Author: Aaron Weber

The Globe Scores 1% on Technological Awareness

The Boston Globe is not the world’s best paper. For example, today it noticed that it’s hard to tell when someone’s on a cell phone or crazy. It’s only been a standup joke since the last century. Hey guys, it wasn’t very funny then and it’s still not funny now that it’s BlueTooth headsets instead of plug-in headsets.

Earlier, they discussed the 1% rule— which is that about one percent of your online consumers will create some content (actually it’s less: 0.065% in the case of YouTube). It’s pretty much obvious that way more people consume than create, and also misleading. A 0.065% contributor-to-consumer ratio is much higher than with old media where there are perhaps a dozen creators and five billion consumers. The fact that as many as one percent of your users might say something to you is incredible. One percent is a great achievement, not a lamentable failure.

And the fact that the one percent might be anyone, that there are few barriers to a voice coming from the wilderness and creating the best YouTube video or blog post ever, catapulting itself to global stardom? That’s the best part. That can’t really happen in film or news or television.

Stem Cells are Hott

Old-school internet curmudgeon JWZ has often been quoted as saying that all technologies boil down to helping the user get laid. Email, file-sharing, web-browsing, databases, whatever: it has to ultimately lead to getting some ass, because that’s the primary human drive.

The most direct software for that is, of course, dating sites. TechCrunch profiles 13 new ones. Do we need that many? Yes and no. Probably not all of them will survive. But on the other hand, if every website is the online equivalent of brightly colored plumage, then the world wants a hell of a lot more than 13 dating sites.

JWZ’s theory is flawed, of course: there are other human drives and not every technology is aimed at satisfying the reproductive urge. Stem cell research, for example, will probably never get anyone laid. And internet video of Josh Bolten’s defense of the stem cell veto has destroyed nearly all possibility that he will find sex, love, or work ever again.

I Digg Paris Hilton

According to Cranky Geeks, Digg got a huge surge in traffic because it managed to be the top Google News search result about Paris Hilton’s cell-phone troubles some time in February. But that’s not the right time-frame for the spikes in traffic that I see from the Alexa rankings: Nov-Dec ’05 and April ’06.

Any theories?

A top shop?

Topshop is a trendy UK retailer, and they’re pretty tech-savvy, what with a fashion SMS service and such. But their website is so flash-heavy it’s almost impossible to navigate.

It’s still not as bad as the official Icon motorsports page, which is not only difficult to navigate but almost impossible to find if you can’t remember the URL– which is not the name of the company, but rideicon.com. The site is all Flash, so search engines can’t index it. Search for “Icon Motorsports” or “Icon Motorcycle Gear” and you might find some resellers, but not the official page. I guess their sales are all through local motorcycle shops or online resellers anyway, so maybe they don’t care that the site is hard to find and hard to use.

I’d care, though.

This is the most boring post ever

Monday I went to the Sox/Royals game with Bookdwarf, where it was incredibly hot.

Tuesday, I knew it was going to be hot so I went to the office where there was A/C. Someone emailed me a link and I clicked on it without thinking. It was a video of people having sex in time to music. I yelped and closed the window as fast as I could. Everyone turned around to see what I was trying to hide. Hilarity.

Today I’ve been updating the StyleFeeder FAQ, sending out new welcome messages, and trying to figure out how Flash 9 and MySpace interact.

What was so special about December ’05 and April ’06?

Have a look at this chart of Alexa rankings of Digg and Del.icio.us. Both of them– and a lot of other collaborative-media sites like Technorati, Reddit, and MetaFilter— have small spikes in late 2005 and a giant spike right in the middle of April 2006. What happened? What were they doing, what was the world doing, that made those sites so popular so quickly?

Looking at one site you’d think that there were a couple of points where a critical mass built up, or maybe they scooped a couple good stories, or got some very positive coverage in a few major venues. Or perhaps they released a new version of their software and got a lot easier to use and therefore more popular.

But seeing all those sites with the same traffic patterns makes me think that it was something about the zeitgeist that made all those buzzwords like “collaborative news” and “citizen media” relevant to a lot more citizens.

Obviously, I want that kind of relevance, that kind of traffic and success, for StyleFeeder.

To get that, I have to find out not only what made it happen then, but what can make it happen now. Neither answer is clear.