trendpreneur

There’s a really fascinating post over at TechCrunch today by Mary Hodder, someone who’s been working in ‘live search’ – what we now call the real-time web – for some time.

The article’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight some of the difficulties with real-time conversations that she mentions. A great example is the Michael Jackson Tweet-splosion; if you’re taking a purely search-based view, what do you search for? “MJ”? “Michael”? “King of Pop”? As Mary says, that’s a relatively easy example!

More interestingly is the comments Mary makes about authority. How do you measure authority online? Well, as part of my initial PhD research I looked at various web-structure algorithms (yes, including PageRank) and how you might exploit them along with semantic information to gain a true understanding of the importance of an article.

This research is rooted in scientific publications, in fact; we can learn a lot from the relatively ‘clean’ case of scientific paper citations, although the language used on the web is about a thousand times more interesting. (And, thus, a thousand times harder to process.)

If I told you how we actually track influence, of course, I’d have to kill you. But check out Mary’s article, it’s great food for thought.

Today’s mild disturbance in the sedated post-Christmas Force is a throwaway thought by Loic Le Meur on being able to search by authority on Twitter. Duly picked up by Techcrunch, the debate seems to be flitting back and forth. There are a couple of good points coming out of it: number of followers doesn’t necessarily confer authority, except perhaps to those with a lot themselves; being able to filter out which are the useful voices worth listening to amidst a sea of noise is useful; and basing search on social networking (prioritising friends, then friends of friends) is a possible alternative than to purely count followers.

Authority and influence are something I take an interest in and a magic one-size-fits-all solution isn’t necessarily the sort of thing you can hack up in a one-paragraph comment somewhere (indeed, due to the differing nature of individuals’ trust and respect, it might not exist at all). However, it’s good to see so many different minds at work on something I’ve been mulling over for a while. It’s also somewhat frightening; based on the leisure of the Christmas-New Year period, and the sudden profile of this concept, I would be very surprised if a couple of homebrew solutions didn’t pop up over the next week. I’m already thinking how you’d accomplish some of the solutions most talked about with the Twitter API.

Talking of New Year, traditionally a time where we often vow to change our ways, to break bad habits and to establish good ones — the helpful posts and newsletters about how to get one’s finances ship-shape ready for 2009 are already well underway. (Of course, mine aren’t helped by the fact a letter from the estate agent demanding money I don’t actually owe them greeted me as I got back home. I’ve never seen a company more incompetent.) The usual advice is being given: sort out credit cards (hello 0% balance transfers), make sure your savings are working for you, see if you can trim down different payments by switching supplier or threatening to, etc.

The most useful one I’ve seen is perhaps the simplest. Be on top of your money. Log into your internet banking regularly, be aware of exactly what you’re spending, and if there’s a problem, work through it logically rather than avoiding it. Much as I would love to have Mint or Wesabe grab all my personal financial data and present me with beautfiful pie charts, the faff of shuffling data from HSBC is possibly too much (though I’ll try!).

As a side note, connecting both money and 2009 (how apt!), my free trial of Basecamp expires on New Year’s Day. I have this marked in several places so I don’t fall into the clever trap of paying for a month’s subscription because I was one day late cancelling. However, I’m not really sure if I want to cancel. I like Basecamp, it looks great, and even for one-man-band project organisation it’s nice to find somewhere central to put stuff. But it’s not quite right, and neither’s Huddle. Perhaps a simple blog and linked calendar is more what I’m after, but I have a feeling that anything requiring too much effort will lose the battle for control of my project management.

Managing online identities can get confusing, especially for algorithms trying to understand who you really are…

I’ve had two articles kicking around in saved tabs for a while now: Home Bases and Outposts over at ProBlogger, and How to Build Your Online Brand from Mashable. Both posts are aimed at an audience wishing to extend their online ’self’, mostly for branding or business reasons; the overall message to anyone establishing a web presence is ‘don’t limit it to just a website’. Instead, reach out to different related social sites, build up profiles and relationships, find people to connect with — this extended network, spanning multiple social media outlets, will enable you to reach far further than a standalone website can.

Okay, but we knew all that already, right? That’s why we all have Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and so on and so forth. Whenever the latest hip Web 2.0 site goes into beta, we all scramble to sign up and become ‘friends’ with the great and the good. What’s interesting, to me, is what happens next… [...]