Jeff Jarvis has the inside scoop on the USA Today Re-Design.  Apparently, this was a 50-person five month project at Gannett.  Here are Jeff’s highlights of what I would describe as the social / “web 2.0″ components of this new design:

On this page, you’ll see the On Deadline blog front-and-center. It has been “enormously successful,” Kinsey said, for USA Today. I do like how papers have discovered that the incredibly light and easy content management tool called a blog enables them to publish faster and easier. On the lower left, they — like other papers — are now promoting lots of their own blogs.

Here they expose the most popular stories as determined by readership, commenting, emailing, and recommendation — note the Diggification. (I look forward to most-linked as well.) In their effort to link out to other sources, even competitors, see this example of on-page external RSS feeds, powered by Newsgator.

Here they begin to use tags (these are machine-generated; given the biorhythm of news, I wonder whether a folksonomy can take hold in time). We’ll be seeing much more of that on news site, I’ll bet, as they move away from strict (USAToday-like) taxonomy to an all-roads-lead-to-Rome structure to give you many paths to relevant news, via links, tags, and search.

And one of the cooler features is a personal page that is populated with, among other things, the comments you leave around the site. It is an effort to enable a social network on the site built around content, theirs and ours. (I said that I hope they will make this portable; I’d like to put up on my blog a feed of the comments I leave on a news site with reviews I leave at Amazon and so on: my distributed identity.)

There are two big take aways reviewing this for me:

1. If the goal for the popular items was “diggification”, they did a terrible job.  There is no transparency into how may comments, email, etc… Also, as a user you have no ability to vote (eg digg this / bury this) on the articles. Obviously this may not have been the goal - just reacting to what I saw / read on Jeff’s bog
2. The auto-generated tag stuff looks really interesting.  I wonder if they’ll include these tags in the RSS feeds for their content?  However, it is interesting again they don’t really encourage their users to participate and add tags.  (Unless this functionality wasn’t obvious from the designs.)

There is a great article by Brian Morrissey in AdWeek titled “Advertisers Follow the Digital Bread Crumbs“ (sub req)  The article explains that:

For years, it’s been standard to use digital clues left by consumers to refine online messaging, but increasingly that same data is proving useful to offline tactics as well.

Brian backs up this claim detailing a story of Snapple discovering additional clients for their new Green Tea product after their agency (Mediaedge:cia) ran a campaign through the Tacoda Ad Network.  They had anticipated this product appealing to “young, athletic consumers” but discovered “electronic shoppers” as an important audience. 

How did they do this? It was accomplished using Tacoda … ”tracking ad clicks during a six-week web push” (see my review of Tacoda as a ‘digital attention company’ here)

Obviously, I agree with the article’s conclusion that advertisers are just begining to leverage this information.  However, I’m also excited about the role this information can play in across an organization. 

In addition to being used for refining targets for advertising campaigns, I can imagine marketers using this information both earlier and later in the product lifecycle.  In fact, I believe this type of insight could provide value from product design & development all the way to lead qualification & classification. 

It certainly is an exciting time to be operating in this ‘digitial attention ecosystem.’

There is an interesting new working group at the Web3d Consortium trying to develop a common protocol for the 3D web.  While the charter document is fairly technical, this seems like a positive step in the evolution of 3D worlds.  The goal of the working group is:

The main goal of the Web3D Consortium Networking Working Group is to propose amendments to the X3D specification to strengthen its open standards networking capability in such a way that it: is portable across platforms (including Web3D Browsers), is defined at the node level so it is easier for content developer and authoring tools to use with limited scripting, if any, provides support for communicating to non X3D applications, allows the routing of events over a network using the same routing mechanism used for internal routing, provides for high efficiency transfer of data or nodes, supports secure communication, allows for possible error correction option (e.g. For wireless connections), supports the main Web/internet standards: http, tcp/ip, udp and possibly https, allows for streaming of media and level of detail (LOD), and can be used with interaction sensors.
Another goal of the WG is to define a set of best practices for Browser implementers and another for content developers. These documents should provide guidance on things like efficiency and security.

This is an important group for digital media types to monitor if they are interested in leveraging 3D worlds for their work (found via: Web3D)

… And this example of turning a negative to a positive does nothing but validate my belief in the company.

Jason has an interesting post  further explaining his position on Wikipedia’s Technological Obscurification  He spent a significant time talking about this in the last Calacanis Cast podcast.  I listed to the podcast this morning and found the Digg example even more compelling.   (Digg removing the top submitters).

Interestingly, I believe the ‘technical obscurification’ is just a symptom of monolithic systems being vulnerable to gaming.  The initial reaction is to try to make the system more ‘obscurified’ (yes, I realize this is a word Jason made up.)  However, it still doesn’t change the most important fact,  Namely, that with a single set of rules (or algorithm) being used to predict relevant content for a large webservice  — one algorithm directs large chunks of traffic.  Therefore, gamming / spamming the system becomes a HUGE problem.  An initial reaction is to try & ‘obscurify’ the system.  However, it doesn’t fix the problem.

Instead, each user should have a separate (personalized) algorithm delivering content to them. Think about the reaction from search engine optimization folks as Google announced increasing their focus on personalized search results … "oh my how will we ‘optimize’ for personalized results."

Interestingly, it appears that Digg is now considering personalizing the results as well.  

He also wants Digg to start showing you stories based on what you have digged in the past.

That is the solution, not obscurification!  Interestingly, this is something we know a little bit about at mSpoke.  Kevin … I’ll be waiting for your call!

I went home to my parent’s  in Ohio this weekend.  My parent’s run a fitness equipment distribution company Fitness Wholesale As we were discussing their business, my father & I started talking about ways to embed short videos on their site. 

I showed him how to do this using You Tube.  We created a first video (below):

Interestingly, people are actually finding the video on YouTube. That’s right … social media optimization in the fitness industry.  This has been a pleasant surprise.

Obviously, there are some ways to improve it such as:

• adding pre & post roll information on Fitness Wholesale to the video
• adding better / more popular ‘tags’ to the video
• promoting the channel on their site

Anyway, its interesting to see how social media can is helping my parent’s fitness distribution company.

PS - This is my first post using Qumana - any feedback?

There is a great post on the Light Sped Ventures Blog which does a great job explaining why … “New Forms of Advertising Are Hard.“  Definitely worth a read!

As Scrum Master & Product Manager at mSpoke, it has become obvious that I really needed to learn Ruby on Rails.  I don’t need to actually code anything (don’t worry guys).  I just need to get a level of concrete understanding of the basic framework of a rails web application. 

At one point, I was a pretty decent Fox Pro & Visual Basic programmer.  Then I realized that I’d be much more effective doing other things (sales, marketing, product management, etc…) So it has been years since I’ve written any quantity of code.  I certainly don’t plan on changing this any time soon.  However, I’ve actually really enjoyed learning about rails web development.

To help me with this, I’ve been reading “Agile Web Development with Rails“  I’m through the first six chapters and have already found myself looking at the web through an additional lenses. 

I’m especially impressed with how quickly you can get some basic functionality in place.  I’m sure the ‘devils are in the details’ as modifications start being made.  However, it is impressive none-the-less.

I’ll try to blog some of my observations & frustrations as I get up to speed.

It is being parodied by 1938 media …

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the upcoming Presidential Election being the first web 2.0 election.  Bloggers have been invited to tour with candidates.  And Venture Capitalists have criticized candidates for not making the social aspects of their site compelling enough.  It seems like every day in the last week there has been some ‘political’ story on TechMeme 

Well if we are entering a period of “Politics 2.0″, then there is at least one Senator who is way out of place.  Senator Stevens (the senior senator from Alaska) first made waves by comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes.”  He recently decided to sponsor a bill that would eliminate social media sites from schools & libraries.  Ironically, this could include Wikipedia - arguably one of the best references available for students today.  I thought I’d utilize a few of these social media sites to find a few quotes from his last misstep…

First, I wanted to find the link to his ’series of tubes’ quotes and where did I find it?  Wikipedia.  Here is the ‘tubes’ quote from Wikipedia:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.^[2]

Next, I wanted to see if I could find a video of it — ahh YouTube:

I guess the point is that these social media sites are a key part of how I find information.  Students in school today deserve & need access to those same tools!

I’m not sure if Senator Stevens is effective in other roles he plays on capital hill.  However, you would think after his last “tube misstep” he might stay away from legislating Internet policies for some time.  I guess not!  It’s time for the people of Alaska to step in …

Found Via: aVC