Tagging
Hey, You, Get Off of My Name!
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 3, 2008 | Share This
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Bo Diddley, the pioneering rock n’ roll genius who died yesterday knew a thing or two about marketing and branding. Consider this: Ellas McDaniel re-dubbed himself as Diddley, had his first hit record with a song called “Bo Diddley” (the first of many times he would work his new name into a song title and lyrics) and made sure that the ubiquitous shave-and-a-haircut beat that was his trademark was referred to far and wide as “the Bo Diddley beat.” The man was SEO before there were any E’s to S.
Now imagine if you popped Diddley’s name into your search engine of choice and the results page featured a big ol’ ad that said “Bo Diddley Music” with a click- through to Chuck Berry’s site. Though Search Engines frown on this when the name is under copyright it does happen and in some cases is part of an overall marketing strategy.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that focuses on the naughty folks who contravene the search engine’s ban on using another company’s copyrighted name as a paid keyword. The accompanying vid however deals with a slightly different and murkier issue, perhaps because author Emily Steel is talking to someone from a company that hopes to get paid for protecting your good brand name from being sullied. Here it is in living Murdoch-vision:
The general practice of buying up terms, phrases and even copyrighted names associated with a competitor is not uncommon, though the effectiveness is open to debate. If your brand is the victim of this kind of keyword jacking it’s a terrible scourge. On the other hand, if your brand has used it to checkmate a rival’s campaign, it’s flippin’ genius.
A good example of this can be found in Reprise Media’s own typically thorough (excuse us while we plug ourselves) Superbowl Search Marketing Scorecard from this past February. CareerBuilder did a series of ads based on the theme of “Follow your heart.” The clever folks at Monster.com bought that phrase and other similar ones and even integrated it into their online ad copy. No doubt many job seekers who may not have been aware of Monster found that they offered an alternative to CareerBuilder that met their needs.
Whether or not you are using someone else’s brand name or campaign is maybe less important than why you’re doing it, and where you’re sending people once they click. Sending a bunch of folks who are looking for Bo Diddley to the Chuck Berry product only works if the landing page you send them to doesn’t make them feel tricked and hostile. Sending them to a page that says “If you like Bo Diddley, check out Chuck Berry’s CD” and includes the ability to sample some tunes could actually create a positive experience for the user.
This also can have some bearing on the price advertisers pay for their ads. Most search engines incorporate landing page content into their quality score – the algorithm that is used to determine the price they’ll pay in the auction. In fact Google makes this very clear in their Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines for AdWords. If your landing page doesn’t feature content that’s relevant to the keyword you’re buying? Prices will go up and in some cases your ads will even be deactivated. Not the kind of ROI most advertisers want.
Ultimately, the question of whether or not companies should be able to buy competitive brand terms comes down to intent – deception vs. comparison:
- Brand comparison is a crucial and age-old tool in the marketing toolbox – saying “if you like x, try Y” creates instant context for people. Think classic campaigns like the Pepsi Challenge and Snapple’s “We’re number 2.”
- But when users click on an ad, they’re expecting relevant content on the other end. If you don’t deliver, you may end up damaging your relationship with your user, and that kind of negative impression can be very hard to erase.
Searchviews: Week in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 11, 2008 | Share This
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This week, we’re launching Searchviews: Week in Review, a digest of sorts in which we’ll highlight the past week’s Searchviews posts, along with noting other top stories in search, social media, and Internet news. Look for it every Friday. Happy weekend-reading:
- This week’s theme was “open,” and it’s shaping up to be the theme of the year. First, Sony BMG let go of DRM, but they came up with a dumb scheme to sell redeemable giftcards. (Thankfully, they got smart and struck a deal with Amazon yesterday).
- In other “open” news, Google and Facebook joined the Data Portability Workgroup, which wants to let Internet users take their social data from site to site. Not to be outdone, LinkedIn, SixApart, and Flickr jumped on board, as well. Many of these sites don’t actually want users to be able to do this because it hurts their pageviews, so we’ll see what happens.
- And final point in “open”: Bebo now invites everyone to design applications for its network.
- Wikia Search finally launched, but to some pretty harsh criticism. Lesson to entrepreneurs: less hype, more private alpha. Incidentally, another “human-powered” search engine, Mahalo, is growing like gangbusters despite initial blogosphere scoffing.
- Ask.com lost a CEO, but kept it in the family with their replacement. Barry Diller really wants you to try his search engine, people, and 2008 is the year he wants to see you migrate over en masse.
- Microsoft kicked off what’s sure to be a year of many M&As with its acquisition of Norwegian enterprise search company FAST.
- Surely our favorite story this week, though we didn’t spill any digital ink on it ourselves, is the Facebook hoax pulled by one young Frenchman, Arash Derambarsh, who got himself “elected” Facebook president via an app… and managed to convince the entire French press that it actually means something. Apparently lack of understanding of social networking is even more pronounced in the European mainstream media (as in, they don’t get it at all) than it is stateside (where journalists and bloggers represent the bulk of users over 30).
- And finally, a bunch of stats released this week affirmed something we’ve been feeling in our gut for a while: online video will overtake television, probably. I mean, would you rather watch those annoying judges from Dancing with the Stars on their own spin-off, dance-off show that is already painfully hyped and will probably make you want to pluck your eyes out… or would you watch this compact but totally genius interpretation of our American past, Drunk History? Not that we’re biased or anything, but we’ll say more about this particular topic soon.
Looking for Someone? Just Ask Spock
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Written By Drupad Sil | August 8, 2007 | Share This
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After much hype and coverage in the tech world, people-search engine Spock launched earlier today in open-beta form. Founded in 2006, the site claims to have indexed over 100 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records, including those from public social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Friendster.
According to the company, 30% of internet searches are people related. In order to tap this search sub-market, Spock utilizes algorithms that pull together content on specific people from their online public profiles and other people-search engines. The engine also takes existing content on bigger sites like Wikipedia or IMDB.com to round out the data.
To feed their people-search index, Spock asks users to add tags, photos, and links, to the original pulled data. Users can vote tags up or down, affecting the popularity of the tag and thereby how high it ranks as an adjective describing the person it is attached to. This adds a community feel to the search engine, and ensures that, given enough users, the community’s ‘real’ opinion on each individual will surface. In this way, Spock leverages user-generated voting to determine relevancy.
Spock Chief Executive Jaideep Singh plans to gain revenue by serving ads next to searches (a la Google), although the company will wait a few months before doing so, probably timing it to coincide with Spock coming out of public beta. Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch muses on what is likely to be an initial problem for Spock, however:
“Spock is certainly fun, and encourages user interaction by adding and voting on descriptive tags. It could easily become a definitive source of information about people. It will, however, likely take a massive number of page views to properly monetize the product - people searches do not generate the kind of advertising rates that ecommerce and other searches command.”
On a final note, Spock users can “claim” their name and upload pictures, friend others etc…. all of which will affect the search results tied to their name. All this makes Spock a very interesting mix between a search engine and social networking tool. We’ll have to keep an eye on the beta (it’s been running extremely slowly today) and see how popular it becomes.
Technorati Redesign Lays Foundation for Social Search
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 23, 2007 | Share This
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The past April, David Sifry announced that the “blogosphere” was no longer a relevant term for the conversations taking place online. He wrote, “Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.” And so, Technorati began referring to its index as the “Live Web”. Though the new terminology at first seemed trivial, the significance of these words is finally evident in the complete re-structuring of Technorati.com that launched this morning.
Technorati has officially transitioned into a search portal for all user-generated content. They’ve changed their back and front end architecture to encompass, “the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.” In doing so, they’ve not only cleaned up the site, they’ve made it tremendously more useful - a fact evidenced by overwhelming positive initial feedback.
Most interestingly, the change was driven by the growth of tagged media. Writes Sifry, “This is being facilitated by the phenomenon of tags and tagging, which helps to unify and organize the rapidly expanding world of user-generated media. As more and more publishing tools support the use of tags, the better we are able to assemble collections of social media based on the interests of our users.” When tagging was first introduced in 2005, the size of Technorati’s tagged index went from zero to 20 million posts in just 6 months. Today, tagging is a pervasive categorization system used on all types of user-generated media - In February, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 28% of all internet users have tagged online content. As tagging becomes the standard of semantic organization across user-generated content, search will have to adjust accordingly. Could we see engines based on user-generated rankings, like Wikia, prevail over the algorithms of Google, Yahoo and MSN?
The other important element of Technorati’s redesign is its emphasis on popular content. Nearly every part of Technorati’s new navigation structure helps people find archived content based on it’s popularity - beyond the search box, users browse by tag, content type, “Top” categories, or WTF. By using popularity ranking and tags as the only elements of its navigation (beyond search), Technorati underscores the importance of offering social filters to help sort content online.
In sum, I think Technorati has approached the “live web” in a really interesting and amorphous way. I appreciate that they recognize different media types within the same “social” space, and admire the execution of Technorati’s new UI. I wonder what effect, if any, this will have on the use of Technorati as an alternate search engine, and the subsequent traffic increase to blogs that are well indexed within Technorati. I wonder how this will change social media marketing strategies, specifically those that submit content to sites that are included in Technorati’s index (like Youtube, Eventful, last.fm, etc). It seems like there’s a big opportunity here to create dynamic cross-media tagging campaigns to promote your site’s visibility in Technorati results. On that note, I wonder how Technorati will deal with marketers trying to game the system - and I wonder (skeptically) if they’ll ever really have a spam-free index.
Technorati Releases “State of the Live Web”
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 5, 2007 | Share This
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After six months of silence, David Sifry has finally released an updated State of the Blogosphere report - well, technically, “State of the Live Web“. The new data isn’t revolutionary, but it does show a rich picture of many obvious trends. Sifry reports:
- Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, with about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day.
- Spam and splogs (spam blogs) continue to be a problem in the blogosphere
- The blogosphere is no longer doubling every six months, but that’s understandable considering its size
- Posting volume is growing more slowly, though spikes in posts per day occur surrounding global crises.
- Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets.
- Japanese blogs occupy the greatest percentage of the blogosphere
- Tagging has seen “explosive growth”
(and of course…)
- “Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots as the leading blog search engine”
Two significant points stand out from this report. One: the decline in posting volume, and two: the “explosive” use of tagging. The fact that people are posting less is likely attributed to their increased participation in other networks - Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. The increase in tagging, likewise, shows a growing perception that content is threaded across multiple networks. Together, these points indicate a new kind of awareness required for online marketers. As users’ attention fans, it will be increasingly important to leverage search as the gathering point of all related content. The footprint of a site, thus, may one day be more valuable than the site itself.
For more detail, check out some of Sifry’s charts :
- Daily Posting Volume
- Weblogs Cumulative
- Total Posts Using Tags
- Monthly Percent of Posts Indexed Using Tags
A Search for Search That Works
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Written By Reprise Media | December 23, 2005 | Share This
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Last week Yahoo acquired del.icio.us, the wiki-style social book-marking service for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was very public and widely covered, though speculated and explained only by the most hardened industry insiders. The purchase of del.icio.us is just the latest in a long-time-coming consolidation of user-based applications by the majors, possibly kicked-off with Yahoo!’s high-profile acquisition of Flickr last year.
Yahoo! also recently launched My Web 2.0, which intends to be a user-specific search functionality which includes for page-ranking technology, but more intently adds the shared knowledge from people we trust. And earlier this month Yahoo! created a new platform titled Yahoo! Answers where users get to ask, answer and browse each other’s questions. Because these search results are more based on the aggregation of user-generated content (or folksonomies), the system is more conducive to common language, which is a huge accomodation. Ultimately this is where Yahoo!’s acquisition of Del.icio.us becomes so intriguing and suggestive of a new age of search.
Yahoo!’s definitely got it right if their effort is to redefine web-search, moving away from the algorithmic methods defined by Google. Recognizing its myriad shortcomings, Google has long been diminishing their reliance on Page Rank, a democratized algorithm whereby sites are indexed based on their link structure (mainly inbound) and the value of those sites that vouch for them. Page Rank essentially makes the business of indexing the web one big popularity contest and helps emerging blue-chip and up-and-coming sites snowball far beyond their natural momentum should allow. Additionally, Page Rank has given a tremendous edge to sites like CitySearch, eBay and NexTag, as their various listings clog up the resultant listings. Perhaps the biggest way Page Rank fails is where it neglects the valance of those links and connections. Google will recognize 316,000 inbound links to Amazon.com, but won’t distinguish whether they speak in favor of the products Amazon sells or links that speak against the brand and its corporate policies. Run the query “link:google.com” and you’ll find over 3.7 million trackbacks. I wouldn’t begin to speculate the breakdown between positive coverage, financial coverage, and backlash content.
The best example of how this Page Rank system fails the user so completely is with Google Bombing, the process by which large numbers of sites can influence the search results, in order to reflect personal opinions, values and vendettas. Consider that infamous scenario where a query for “miserable failure” links back to a biography of the President on the official White House website. Another example, type our President’s name into Google and you’ll find the 6th organic link tracks back to a site that juxtaposes photos of Dubya with chimpanzees in similar poses. Whether the ultimate site is dignified for the President or not is irrelevant, what’s critical is how unproductive the instance is to what’s supposed to be a freely democratized, non-partisan informational utility.
Most recently, the private search network Wink launched widespread. Wink pulls web-links from user-powered sites like Slashdot, Digg, Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0 and last but not least, the aforementioned Deli.icio.us. While Wink will backfill their listings with Google and host AdSense as well, these various applications and folksonomies represent the true intent of the engine, and ultimately a shift from the extremely misguided field of algorithmic search exemplified by that Google search for “miserable failure”.
On a broader level, this new “Web 2.0″-titled wave of social networking, social bookmarking and wiki-style folksonomies represents a move towards the more collaborative global community first described in Howard Reingold’s seminal book from 1991 “The Virtual Community”. There, the man known as the “first citizen of the Internet” spoke of true online communities defined and constructed by the participants, with the users as architects to the web. While currently based on the algorithmic contribution, Web 2.0 is spinning out in all sorts of directions, including assets and provisions from social networks, photo-sharing and blogging applications, Wikis, ratings and review contents (Amazon recommends, Gizmodo, Guidester), so on and so forth. Google may always form the basis for search algorithms, but the new guard will create an Internet that more closely reflects the contents we create online, and how those contents mirror our personal interests, values and connections.
Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.
Tagyu Does It All For You
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Written By Reprise Media | October 10, 2005 | Share This
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One of the coolest ideas at Web 2.1, Tagyu is a free service that automatically suggest tags for your content based on a URL or chunk of text.
It works by comparing your text to text other folks have written and how they’ve tagged it - a sort of “reverse-folksonomy” as Jeff Jarvis puts it and was founded by Adam Kalsey, formerly of Pheedo.
Check out the official Tagyu Blog here.
Technorati Redesign Now in Beta
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Written By Reprise Media | June 10, 2005 | Share This
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Technorati founder and CEO Dave Sifry announced the launch of the public beta of a major site redesign yesterday.
Here’s what’s new:
- A more streamlined user experience making the site more accessible to those new to blogs.
- Expanded tag functionality with the ability to bring in photo and links from Flickr, del.icio.us, Buzznet and others for searches that match corresponding tags.
- Advanced search features, including “Search by URL” and “Search by Tags”.
- More personalization, with watchlists, claimed blogs and profile info all on the home page.
- No RSS reader needed to watch your favorite searches, users can now view them all on one page.
Great redesign and even better blog post announcement. It’s nice to see a corporate blog getting it right. Then again, he’s the CEO so you know he’s gotta be smart…
LexisNexis Launches Taxonomy Initiative
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Written By Reprise Media | June 9, 2005 | Share This
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LexisNexis not only has all the data you need, it can help you organize it too.
Earlier this week the news and business information services provider announced the launch of a taxonomy program aimed at helping companies organize unstructured content. Teams of “expert consultants” will be on hand to help firms “centralize, classify, and organize” their information.
The firm estimates that poor classification of enterprise data can cost a 10,000 member organization approximately $10 million annually, while security experts say that storing identity data with LexisNexis could cost significantly more (just kidding guys).
Seriously though, this is an example a company realizing of the enormous monetary potential in
tagging and taxonomy creation, even if it is more corporate and structured than free form and user-controlled.
Yahoo! News Tag Soup
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Written By Reprise Media | May 17, 2005 | Share This
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As someone who has a hard time keeping her socks with their mates, I have mixed feelings about tagging. While I recognize the long-term value of setting up an organizational system, sometimes I just want to get out the door, even if that means sporting one argyle and one tube sock.
That’s why I was pleased […]
As someone who has a hard time keeping her socks with their mates, I have mixed feelings about tagging. While I recognize the long-term value of setting up an organizational system, sometimes I just want to get out the door, even if that means sporting one argyle and one tube sock.
That’s why I was pleased to read on the Yahoo! Search Blog about a new app by that aims to automate the process of tagging. It’s called Yahoo! News Tag Soup and it was created by John Herren, who explains the motive behind his pet project on the How Does This Work? page: “‘Cuz I’m lazy like that.”
Maybe so, but the process seems pretty well-thought-out to us. The app works by combining Yahoo’s Content Analysis Web Service with RSS feeds from Yahoo! News and a MySQL database. A scaling function gives prominence to the most popular, frequently occurring terms. Right now, “President Bush”, “United States”, “Iraq”, and “White House” are showing up as the most prominent (surprise, surprise).
The app has only been monitoring feeds for a few days now, it’ll be cool to see how this changes with current events. Also, the results are based off abstracts, not whole articles, so that’s sure to have an impact as well.
Hit Herren up for his source code at his Yahoo! 360 blog now.