Processing Flock

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As a Beta Hound for ReadWriteWeb I get to explore some fascinating startups – not the least of which was the social media browser Flock. A recent upgrade has brought me back to my personal blog in order to demonstrate the flexibility of this super cool innovation. Version 0.9 is proving to be a very useful and interesting service that I believe many people are going to enjoy.

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So, look for the public release of this beta on Tuesday and I hope everyone enjoys the utility and time savings of using one of the coolest browsers around.

Cheers, Phil

While you are here enjoy Celine singing a song for you!

Blogged with Flock

Particls Launches Public Beta

Particls came out of an invitation only alpha testing today with advanced alerts and other innovations. This anticipated startup has been hard at work developing one of the best RSS and data feed tools of Web 2.0 See my post at ReadWriteWeb for more information and links to this great time saver and perhaps the future of RSS.

After the testing I realized just how useful this service can truly be. At first the learning curve and my deadline caused me some issues. The biggest of these was that I was not very selective in choosing the RSS and feeds that I wanted notification on. More precisely, I did not narrow the customization in the UI field so that filtering could limit the data. The result was a barrage of notifications. The issue is easily handled via feedback on the notifications which helps Particls learn what to present.

Out There
Particls like many very innovative services could be really “out there” into the Web 3.0 landscape with some more additions. It is not really fair to comment too much about the few negative aspects of the service since it is so new. One aspect that was mentioned at ReadWrite was email notification. Another that I know is possible would be any update to a favorite web site or service. If the engine is strong enough, which remains to be seen, then users can essentially have a smart buddy to keep them up on any development Web wide. That is “out there” in my book. Time is the most crucial commodity any of us have and it looks like Particls could save us all plenty.

Digg in the Dirt – Get Dirty

Top 10 Digger banned for half an hour!
Well, maybe I exaggerate; perhaps it was two hours of something. I saw one of the most amazing things today; I need to share it with you.

I got a message with several URL’s pointing me to this Digg about a top Digger being banned. I made comment about how ridiculous I thought this seemed and proceeded to ask some of my contacts about it. The whole thing was so bizarre to me, but then Digg has been doing some really Coo Coo stuff lately any way.

The bottom line is, in the time it took for me to get back to see other comments I was directed to by friends the ban had been lifted. Perhaps the 42 Diggs on the submission announcing the ban had something to do with this? I must have been away for like 15 minutes and the story got 38 Diggs! Now that’s a response for you, half an hour from the time the story appears until Digg removes the ban.

Profy Buried With Others
Given the issues with every story anyone submits from our blog being buried systematically, you can imagine how fuzzy that must have felt. I won’t get into our repeated appeals to Digg to explain our situation. What is important for the reader to know is that a much screwed up system is in effect at one of your most popular sites.

There have been claims and assumptions surrounding Digg in regard to a “bury crew” that was hiding submitted stories fro various reasons, one person told me that Digg buried submissions themselves based on certain criteria not specified but understood, and all kinds of mumbo jumbo in an effort to answer my questions about our exclusion from the information pool there.
Besides the obvious inequality system made apparent with today’s activity, there are deeper implications into these strange events. I would not even be telling you about them were it not for the fact that communities and people get hurt by these things. That’s right one of your communities gets hurt because of either stupidity or maliciousness on the part of others!

Partial Answer
I ran across a post by Kevin Rose on the Digg blog when I was doing some further reading, and was really shocked at what I saw. In a post from March 1st Rose specifically acknowledges the problem (which appears worse than I thought), and assures readers that something has been done to make the system better. Rose said, and I quote:

“We have tweaked some systems so that Digg is now able to be much more granular in the way it blocks offending content, so that Digg doesn’t necessarily need to block entire domains or subdomains. Apologies to any sites we’ve inconvenienced with our previous system.”

I am not sure exactly how difficult it would have been to rectify this situation, but I can only assume that they got so many emails from “domains” that they decided to blanket cover any that could find this post. So they knew all along that some people would get buried or excluded.

Math Can Hurt
It turns out that Digg has the capability ton analyze data that the average user is not aware of. I certainly was not at any rate, and I was somewhat stunned by the Matrix like way these people approach users. I guess it is to be expected from super geeks, but the message I got from all of this was not exactly a human one.

From what I can gather, this system is run by an algorithm that can and will surgically remove any domain or user automatically based on a set of variables and parameters. The screen shot I provide below illustrates exactly what you as a user represent to these people.

Conclusions
There is a reason no one ever answered those emails, and a reason Profy and other communities can be essentially excluded from their potential readers. Computers and math programs do not give a crap about people! Instead of having real people contact us or other people about problems, Rose had his people analyze freaking flow charts and high tech scatter grams. Then he issued an all points bulletin to everyone saying: “There may be a problem Houston, but we told Hal 9000 to do better!” The reason the top 10 Digger was contacted so fast was not because Digg cared about a human being or justice for that matter, the contact was likely because a huge blip (spike) appeared on the monitor showing 40 or 50 diggs in record time!

I hope everyone is as stupefied as I am about this, and watch tomorrow for my recommendations for alternatives to being considered a “copper top.”

Late Note: A CEO of another site who is a friend of mine also happens to be a programmer/developer. He emailed me and was upset that 1708 Diggs had been buried at Digg in a two hour period, that’s almost 25,000 in a day!

Honor in the Web Community

Right and Wrong -Nothing in BetweenThis is a veritable impossibility to me!
Every community member has to have some degree of control over the whole, and certainly several people should be able to do something about anything. True the end result might not meet the original intention, but we have a responsability and something always has to be done. If not, the next time it will be you who is angered, blindsided, hamstrung, backstabbed or mistreated in some similar way.

By way of illustration, I provide the following screen shots of all the posts anyone dugg from profy articles in the last week. You will note that most are from different individuals, and that there are none listed when the field for “buried” articles is not checked. The converse reveals that there were actually 10 dugg and then buried within a few hours of having been dugg. This imagery deos not reflect other stories past the 7 days. A picture should be worth a thousand words, especially since a couple of these stories are highly original and were viewed by hundreds of people outside the Digg realm. I look forward to you comments and suggestions. See I did something!

And that’s all I have to say about that!

Joost Squeezes More Content In

Joost to get free content from JumpTV!
I was pretty miffed at Joost the other day, when I went inside the beta test forum and essentially called them escaped Nazi war criminals over our unanswered requests for invitations. As it turned out I had to eat my words (and I did feel bad) because the messages just got lost in the cracks at Joost. The folks there were really nice and gave me some tokens to distribute. Now I am even happier to be able to report about Joost’s latest coup.

It looks like Joost had sealed a deal with JumpTV to offer some of their programming to the Joost viewers. JumpTV says they are ready to offer Joost some of their ethnic programming for free, and this will be a big boost to Joost’s growing programming list.

The Canadian company, with 270 channels of ethnic programming, broadcasts content from 70 countries! This is a huge deal in my opinion, and Joost must be working their market strategists overtime to come up with sweet deals like this. The world market for content is growing and though English content is huge, the rest of the world cannot be ignored. Someone at Joost obviously recognizes this important market and is hoping to wrap much of it up before competitors do.
Joost, which we have covered rather extensively on our multi author blog at Profy, uses the same Internet technology that upset the music industry a few years back, and has already made deals to distribute Viacom’s MTV content and Paramount movie content. Joost executives are not silent about even more deals to follow, as the Web 2.0 innovator obviously begins to make its move on the big time.
Skype founders Zennstrom and Friis seem determined to grab a huge niche of Web 2.0 with their telephony aspect and now the apparent lead in Internet TV broadcasting. I am not trying to count anyone out, as we have seen great developments from Apple, Microsoft and video communities like Veoh. Joost is just pulling ahead with continued improvements in programming and their system.

I predicted in a previous post for Profy that Joost would turn the Internet upside down to some extent, and it is beginning to look like I was correct for once. To be honest, it was kid of a “no brain-er”, as the quality of the site and attention to detail there was easily evident.
According to a Reuters press release via Yahoo!, JumpTV will launch on Joost with a Spanish language version from Columbia.

Now, all I have to do is answer 200 emails from potential Joost testers.

SEO – Straight from their Big Mouth

A press release via 24-7 announced today the merging of bigmouthmedia and Global Media. Global Media is a premier marketing company with many distinguished clients worldwide and bigmouthmedia is an SEO company in the UK that provides online marketing and optimization services.
I posted a more detailed report on this merger at another blog site in case you are interested. I am writing this post because I want my readers to know my exact feeling about SEO companies in general. in particular, I would like to point out that blatant disregard that SEO companies have for any intelligence you readers might have. Evidence of this disregard can be found right on the front page of the bigmouth site.
The companies expressed purpose is to essentially get any client who can afford them to the top page ranking they can afford. Well, let me be clear, they do not say: “speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?” But I think we are all capable of reading between the lines here. The most significant service the company provides is fast page rank via search engine manipulation by link building, manual search engine submission, cloaking of catalog sites, and other techno skulduggery.
bigmouthmedia freely states that they will foster web communities around your brand and utilize social search to get your site better placement. They make no bones about listing blog communities as resources to this end, and I quote: “We actively encourage blogging of a positive message around your brand, using sites like Del.icio.us, dig and reddit to generate a groundswell of support which boost your listings to new heights.”
What is up with this? We constantly complain about spam and goofed up advertising, while we watch these predators fill Web 2.0 with advertising that none of us need.
When are we going to have enough? All it would take would be some concerted effort by the web community to wards the viable advertisers these SEO companies feed off of and the larger entities would effect the change. People are so empowered yet they seldom do more than n feed some never ending instant gratification mode. I don’t quite understand?
As a blogger, I can post the 2007 equivalent of “The Declaration of Independence”, and scarcely one blogger or forum would even take note, except to perhaps put it down as something from “back in the day stuff.” However, let me bring to one well placed bloggers attention a toy bug that flies like a dragonfly and every blog in the world has it as front page news. Don’t get me wrong, I love toys and gadgets as much as the next guy, but the pollution of the whole web is slightly more impactive.
I am not putting down my blog contemporaries, I am just frustrated by inactivity where there should be plenty. Rather than worrying about how we can make the next dollar off of the digital money tree, can’t we figure out better ways that will help everyone. Not everyone who uses the web is an SEO wizard, startup CEO or superblogger! We are supposed to be here to inform and even protect the very platform we express ourselves in.
Let me know your thoughts on these issues. I know, you may have to think, but if you have to spend less time searching over 200 ad sites then you will have more time to talk on the cell phone. The Internet is turniing into one giant Walmart full of worthless cupie dolls right before your eyes. Let’s go for the go for the excellence can we?