Dave McClure on Social Networking and Web 2.0

Dave McClure addressed a Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club/Edinburgh-Stanford Link event on 29 January 2008. He outlined some of the advantages of “Web 2.0″, talked extensively on the use of real-time metrics to evolve web services, developed a history of social networking websites, and highlighted the interesting aspects of Facebook. This article summarises Dave’s talk, with some additional commentary from myself.

Advantages of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is characterised by the:

Dave McClure did not actually try and define the term, which was probably wise. Generally the term is applied to websites and services where users collaborate or share content.

Web 2.0 has a number of advantages (although it could be argued that some of these apply to earlier iterations of the internet too):

Metrics for Startups

I believe the ability to very accurately analyse website usage, implement changes, and then analyse the results, is a key advantage of web-based services. It is an advantage often overlooked by information technology professionals and programmers. I’m not sure why - possibly because web service developers:

Or perhaps Web 2.0 just isn’t mature enough yet for developers to have to worry too much about optimisation: A new concept for a site will probably either fail horribly or generate super-normal profits. The sector isn’t yet competing on very tight margins, where subtle optimisation can make or break profitability. Of course, optimisation of websites can deliver substantial changes in user behaviour. For example, I have found that a relatively subtle change to the position of an advert can alter the revenue generated by over 20%.

Dave McClure developed the AARRR model. AARRR segments the five stages of building a profitable user-base for a website:

  1. Acquisition - gaining new users from channels such as search or advertising.
  2. Activation - users’ first experience of the site: do they progress beyond the “landing page” they first see?
  3. Retention - do users come back?
  4. Referral - do users invite their friends to visit?
  5. Revenue - do all those users create a revenue stream?

For each stage, the site operator should analyse at least one metric. The table below gives some possible metrics for each stage, with a sample target conversion ratio (the proportion that reach that stage).

Category User Status (Test) Conversion Target %
Acquisition Visit Site - or landing page or external widget 100%
Doesn’t Abandon: Views 2+ pages, stays 10+ seconds, 2+ clicks 70%
Activation Happy 1st Visit: Views x pages, stays y seconds, z clicks 30%
Email/Blog/RSS/Widget Signup - anything that could lead to a repeat visit 5%
Account Signup - includes profile data 2%
Retention Email or RSS leading to clickthrough 3%
Repeat Visitor: 3+ visits in first 30 days 2%
Referral Refer 1+ users who visit the site 2%
Refer 1+ users who activate 1%
Revenue User generates minimum revenue 2%
User generates break-even revenue 1%

These metrics become critical to the design of the product. Poor activation conversion ratio? Work on the landing page(s): Guess at an improvement, test it out on the site, analyse the feedback, and iterate improvements. Gradually you’ll optimise performance of the site.

I find this attempt to structure analysis and relate it back to core business performance, very interesting. However, the sample metrics can be improved on a lot, depending on the nature of the site. For example, to track virality (referral), I might watch the monthly number of del.icio.us adds, or monitor the number of new links posted on forums (Google’s Webmaster tools allow that). Tracking users all the way through the tree from arrival to revenue generation needs to done pragmatically where revenue is generated from very infrequent “big-ticket” sales: With minimal day-to-day data, it can take a long time to determine whether a change genuinely has improved long-term revenue, or whether natural fluctuations in day-to-day earnings just contrived to make it a “good day/week/month”.

Now I know this approach works, but why it works is less clear. We might like to think that we are genuinely improving the user experience, and maybe we are. However, it could be argued that merely the act of change is perceived by users as an improvement - a variation of the Hawthorne effect. The counter argument to the Hawthorne effect can be seen on sites with low proportions of repeat visitors: The majority of those experiencing the improvement will not know what was implemented before.

History of Social Networking

Dave McClure’s interpretation of the timeline of the development of social networking sites is as interesting for what it includes, as for what it omits: No Geocities; no usenet; no forums; no MUDs… The following timeline shows key services in chronological order, except without dates - all the services shown were created within the last ten years:

The future may be “Social Prediction Networks”. This is a variation on the theme of using trusted networks to filter content: Instead of Blogging meets Search, I characterise Social Prediction Networks as Digg meets Facebook. Shrewd observers will note Facebook has already implemented Digg-like features, while simultaneously topic-specific, community-orientated Digg-clones are being launched. People gather into interest groups around a topic, and then through use of tagging and rating, the community filters content. The system effectively predicts what other people in the group will find useful. This may be an optimum approach for groups above the Dunbar number (or an equivalent number representing the maximum number of people a person can form stable relationships with).

Interesting Aspects of Facebook

Three were discussed:

  1. Social graph (friend list) - email and SMS (mobile phone) service providers have rich data on the frequency of communication between people, yet aren’t using this information to form social networks. Dave noted that two major email service providers, Yahoo and AOL, are currently struggling to thrive - this could be an avenue for their future development.
  2. Shared social activity streams - knowledge of what your friends think is important. Friends are more likely to influence you than people you do not know.
  3. API/Platform - dynamic behaviour and links across your social network.

Further Observations

Will growth in social networks continue? Yes - the friend list adds value to the content.

Will others compete? Probably, as a “long-tail” of networks, likely topic-specific.

Can social networks be monetarized better? Currently social networking services generate far less revenue than search services. The challenge for social networking sites is to move towards the wealthy territory of search services. At the same time, search services are moving towards becoming more like social networking sites.

How can traditional companies engage with social networking sites? Social networking sites work best for sales where a product has a strong aspect of peer pressure in the decision to buy. The most important advice is not to create a copy of a website: Instead provide less complex content that uses social networks to draw users to a website.

Applications for social networks tend to be over-complicated, normally because programmers attempt to implement functions found in software they have previously written for other platforms or websites. Generally the successful applications are very simple. Some developers have opted to break complex applications into a series of smaller applications, and use the virality of social networking sites to build traffic for one application from another.

Social network applications are exceptionally viral. They can gain users very rapidly, yet also loose users just as fast. Much of this virality comes from feeds, which typically alert friends when a user installs an application. Within a few years the feed is likely to be based on actual usage of an application.

Facebook now allows applications to be added to “fan pages” (or product pages) - so individual users need not now be forced to install an application to use it.

Those using email lists for retention are best to focus on the title of the email, and not the content. Merely make it easy to find a URL in the content. The key decision for the reader is whether to open the email. What the email says is almost irrelevant - they’ve already decided to visit the site based on the title.

Tim Howgego, 31st January 2008. Related topics: Analysis, Edinburgh, Information Management, Social Networking, Web 2.0. 1 Comment »

Gravatars and Identity

Gravatars are “globally recognised avatars”. Here, an avatar is a simple image representing the author of a ‘blog or forum comment. The name is derived from Hindu philosophy, although the blog/forum avatars are the direct descendants of the avatars found in video games, specifically role-play titles. This article discusses the limitations of Gravatars, and hints at a future based on game-like automated customisation for forum avatars.

Be warned that this is another inadequately researched “thoughts” article, that covers a lot of rather well-discussed territory superficially, and perhaps needs to be developed further.

Gravatars in Practice

The idea is simple: Instead of uploading your image to every website you interact with, upload it centrally, and allow each website you use to retrieve your avatar from the central source. Gravatars are linked to your email address, which already uniquely identifies you on the internet. Gravatars are currently still the preserve of hardcore bloggers. And no, they are not installed on this site yet either (comments are infrequent here). While implementing the code to support Gravatars is straightforward, it is still rarely done on ‘blogs, and almost never added to internet forums. Like OpenID, it is the sort of idea that needs to attain a critical mass of widespread use before it will become truly useful.

I opted to try using Gravatars at El’s Extreme Anglin’ forums. Partly because (by design) BBPress has no avatar features by default, yet users still expect to be able to personalise their posts by using avatars. Partly because not allowing image uploads or remote image hosting removes a potential avenue of attack by hackers. Partly because it seems logical.

However, already some issues are emerging:

  1. Where users attempt to create a Gravatar account, they invariably fail to get Gravatars working, with the result that the default image shows.
  2. The majority of users don’t already have, or don’t wish to use Gravatars.

In my opinion, the first problem is a design failing of Gravatar’s website: After uploading an image, Gravatar needs to be told to use the image that has just been uploaded. This final step in the process is not sufficiently clear to most users because it should not be necessary - “I just gave you an image to use, why aren’t you using it?”

Multiple Identities and Avatars

The second problem in part reflects the tendency of ordinary internet users (that is, not the people that post a lot of blog comments) not to have Gravatars associated with their email addresses. That may change in time, particularly in tech-savvy areas such as gaming.

But one specific reason for not using Gravatars is the fact that a user may want to display a different image depending on the type of site they are posting on. Gravatar’s service allows multiple images to be uploaded, but only one image can be used at a time. The only way I know to attach different images to different websites is to use different email addresses. Sure, there is no shortage of free email services… but doesn’t that merely replace one administrative saving (an avatar that follows you) with another (a need to create and monitor a new email account)?

At the root of the problem is the premise that one person = one email = one identity = one avatar. In the sphere of online gaming, at least, that is a very contentious, and consequently dangerous, assumption to make.

It is worth analysing our perceptions on this.

Some people have a desire for separate visual identities, yet all managed from the same email address. Deep philosophical debate can ensue. Does that mean our emails are closer to us as physical entities than our avatars? Or is it just a purely pragmatic visual thing? A lolcat might look great on a casual discussion forum, but would be less convincing (or socially acceptable) against a formal piece of academic writing.

Sometimes it is very practical: On a service such as Facebook, I find it useful to see a picture of what a person physically looks like, because most of the people I have befriended there are people that I am likely to meet and talk to physically. (And I’m terrible at remembering names, so am frequently confused by friend requests from cute animals or blurry-looking groups of drunk people.) In contrast, on a gaming discussion forum, seeing an image of the actual person posting is not especially relevant, and can even be somewhat distracting.

Every online game that introduces something akin to Tabula Rasa’s surname (where the surname is linked to the player, and shows on all their alts), seems to upset people that want to separate out characters/avatars from any link to other characters/avatars. Yet in Live Action Role-Play (like a Massively Multiplayer Online Game RolePlay-Player-vs-Player server, but without the computers), it was often said that most players end up playing themselves: While you can attempt to change your visual identity, your behaviour ultimately reflects who you are. Clay Shirky draws an interesting conclusion from the case of Kaycee Nicole, a famous internet hoax involving false identity:

“When the community understands that you’ve been doing it and you’re faking, that is seen as a huge and violent transgression. And they will expend an astonishing amount of energy to find you and punish you. So identity is much less slippery than the early literature would lead us to believe.”

Avatars of the Future

Are these perceptions changing over time? Personally I’ve found that over the last ten years my real and virtual identities have merged: I no longer actively try and isolate one from another, and pretend that one is a different person from the other. But that may simply reflect my growing personal acceptance of who I am, and not be related to physical-vs-virtual identity. At the other end of the scale their are the social networking virgins: Young adults who continue to refuse to engage in any for of internet networking with their peers, because they fear that they will no longer be able to hide the truth about what they really do from polite society, potential employers, or anyone else that might “use the web against them”. Will they change with time?

The key question remains, will multiple avatars always be a requirement of an online presence, or is this merely a transitional phase while people experiment with the concept? It might be argued that in either case Gravatar is the wrong approach, since currently there is a need for multiple visual identities - a mainstream need, not the need of a quirky few - yet the system struggles to accommodate that need. It follows that linking a visual internet identity to an email address is flawed.

A solution would be to add a further sub-classification of avatar after the email address: me@example.com:work would somehow determine that the site displaying the avatar was a work-related one, and display a sensible work-related avatar.

But avatars are still incredibly basic. On some forums, you will now find a line below the avatar that says “I’m feel a tired”, yet the avatar still shows a happy smiling face. Or the poster is on holiday in Florida… yet there is still snow in the background of their picture. Better to alter the face in the image to reflect the mood or alter the background of the avatar to reflect the place. (With appropriate alt and title tags, of course!)

The historic link between forum and game avatars is already coming full circle, with avatar generators for “games” like World of Warcraft and Gaia Online that allow the creation of forum avatars based on virtual-world appearance. It isn’t a huge step forward to make avatars a lot more “realistic” than they traditionally have been.

With all those customisation options, perhaps the old method of site-specific avatars wasn’t so bad after all?

Tim Howgego, 29th January 2008. Related topics: El, Gravatar, Identity, Thoughts. Comment »

Mike Masnick on Techdirt, Information and Consultancy

These are notes from a talk given by Mike Masnick, CEO of Techdirt, a “technology information company”. Mike addressed a small Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club/Edinburgh-Stanford Link gathering on 22 January 2008. He outlined the company’s history and philosophy - “use what’s abundant to solve what’s scarce” - and outlined an interesting approach to the delivery of expert/consultancy business services.

Brief History of Techdirt

In 1997 Mike started running a technology-orientated email newsletter and then website, purely as a hobby. In 2000 he found himself looking for a job, and decided to develop Techdirt into a business. He applied the ethos of “taking a major problem and solving it” to information: Businesses found that there was a lot of information being published on the internet which they could not filter and use effectively. Techdirt’s original business model gathered up information, and then filtered it out based on what they knew each customer would be interested in.

Techdirt was funded by revenue from business clients, not advertising, so survived the “Dot Com” crash. Between 2000 and 2004 there was no money available for investment. However there were plenty of good people willing to work, and a lot of excess infrastructures (servers, etc) available. “Use what’s abundant to solve what’s scarce”: The initial business model used the abundant labour and technology, and did not rely on external funding. That model might now be reversed.

Insight

By 2005 blogging had become more widespread, with news-readers increasingly used to aggregate data. Techdirt can still add value for businesses by managing information: I’m glad to know I’m not the only one with 1000+ unread ‘blog posts heaped up in Google Reader…

While most blogs were of little value for the information they contained, some bloggers were insightful experts on topics. All these insightful people were a resource that needed to be connected to companies. What developed was the Insight Community - essentially eBay for technology experts and freelance consultancy services: Companies announce requirements for analysis, with a set amount of money available for the best (or best 2-3) pieces of work that meet their requirements. Freelance experts then compete with one another to provide the best analysis at the price offered. Companies gain multiple points of view, and access to a wider community of experts on the topic.

Techdirt take 25-40% of the money paid by companies - Techdirt’s value added to the independent experts is in putting them in contact with companies - do the experts’ marketing and networking for them. Ultimately, companies can still employ the experts directly, and save Techdirt’s fee. This may happen once companies become aware of how good individual experts’ work is.

Attracting experts was far harder for Techdirt than attracting companies to supply jobs. Initially a lot of work was generated by technology start-ups, but has since shifted towards better-established businesses, which tend to bring repeat business.

I come from an environment where any competition is solely to attain the contract to start the work. I find the concept of the experts competing on the actual output delivered intriguing. I suspect it only works well in niches where all the expert’s value is in their ability to add unique perspective or insight. A lot of mainstream consultancy involves the management of processes, or deploying teams to gather information. More than one person/organisation trying to perform those tasks in competition with one another would needlessly duplicate cost, with the potential to cause chaos.

Mike “has plans” to roll this approach out beyond the technology sector, but did not detail them.

In Review

Mike Masnick summarised his talk as:

His biggest surprise? “That we’re not more successful!”

What would he have done differently? Hired someone that knew how to manage people… The best moments for the company in terms of outward successes also heralded the toughest internal conflicts.

Postscript: The Music Industry

In response to a question, Mike outlined how the philosophy of selling scarcity, not trying to sell what is abundant, needed to be applied to the music/recording industry. The industry believes it is still selling music as a physical product (the CD), yet in the age of the internet, music is abundant. While sales of CDs are in decline, most other aspects of the industry are very healthy. For example, revenue from concert tickets is at an all time [more-or-less] high. So, rather than fight and try to criminalize its own consumers, the music/recording industry should simply change its business model, and focus on scarce aspects: For example, access the artist. An interesting perspective on probably the best-known case of how not to react to the arrival of the internet.

Further Reading

Tim Howgego, 29th January 2008. Related topics: Analysis, Consultancy, Edinburgh, Information Management. 3 Comments »

Networks of Trust in Personal Information Management

In an earlier article, I mused on the role of “thought leaders” in indirectly influencing the popularity of websites. These are further rough thoughts on the topic. Caveat: this text is not well researched.

My basic premise is this: ‘Web authors and ‘bloggers are creating trust-based filters for information. Many online writers are looking to evoke discussion and change. But most readers, most of the time, are just trying to get through the day, and aren’t too interested in discussion and change. For them, the author “sounds like they know what they’re talking about”. That creates a sense of trust, and validates the author as a reliable filter for information on that topic. Even the most objective and discerning people don’t have time to review everything themselves. They merely spend more time determining which source to trust. Likely, others will trust them, which makes the source they trust a very important actor indeed.

So we create a network of trust for information. If I want to know something about topic x I might follow the recommendation of author y, because I trust their depth of reading on that topic.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all webmasters and bloggers are automatically trusted. Far from it. The internet or “blogosphere” is so easy to publish to, it fills up with low-grade content faster than any other media in history. Authors have to earn trust, at least from their early readers. Subsequent readers may be more prepared to trust because others are already trusting (a herd or celebrity mentality).

Why is this happening? Take Herbert Simon’s statement that, “the rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention.” The sentiment is repeated in Davenport and Beck’s “The Attention Economy“. We simply can’t manage all the available information any more.

Is that really a new problem? It probably hasn’t been possible to know everything there is to know since the early Victorian era. In some cases there are now technical barriers to knowledge: Simply being well educated isn’t enough to allow one to understand most cutting edge scientific developments in depth. In most cases the prime problem is volume of information: In our World of Warcraft example, more information is written than is possible for a human to read. Finding the important or useful information within can be immensely time-consuming.

Trusting people one barely knows to filter information does not automatically turn these authors into celebrities. In a few cases it may do - some readers will feel the need to trust only those who appeal to many. However, if there is a trend towards writing in narrow niches with in-depth content, rather than content with mass-appeal, an individual author may never be known to millions of people, because the topics they write about aren’t sufficiently mainstream.

Those narrow niches will similarly prevent most authors from emulating the role of pre-internet mass media, notably newspapers. They do, none the less, retain the same duty to their readers: Their readers may be inclined to trust them, but that trust will be eroded if abused. Of course, much like modern mass media, readers can still be subtly manipulated…

As I noted, Google’s biasing of sources by the number and strength links to the source. This automated approach fails to value who is creating links, so has become less valuable as the internet has become more mainstream and prone to abuse. There does not yet seem to be an effective automated equivalent of personalised networks of trust - perhaps because emulating humans is hard to do?

Tim Howgego, 8th January 2008. Related topics: Data, Information Management, Thoughts. Comment »

El’s Extreme Anglin’ - 2007 Retrospective - Part II

This article continues my observations on running El’s Extreme Anglin’, a World of Warcraft (WoW) fishing guide, with a look at some of the trends in usage during 2007. You may also be interested in part I of the 2007 retrospective, which contained some observations on aspects such as thought leadership, quality and links.

Read more of this article »

Tim Howgego, 3rd January 2008. Related topics: Analysis, El, Learn2Play, Video Games, WoW. 3 Comments »

El’s Extreme Anglin’ - 2007 Retrospective - Part I

El, a gnome fisher-woman. El’s Extreme Anglin’ is a guide to fishing in the game World of Warcraft. This article contains some of my observations from running El’s Extreme Anglin’ during 2007. Further analysis of trends, and commentary on the introduction of advertising to El’s Extreme Anglin’ are contained in follow-up articles.

Virtual Fishing

Fishing games have been around for a long time. Fish Tycoon is one of the top selling “casual” games. The popularity of fishing in the first major modern MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), Ultima Online, even took designer Richard Garriott by surprise [1].

Unlike most fishing games, fishing is a relatively minor part of the world’s most popular current conventional MMOG, World of Warcraft (WoW). It is not fundamental to the game’s design: Players can play the game without knowing how to fish. Like much of WoW, the basics of fishing are exceptionally easy to master, yet fishing becomes exceptionally complex, the further players get into it.

El’s Extreme Anglin’

El’s Extreme Anglin’ was launched in August 2006, as a guide to fishing in WoW. It was initially written to fill knowledge gaps in that complexity: Nobody had previously explored issues such as what skill is required to cast in different areas, or how pools of fish appear, or the extent to which catch rates varied by time of day.

The guide has always tried to cater to a wide audience - from the beginner to the expert. Both are important in developing such a guide: The beginner material is primarily what gets read. But, the expert material is crucial, even if it is rarely read:

Why are thought leaders so important? They are the key to viral marketing: Allow me to explain…

Thought Leaders and Virality

El’s Extreme Anglin’ was never actively marketed. I posted a couple of links to it in forums, and made it as accessible as possible to search engines. Yet within a year it was attracting over 60,000 individual people each month, and had attained the top spot in Google searches for key terms like “WoW fishing” (beating over 250,000 other sources [2]). Where did all that traffic and search-engine karma come from?

Thought leaders: A very small group of influential people within communities, who other players instinctively respect for their knowledge. Perhaps a hybrid “connector-maven”, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point terminology: They don’t just know; they are able to communicate what they know down to the masses. WoW examples include the forum gurus (like EU’s Highlander), the bloggers and virtual world aficionados (like Alice Taylor and Tobold), and webmasters of community sites (people like Thott and Teza). These are people who generally know everything already published, recognise that what you’re publishing is better, and rapidly link to, recommend, or generally promote your material.

Thought leaders themselves won’t generate much traffic, but the people they influence will in turn influence others. From them, the recommendations spiral out and down the pyramid. The further down the pyramid you go, the more the recommendations are likely to be personal, and highly “viral”: For example, one-to-one using in-game chat channels, or posted on small guild forums. Those are far less tangible, but ultimately create the bulk of traffic, not the links from the flagship sites (the value of links from larger sites is explored below).

The realisation that so much influence is in the hands of so few should not come as a surprise. However, the value of certain people in filtering information for the rest of us is still hugely underestimated on the internet, even if the principal underpins the success of search engines like Google [3].

Quality

Quality matters because it is crucial to the decisions of thought leaders. They will only recommend the best they know - their reputation depends on it. But does it matter to the average reader? My basic philosophy when writing is to do something different or better. I certainly can’t do it cheaper, since it is already free to the end user, and I’m not yet able to convince myself I can sell a guide to fishing, even though some WoW guides do sell commercially. I wrote about fishing in depth because at the time, nobody else had. And ever since, I’ve tried to keep the guide as definitive as possible.

It works. Players do actually trust what I write. I wrote a response to Blizzard’s Black Temple Attunement April Fools joke: Detailed instructions on how to catch Djakar, which included references to two +75 skill fishing poles, both entirely fictional. For months afterwards, people would refer to these poles in forum posts, like they were “real”. Along with trust comes responsibility…

I could have written a dozen mediocre texts about WoW fishing in the time it took to write El’s book. I opted for quality, while trying to accommodate the differing levels of experience of readers by offering a mix of articles. This is where it becomes hard to resolve the contradiction (in my mind, at least) between thought leadership, the long tail, and the cult of the amateur [4]. Perhaps I’ll return to that one in a future article…

There is a misconception that being linked to from one of the flagship WoW community sites like WoW Insider or MMO Champion causes a “slashdot effect” - a dramatic increase in traffic the day the link is posted.

It doesn’t.

At the end of October I wrote a detailed article about fishing changes in patch 2.3. I tagged a link onto the bottom of a forum thread at World of Raids, made it to their front page the next day, and then bounced round most of the WoW community news sites (and a few podcasts and blogs) over the next week [5]. The total number of visitors spiked at 10,000 per day on two occasions, which was only just over double the prevailing traffic at the time.

Articles like that on patch 2.3 are of fleeting interest, and within a month hardly anyone was reading about it. They don’t create many additional page views. But they are excellent “loss leaders”: People will follow the link it, mentally log the fact that they’ve found a website about fishing, and a few weeks later when they actually want some information about fishing, they’ll come back and read other parts of the site.

Continue reading part II of El’s Extreme Anglin’ 2007 Retrospective…

Notes

  1. The Tabula Rasa website used to contain the following quote by Richard Garriott: “I was struck in the early Ultima Online days by how many people were engaged in the profession of fishing, despite the fact that the simulation was a mere 50/50 dice roll with each use of the fishing pole.”
  2. Although most of these transpire to be either a re-hash of Highlander’s Cooking and Fishing levelling guide, a doorway for a gold seller, an affiliate link farm, or all of the above.
  3. Google’s pioneering search technology, Page Rank, effectively ranks content based on how widely it is linked to on the internet. Before Search Engine Optimisation became mainstream, links between web pages were generally a measure of how much real people rated the content on the linked site. Today the approach fails outside of mainstream popular culture, because links can be purchased or spammed (popular culture is immune only because the cost of spamming your way to the top becomes prohibitive). If the actual person placing the link could be traced, and their level of knowledge of the subject assessed, we would recreate the matrix created by thought leadership automatically. Currently, only us humans can make that judgement, and probably only the more discerning of us: Do we trust the author of the link as an expert in this field or not? I find myself disagreeing with Larry Page, when he said that, “The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world.” The ultimate search engine does not need to understand anything. It merely needs to know who to trust.
  4. What contradiction?
    • Thought leadership demands quality…
    • Yet the long tail tells us that the more choice we offer, the more we will “sell” overall…
    • While the cult of the amateur implies that the lowest common denominator will eclipse everything else.
  5. Competition for “news” between WoW websites is intense. Many increasingly appear so desperate for content (my opinion) that they will post almost anything even remotely newsworthy. And the moment one site has covered it, the others follow.

Appendix: Timeline

Tim Howgego, 2nd January 2008. Related topics: El, Learn2Play, Thoughts, Video Games, WoW. 3 Comments »