviews from the biased will indeed be a challenge for the operators of review sites, and I’d expect to see enhanced member verification processes as part of the solution.

One site not included in the FastCompany article is Web 2.0 expert and widget guru Lawrence Coburn’s RateItAll, which offers users the opportunity to create their own categories for ratings and reviews. At a million uniques per month, RateItAll generates as much traffic as Zagat.com and AngiesList.com (two sites mentioned in the story) combined.

Notably, the story leads by noting that Dell recently pushed out $500K worth of refurb PCs via Twitter, no small feat for a free medium. I’m sure paid ad venues or direct mail pieces capable of moving that volume would have cost thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars. Score one for Twitter.

Tim Beyers, author of the Motley Fool piece, suggests that because of its network effect Twitter has created real value, and does some loose extrapolation to suggest a value in the $60 to $150 million range.

Still, if you:
1) Have a boss, and
2) Spend a lot of time on Twitter
be sure you have a good business case for Twittering at the office. Moving inventory is good. Making sales of any kind is good. Getting quick answers for tough tech questions is good. On the other hand, in today’s tough times, building your Twitter following for some vaguely defined future benefit could indeed be the equivalent of showing up at the office in a funny pleated shirt when everyone else is buttoned down.

Guy didn’t invent this f-word, which I verified by checking (of course) Google.

Even if you couldn’t have defined “fisking” if Regis Philbin was offering you a briefcase full of cash, you have almost certainly run across the behavior in forum communities. While occasionally such extensive quoting is good-natured and advances the discussion with its specificity, most of the time it is nit-picking and argumentative.

Get Rid of Auto-Quote! One of the first things I do when I set up a new forum is disable the auto-quote feature. If someone is going to be a fisker, at least he’ll have to work for it by doing some copy and paste work. (In addition, killing the auto-quote function prevents huge amounts of redundant content when a poster mindlessly quotes six paragraphs of text and adds only, “Yeah, I agree completely.”)

Moderation. Any one post with lots of quotes in it isn’t necessarily a problem. Fiskers are usually consistent, though, and their pattern of dissecting the posts of others becomes apparent. Often, a quiet word from a moderator can correct the behavior. Most fiskers are oblivious to the fact that their behavior is annoying or worse. Some, of course, will prove to be incorrigible.

You are now armed with an new word. When someone dissects your forum post line by line, instead of coming back with an even more detailed line-by-line rebuttal, just post, “Fisker! Fisker!”

While I don’t have the same kind of formal research behind my proposed eleventh guideline, I base it on years of observing visitor behavior to communities and blogs. What’s special about community sites like these? Because it’s easy for visitors to interact, these sites offer a window into what the visitor is thinking when they arrive for the first time. (Static sites with obvious contact mechanisms also provide this kind of insight, though perhaps to a lesser degree.)

What I have observed, time after time, is that some people assign massive credibility to the first viable search result. If they search for a company, a product, or a brand, they BELIEVE that the first result is that company, even when web-savvy individuals would instantly identify the page as a forum thread or blog post about the company. On a wine blog I frequent, I’m constantly surprised by the number of comments in the form of, “I really liked your wine. Where can I buy it in South Dakota?” Those comments typically appear on a blog post offering the author’s tasting notes for the wine in question.

Forum threads produce similar results. A thread titled, “Are Acme Widgets any good?” will draw posts from new arrivals like, “Dear Acme, I tried to call you but couldn’t find the phone number. My widget broke and I need a replacement.” While this may lead to merriment among the community regulars, it’s clear that the visitor clicked on a top-ranked result for “Acme Widgets” and ignored all evidence that the page they reached was not the Acme corporate site.

Contact forms on all types of sites show how confused visitors can be about whose site they think they visited. When I’ve examined these cases of mistaken identity, it almost always traces back to a top search result for a term related to the visitor’s real target.

Before we dismiss such errors as purely the bumblings of hapless newbies, I think we should ask ourselves whether even more experienced users find a top result more credible than a lower-ranked one. While most users won’t mistake a blog post for the actual company, I DO think that a high ranking for a very relevant brand or product name is a credibility booster – perhaps as much as, say, Stanford’s #4 – showing the people behind your website. Unfortunately, my #11 guideline may require a lot more effort than adding a few bios to the “about us” page.

Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, was just on stage and he spoke about trying to harness the web and the tremendous number of users, around 50 million.

He said he had asked his managers to figure out what salaries can be cut because users are volunteering to do those jobs for free. Why should Intuit pay salaries when users are doing a far better job than Intuit staff?

Mr Smith said that users are providing better answers to key questions than Intuit staff. He is looking to try to harness that resource in many ways. [From Will social media lead to user generated unemployment? ]

I’ve visited any number of software support forums, and it’s not uncommon to find a mix of company techies and well-informed users helping out other users having problems. This is a great model, as often those using the software in a production environment have a better grasp of some aspects of the product’s use. Also, if the user community is big enough, there’s a better chance that “long tail” problems, i.e., those that occur infrequently, might be seen by solved by a user with a similar environment.

I do find it quite bizarre that a CEO would suggest sacking techs because the users are so effective. In my experience, these employee/volunteer communities evolve over time and there’s rarely a surplus of company experts hanging around with nothing to do. As word gets out to the Intuit support community, the implication that the volunteers are so effective that paid staff is being let go could be quite damaging to the morale and motivation of the volunteer helpers.

Community participation is a delicate balance. If a member arrived at the community seeking help and found both a welcoming group and the answers he needed, that member may decide to stick around. Soon, he may be helping other members with even less knowledge. After a year or two passes, the clueless newbie may have become a true expert, and may still be helping others.

If Intuit has excess tech support staff, I’d lay the “blame” more on their products getting better and the universe of users gradually getting more familiar with software and technology. Most of Intuit’s products do the same thing they have been doing for years – it’s hard to imagine that the firm hasn’t incorporated user feedback and problem reports into each new generation of the products. Still, Smith’s statement is provocative and in some ways indicative of the way Web communities are changing the way business is done.

Sphinn IS being Sabotaged

The above password protected PDF document contains a “small sampling” of content that “is” getting indexed “under” and “across” the Sphinn.com domain. The abuse is far greater than the “small sampling” shown in The Smoking Gunn document. If you don’t believe me at this point, please do ping me and I’ll be more than happy to explain in great detail. The Sphinn Community is being “Sabotaged” by various entities from a multitude of angles.

1. What’s New Sphamm (the bait and, the diversion tactics)
2. Auto Voting on Sphinn – SphinnBot Sphamm (the bottom feeders fueling the What’s New Sphamm)
3. Nodes “outside” of the Sphinn Network (the sharks and whales feeding off Sphinn)
4. Nodes “underneath” the Sphinn Network (the black hole sucking the lifeblood from your Node, Community and, Network Reputations).

For a full view of all of this, see Content Cross Contamination. As a guy managing or involved in a variety of Web communities, I can attest that just about any user-driven site that gets traction will draw the unwelcome attentions of those who want to abuse it. The part that I don’t quite understand is why, if some Sphinn members seem to be engaging in questionable promotional activity, they are still active and in apparent good standing.

PageOneResults is a very bright guy, and this body of research is extensive… At the same time, Sphinn is part of Danny Sullivan’s Third Door Media group, and it seems like these guys would wise up quickly to any attempts at manipulation. Experienced community operators are pretty good at sniffing out even subtle promotion, and one would think that anything documentable would have been quashed quickly.

I’m going to continue to digest P1R’s data… In the meantime, what do you think?