Our world has certainly changed if Pearson, the publishing giant behind the Financial Times, Les Echos or Penguin Books, has decided to use a wiki to create a new business book. According to the Wall Street Journal in U.K.’s Pearson Tests The Group Dynamic For a ‘Wiki’ Book (paid registration required), Pearson will collaborate with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School on a book exploring how businesses can use online communities, consumer-generated media such as blogs and other online services. [Update: An alert reader — connected with Shared Insights — wrote me to say that there was a free link to the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above.] But read more…

This book will be called “We Are Smarter Than Me” and will be written by people like you and me who will submit their contributions to the WeAreSmarter.org website whose motto is “Be an author of the first networked book on business.” The site contains the chapter headings and a few starting pages. Here is how the book will be written.

For instance, a chapter titled “We Can Research It,” tells an anecdote about an Australian man who started a mail-order brewery based on votes by 20,000 cellphone users on what makes an ideal beer. Other participants can then edit the contents or add anecdotes.

The wiki leaders expect business consultants and executives to contribute to the book site, which, like Wikipedia, doesn’t pay writers for their work. The site is open to anyone, but does ask contributors to supply information. WeAreSmarter expects to close submissions to the book wiki by the end of the first quarter next year and turn it over to paid ghostwriters to turn it into a 120-page business book aimed at the fast-growing airport bookstore market.

The contributors will not be paid but the book will not be free. It’s expected to be sold for $25.99. And all profits will be given to a charity chosen by the contributors.

The WeAreSmarter.org gives more details on the goals of the book.

The central premise of We Are Smarter Than Me is that large groups of people (”We”) can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions that are currently performed by companies, industries and experts (”Me”).

And here is an example taken in the real world.

Procter & Gamble is recruiting 600,000 housewives to help market its products through word of mouth. In return for much greater reach and impact, the company is giving up control of the marketing message, relying on its community of customers/marketers to craft their own message in the most appropriate fashion.

If you’re not familiar with this Procter & Gamble’s project, please visit its Vocalpoint website (free registration).

The initiators of the project have planned to invite members of their communities, which are much bigger than I would have thought: Wharton Business School (675,000 invitees), MIT Sloan School of Management (400,000 invitees), Pearson (500,000 invitees) and Shared Insights (250,000 invitees).

For more information, you might want to read this press release, “More Than a Million Invited to Write and Edit First Collaborative Book on Management Best Practices.”

But how many of these people will contribute? Let’s go back to the Wall Street Journal for an answer.

One of the big challenges will be finding ways to motivate the professional experts, many of whom make money by writing books themselves, says Mr. Malone of MIT. “The question is, can we create an incentive structure so they’ll put in some of their best thinking, or will this just be incidental thinking?”

All participaants will have to sign a Creative Commons license to avoid the issue of many individual copyrights.

Now, let’s wait until next year to see if the wiki process can be successful for such a project.

Sources: William M. Bulkeley, The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2006; and various websites

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• Blogs
• Books
• Business
• Social Networks

I found last week a press release from Fasthosts, a UK company specialized in web hosting, which stated that “nearly half of small businesses would use a blog to drive traffic to their website.” The company added that 2,295 businesses participated in its online survey. Fasthosts provided other numbers which all are here to convince U.K. businesses to create a blog hosted by them. But their research paper, ‘Blogging For Business,’ widely taken up by bloggers, is anywhere in sight. Does it exist? Read more…

For example, the press release states that “only three per cent of the 2,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) questioned are actually intending to start a blog.” Here is another quote.

Findings from Fasthosts research paper ‘Blogging For Business’ suggests that SMEs understand the potential business benefits that running a blog on their website could bring, but are failing to put this awareness into action and create one.

But where is this research paper released by a company which is not involved in market analysis?

A search on Google for this document and the name of the company () returns 285 results, including news sites such as vnunet.com or ZDNet UK, and lots of blogs. I briefly scanned some of the results and all the sites I looked at are taking the Fasthosts press release at face value.

But a search for the same document restricted to the Fasthosts site () only returns 2 results. And none points to the actual ‘Blogging For Business’ paper. So does it really exist?

It’s not really surprising that many people look at a press release and believe what they read. But what amazes me is that a number of these readers put the information on their blogs and sites without having read and checked if the source was available. And I don’t even mention the fact that nobody questions the unknown methodology used in this unavailable — or non-existent — survey.

If I’m wrong, and if you have read the ‘Blogging For Business’ research paper, please post here a pointer to it.

Sources: Fasthosts website

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There are many ways to evaluate the popularity of your blog. You can look at the Google PageRank (read more), the Technorati rank (read more) or at the number of readers of your feeds at FeedBurner or Bloglines. Or you can visit Bloginfluence.net which mixes several of these metrics to give you a unique number which is supposed to reflect your ‘blog influence.’ Like any metrics, this one needs to be looked at with a grain of salt. Read my analysis…

BlogInfluence.net is the result of the work of Julio Gorka, who used various APIs and a formula he devised himself. Here is the formula he’s using to give you the ‘influence number’ of your blog: [(blog+posts+web links) + (bloglines subs * 2)] * 1+(PageRank/10).

Below is a table showing the ‘blog influence numbers’ for three of my blogs, including this one. For comparison, I also put the results for “GM FastLane Blog,” a widely known corporate blog, and for “Smart Mobs,” a group blog where I’m one of the editors.

What can we learn from this small sample of blogs?

• Google PageRank doesn’t measure your blog’s popularity, but evaluates its relationship with the blogosphere. So all the blogs in this sample have almost the same PageRank values.
• The Technorati rank of FL is much higher than the one of TT, but their ‘blog influence’ numbers are almost similar. Why that? Probably because TT is older and contains more posts.
• There are only 64% more sites having linking to SM than FL, but SM’s influence is 6 times larger than FL. Why? Probably because SM contains about six new posts per day.
• The Technorati ranks of ETT and FL are almost the same, but the ‘blog influence’ number of ETT is 3 times the one of FL. Why that? I really don’t know.

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Finally, in Blog Equivalence of Page Rank, WebProNews adds that “a few more metrics added to [Bloginfluence.net] formula which would help strengthen its value.” For example, WebProNews says that Yahoo and Google News links should be incorporated in the formula (for authority) as well as FeedBurner subscribers (for readership).

What do you think of this ‘blog influence’ number? What is yours? Drop me a note.

Source: BlogInfluence.net website; Manoj Jasra, for WebProNews, September 19, 2006

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• Blogs
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You probably are using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds today to discover what is new on a site or a blog. But RSS technology, like blogs, can be used by companies in various situations. RSS feeds can be used internally or externally to improve business processes, as reports the editorial of the latest issue of CIO Magazine. This article gives some details about how real companies use RSS to complement — or even replace — their e-mail systems. Some are using RSS feeds to increase employee satisfaction or to improve the way they provide information to their customers. Still, deployments are not so easy and require some hard customization work. But read more…

For those of you who want to refresh their memory about what RSS means (Really Simple Syndication? Rich Site Summary? RDF Site Summary?), I suggest you read this Wikipedia article which will tell you what you need to know about the various ’standards’ — or implementations — of RSS.

Let’s start with a first example of how RSS can be used inside a company.

Ross Szalay, IS director for the law firm Dykema, took the internal approach to turbocharge the firm’s ability to monitor current cases. For example, an attorney in charge of a specific client account gets a regular feed of all specific efforts undertaken by other attorneys for the client, so there’s a unified view of the services the client is getting — and needs to be billed for.

But RSS feeds also can be used to provide critical information to customers.

At Jets International, which provides a matching service between private-plane operators with unused seating capacity and executives who need a flight, the emphasis of RSS is external, to keep suppliers and customers up to date on available flights and customer requests, according to Nate McKelvey, who serves as both CEO and CIO of the company. Plane operators have a custom RSS reader that keeps them updated on customer requests that match the available seating.

If these deployments are useful and successful, don’t underestimate the amount of work needed to create a real world business application.

Because it isn’t yet clear how RSS will be used and where, CIOs are finding that they need to do a fair amount of custom configuring of the few tools available to meet their particular organizations’ needs.

In McKelvey’s case, he had to write a custom reader for his 350 suppliers of seats on private planes because it would have been too difficult, he judged, for his suppliers to configure a generic RSS reader themselves. The complex configuration has caused him to hold off on delivering RSS feeds to the company’s several thousand customers: “I’ll deploy it to them when there’s no configuration to support,” he says.

And how can you evaluate the ROI of such RSS-based tools? It’s not always easy, because they just provide easier ways to manage information. But every employee or customer will benefit from these tools, which don’t cost that much. “Dykema’s Szalay agrees the cost is small, in the low tens of thousands of dollars.”

Are you ready to build new business applications based on RSS technology? Have you already deployed successful ones? Drop me a note.

Sources: Galen Gruman, for CIO Magazine, September 1, 2006; and BT Business blog

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• Blogs
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You all know that PageRank is the name of an algorithm — trademarked and patented — used by Google to sort the billions of records in its databases. And while the patent about PageRank has already been updated twice since 2001, other companies also patented various methods for other sorting algorithms. The latest is IBM, which recently received a patent to speed up PageRank, as ‘SEO by the SEA’ reported earlier this month. I’m using Google since September 1999 and I never found that its search engine was slow. So what are the motives of IBM? Read more…

Before looking at the new IBM patent, here is a little bit of history about Google’s Pagerank, as I told you previously in this post. And of course, check what says Wikipedia, which reminds us that the name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google — since March 2, 2004 if you search through the records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) — but that the multiple patents about the algorithm have been granted to Stanford University — to The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University to be precise.

Three patents were granted to Lawrence — not Larry — Page and Stanford University by USPTO about this sorting method.

• Method for node ranking in a linked database (Patent 6,285,999 dated September 4, 2001)
• Method for scoring documents in a linked database (Patent 6,799,176 dated September 28, 2004)
• Method for node ranking in a linked database (Patent 7,058,628 dated June 6, 2006)

As you can see, the first and the third patents carry the same name. But the three patents also contain almost the same figures. Below is a figure describing how PageRank works (Credit: Stanford University/USPTO).

Now, here is an interesting paragraph written by William — Bill — Slawski about the new IBM patent.

Rather than describing what the patent contains, I’m going to recommend looking at the paper I refer to in the first paragraph of this post, which is an excellent summary of many of the ideas in the patent. Both patent and paper discuss how difficult it is to compute pagerank for all of the pages on the web, and offer a few solutions which increase speed while also reducing possible errors.

For more information, Slawski is talking about a technical raper published by IBM Almaden Research Center in November 2001, “PageRank Computation and the Structure of the Web: Experiments and Algorithms” (PDF format, 5 pages, 64 KB).

For more details, here is a link to the new IBM patent, System and method for rapid computation of PageRank (Patent 7,089,252 dated August 8, 2006).

Here are some parts from the abstract.

The method comprises obtaining a plurality of documents, and determining a rank of each document. The rank of each document is generally a function of a rank of all other documents in the plurality of documents which point to the document and is determined by solving, by equation-solving methods (including Gauss-Seidel iteration and partitioning) of a set of equations wherein:.alpha..alpha..times..times..times..times. […]

If this language is too esoteric for you, below is one of the figures associated with this patent (Credit: IBM/USPTO).

And here is an explanation of this figure given in the claims of the patent.

Considering the large-scale structure of the web, the arguments for using an equation-solving approach become even stronger. As is now well known, the graph structure of the web may be described by the “Bow Tie.” The Bow Tie web structure generally comprises input segments and output segments. The input and output segments are connected to the strongly connected component. Input nodes are coupled to the input segment and output nodes are connected to the output segment. An interconnecting node directly couples the input segment and the output segment.

This “Bow Tie” theory is better explained in this other IBM document which also contains a better illustration.

After reading all these exciting patents, what do you think of the new one from IBM? Does it make sense to you? Does want IBM license it to Google? Please send me your thoughts.

Sources: William Slawski, SEO by the SEA, August 13, 2006; and various web sites

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• Databases
• Google
• IBM
• Patents
• Search
• Software

Technorati may track more than 50 millions blogs on Earth. But do you know that there are more than 10 trillion spacebloggers from over 300 different planets? At least, I found one, Zmod’s World, which tells us what’s happening on the planet Bartoch, located on the other side of our galaxy. And if it is the first intergalactic blog going live, it will not be the last. ‘According to a recent survey in The Alien Times, the trend in spaceblogging has surged by over 2000% over the last four years.’ If you find other space blogs, please tell me about them and I’ll build an index of blogs in our galaxy and in distant ones. But read more…

Of course, if you’re still reading this post, you already understood that this blog is just a clever sales trick. But it proves that a blog can be used to promote your work or your company. In this case, Faiz Kermani, a writer living in the U.K., just wanted to sell more copies of his book, “My Alien Penfriend.” But even if it is a joke, the contents of this blog are worth reading. Here is an example.

Earth has so many countries — Darius [, who lives on Earth in London,] tells me there are 541 countries. That’s a huge number! We only have 18 countries and so it makes everything a bit easier to run. I know that on Earth there are a lot of wars and disasters. I suppose it’s because there are so many countries and their governments don’t agree with each other.

We used to have a lot of wars here but thankfully there are a lot less now. A lot changed when our planet decided to set up the Mind Complex, rather than leaving it up to governments to make decisions. Only the best Bartochians can join the Mind Complex and they have to go through a special selection procedure. After the admission ceremony the candidate’s brain energy is fused with those of the other members in the central processor in Bilgop City. This means that when the Mind Complex makes a decision, it has the opinions of all the best minds of Bartoch to do so.

Don’t you think we might live better if such an idea was implemented on Earth? But I digress… In the mean time, Zmod has another suggestion for you if you want to make new friends around our galaxy. You just have to send your name, your spacemail address and 20 electronic Earth credits to the Inter-Galactic Space Club.

Once we’ve received your details we’ll send you a special password so that you can access the Members Section of our special intergalactic computer. In the Member’s Section you’ll find all the instructions you need to create a page that only you can access. As soon as you’ve done this, you can begin spacemailing the penfriend of your choice!

Your spacemails will be translated and then transmitted electronically to the club computers on other planets twice ever month.

I hope you enjoyed the contents of this spaceblog. That’s all folks!

Sources: Faiz Kermani’s various web pages, August 2006

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• Blogs
• Books
• Ecommerce
• Humor

Last week, Technorati announced that it was now tracking more than 50 millions blogs. Of course, this number has been abundantly quoted — both by bloggers and newspapers, but only a small minority questioned the validity of Technorati’s report (see below for more). In fact, even if these numbers are somewhat biased, one thing is sure: the number of blogs continue to increase as shows how Technorati ranks my blogs. Read more…

Let’s look back for a minute to the Technorati report, which was widely quoted, but not questioned — probably because it has some nice colored charts… Still, some people said the report underestimated the number of blogs because the company is not accurately watching some blogging services in Asia or in France which have millions of users. Others said the number was an exaggeration because Technorati includes millions of ’spam’ blogs and dead — or inactive — blogs. As both trends are going in opposite directions, I will just assume that the number of blogs continue to increase.

Before moving to personal observations, please read this post from Kevin Burton, “Technorati’s Numbers are Wrong.” Of course, he might be biased, being the founder of Tailrank, another company tracking blogs for reporting news.

But he quotes another post from the Data Mining blog which is worth mentioning: “When one looks at population statistics, one doesn’t count all the dead people. Why do the same for blogs? The size of the blogosphere should include a clear description of active blogs.”

Now, let’s look at how Technorati measured the evolution of my two technology blogs in the last three months.

First, you need to know that Technorati ranks a blog according to the number of sites and links pointing to it. The most important criterion is the number of sites linking to your blog. Technorati considers that such a link is valid if it appears on a home page and is less than six months old. In other words, if I have a link to John Doe’s blog on my welcome page — like in my blogroll — and if I mention Doe’s posts once a week, Technorati will only count one vote from me.

So, now let’s look at the numbers given by Technorati about Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends. On May 1, 2006, this blog was ranked as #6,390, with 637 links coming from 237 sites. Three months later, on August 1, 2006, it is ranked as #7,329, with 689 links coming from 282 sites.

And on May 1, 2006, my ZDNet blog, Emerging Technology Trends was ranked as #3,103, with 802 links coming from 414 sites. Three months later, on August 1, 2006, it is ranked as #3,679, with 868 links coming from 488 sites.

Clearly, there is a trend here: more sites are linking to these two blogs while their global rank is decreasing. And there is only one explanation for this: the number of blogs tracked by Technorati has increased.

Have you seen similar trends with your blogs — if you care about of course? Let me know.

Sources: Various web sites and blogs

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• Blogs
• Ecommerce
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I already wrote two notes about Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail.” And Henri Kaufman, who knows more about marketing than the vast majority of us, wrote even more interesting ones on one of his blogs. I mostly agree with what he writes (in French), especially that he has to pull comments out of his notes in order to make them ‘visible’ (check this previous post for my opinion about the visibility of comments). Anyway, in this last note about what Henri calls the “Comet’s Tail,” our guide will be a professor at Harvard Business School. Read more…

The title of James Heskett’s article is longer than some bloggers’ posts, “What Happens When the Economics of Scarcity Meets the Economics of Abundance?,” but it’s also pretty interesting for people who believe that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Here are some excerpts.

The “Long Tail” describes the region of the item “popularity curve” comprising the vast population of least-popular items, whether it is song titles, books, or little-known brands. Life in the Long Tail is a busy routine involving the downloading of anything digital from the Internet; paying for some things, such as iTunes, but sharing and trading many others.

It is a world where everything digital is available at all times. And because of the very low cost of maintaining and distributing inventory, everything is likely to remain available forever, enabling the occasional gem of intellectual property to survive “in print” or in circulation. It is a world of non-zero-sum thinking.

But is this viable? The contents of this blog — and of millions of other ones — are freely available. Does this mean everything can be free? In fact, what are the economics of “the Long Tail”?

If so much is free, can money be made there? Because if there is no money to be made, many would regard this as a quaint set of beliefs held by people about to come face-to-face with the real world. Anderson describes three conditions critical to potential long-tail profits, all of which are provided by the Internet combined with creative new software and hardware: drastically reduced costs of creation, increased ease of distribution, and search devices employing “filters” and user recommendations that make all of what is available accessible and understandable to potential consumers.

As it is my last post on this subject — at least for a while — let me you ask some questions: Who will benefit from this Long Tail? Customers, producers, or middlemen (they’re still there)? And even if I don’t think it can be applied to all sectors of distribution, what is your opinion?

Source: James Heskett, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, August 4, 2006; and other web sites

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• Blogs
• Ecommerce
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You might not know the name of Ana Marie Cox, but she wrote the gossipy Wonkette blog about what happened in Washington D.C for about two years. But now, after writing a book and being hired last March by Time, she’s the new Washington editor of Time.com. She will be in charge of both the print and online editions of the magazine. I wish I could listen what is happening these days inside the Times newsroom, where the other journalists are certainly jealous, wondering how much she’s earning and if she’s able to edit their articles and be a good manager and editor. David Pogue, one of my favorite reporters writing about technology issues, interviewed her for his New York Times blog. Below are some excerpts from this interview.

Pogue writes that Cox is funny and media-savvy. And he chose to talk with her about blogs in general more than about her new job at Time.

DP: So how did you get into blogging?

AMC: Nick Denton discovered me at the corner grocery. I call it sort of my Veronica Lake moment. I had a blog of my own called The Antic Muse which I was doing while I was working full time at AOL, of all places. And Nick Denton is the publisher of Gawker Media, which has a whole wide array of blogs that are run on a very actually old-school publishing model, where he pays a blogger a salary and sells advertising.

In case you don’t remember who Denton is, you can read how he suppressed some of his blogs — and their editors — in “Gunfight at Gawker Media Corral.”

Let’s go back to the conversation between Pogue and Cox when she was offered a work at Time.

DP: But isn’t that the definition of a successful blogger, though, to get plucked from the blogosphere and given a column?

AMC: I think that’s what most bloggers would consider successful. I don’t think that. I think that blogging as a medium is just that. It’s a medium. And it has a very low bar to entry. But the reason why anyone does it, I think, has to do with, like, having an opinion you believe is worth other people hearing, and having something to say beyond to the three or four people you talk to every day. And I think that’s why people get into journalism.

Of course, you have to read the whole interview, but here is my last selection from this long exchange.

DP: And so what about this thing that blogs are killing newspapers?

AMC: You know, I suspect that The New York Times will never cease to exist. That dinosaur can’t be killed. That really would take a meteor, and I don’t think blogs are a meteor. They’re kind of like a tiny asteroid shower.

I don’t know if she will be a good editor for Time.com, but you can’t deny she has a flair for catchy expressions: describing blogs as “asteroid showers” is pretty amazing!

Please note that Cox continues to write her own blog at anamariecox.com, but she’s probably busy these days. Her last post has been published on July 21, 2006.

Source: David Pogue, Circuits, The New York Times, July 27, 2006

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• Blogs
• Ecommerce
• Internet

A few days ago, I wrote about The Wrong Tail, an analysis by Slate of Chris Anderson’s last book. Since then, there were hundreds of other comments about this book, including the own Slate’s long tail which confirmed Anderson’s views about the distribution of cultural contents. But, in It May Be a Long Time Before the Long Tail Is Wagging the Web, Lee Gomes, from The Wall Street Journal gave some strong arguments against the Long Tail. And of course, this started another controversy…

So let’s start with Julia Turner’s analysis of Slate’s readership on July 18, 2006. This online magazine is now 10 years old, and the 33,000 articles in their archives are freely available to everyone — including to search engines. And this is explains why the traffic at Slate follows a long tail scheme.

On that day, Slate got about 1.9 million hits, but Turner reduced this number to 659,378 page views after eliminating specific hits on the page. And here is what she discovered.

I figured out that 8,903 articles attracted at least one page view that day. The 13 most popular articles accounted for 50 percent of Slate’s traffic, and the top 100 articles accounted for 86 percent. But our least-popular stories got plenty of notice. Seventeen percent of our traffic was generated by pieces that got fewer than 1,000 hits, 8.7 percent was generated by pieces that got fewer than 100, and just under 3 percent was earned by pieces that had fewer than 10.

If you read Turner’s article, you’ll see a diagram showing “a nice-looking tail.”

But if the concept works fine for Slate and its large catalog of old indexed articles, it doesn’t seem work so well for other companies mentioned by Anderson in his book. Here are some excerpts from the article mentioned above from Lee Gomes.

Let’s start this discussion where Mr. Anderson starts his book, with his discovery of what he calls a paradigm-changing statistic. In the introduction, he tells how he learns from Ecast, a music-streaming company, that 98% of its catalog gets played at least once a quarter — much more than most would predict

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Ecast told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago, the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays.

And here are two other examples showing that the Long Tail phenomenon — or at least the “98 Percent Rule” are not always valid — to say the least.

Bloglines, the widely used blog-reading tool, lists 1.2 million blogs; real ones, not computer-generated “spam blogs.” The top 10% of feeds grab 88% of all subscriptions. And 35% have no current subscribers at all — there’s clearly no 98 Percent Rule in the blogosphere.

At Apple’s iTunes, one person who has seen the data — which Apple doesn’t disclose — said sales “closely track Billboard. It’s a hits business. The data tend to refute ‘The Long Tail.’”

Of course, this article, published by one of the most prestigious newspapers – and not by a blogger – was heavily commented. But as I don’t want to be too long, here is one from Ed Sim, at BeyondVC, “How long is the Long Tail?” Not only Sim delivered his own comments, but his post contains links to an Anderson’s reply and a long comment from Gomes.

After reading all this, do you think that the Long Tail concept is valid — even for contents distribution? Please tell me what you think.

Source: Julia Turner, Slate, July 24, 2006; Lee Gomes, The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2006; Ed Sim, BeyondVC, July 26, 2006

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• Blogs
• Books
• Ecommerce
• Internet