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Scribd is Here to Stay!

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Usually when a new company wins the social media jackpot and is featured on Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and so on, the company gets thousands of immediate viewers but the traffic plummets soon afterwared. Scribd, on the other hand seems different. The company got a lot of attention at launch, but the attention hasn’t gone away.

100,000 or so unique visitors come the site daily. 12,000 documents have been uploaded to 8,600 unique accounts (35% anonymous). The team says the site’s traffic has been about an even split between U.S. and non-U.S. visitors (and about half of the documents are non-English).

Mikey has more.

Originally posted on March 25, 2007 @ 10:35 am

Blogs Turn 10, Looking for Daddy

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With the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere in the range of 100 million, there is no doubt about the success of blogging as a medium for disseminating information. And with the success of the medium come bragging rights for the person who started the phenomenon; but who was it?

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?

Join CNet as we journey into the history of blogs.

Originally posted on March 20, 2007 @ 11:41 am

10 Things That Affect Your Google Blog Search Ranking

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Unlike most other blog search engines, the Google version ranks the search results according to relevancy. A look at a patent gives more insight into how the results are ranked and how to improve your blog’s ranking. (I rounded the numbers out, actual pointers are more than 10).

5 Things That Improve Your Ranking

  1. How many RSS subscriptions there are to the blog,
  2. How often people click on a link to the post in search results,
  3. How many blogrolls, and “high quality” blogrolls the blog is in,
  4. If the blog offers visitors the chance to tag posts and whether people are tagging them,
  5. References to the blog by sources other than blogs, (Pagerank, and; Others).

5 Things That Deteriorate Your Ranking

  1. If new posts appear in short bursts or at predictable intervals, and whether posts are the same size, or roughly the same size,
  2. If the content of the posts doesn’t match the content of feeds from the posts, or if the content includes a lot of spam related keywords,
  3. If a lot of content is duplicated in multiple posts from a blog,
  4. Link distribution of the blog,
  5. If posts primarily link to one page or site, (and; Others).

From Search Engine Roundtable. [via Google Operating System]

Originally posted on March 19, 2007 @ 11:38 pm

Web 3.0: From Web Site to Web Service

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Alex Iskold raises some very interesting points and makes some intriguing observations regarding what he calls the pre-cursor to the real semantic web. Yes ladies and gentlemen, we’re talking about Web 3.0.

What we mean by ‘Web 3.0’ is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services – and will effectively expose their information to the world.

He mentions that this transformation can happen in two possible ways. The first is by following the Amazon/Del.icio.us/Flickr method of offering information via an API, and the second is by keepin the information proprietary but allowing mashups.

The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information – paving the road to more intelligent computing.

Join Iskold at the lovely ReadWriteWeb for a look at how this transformation is taking place and how it will evolve.

Originally posted on March 19, 2007 @ 11:24 pm

Interview with Eric Heikkinen of Pligg

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Pligg, for those that don’t know, is a content manage system package that allows you to have your own socially driven site up and running in a matter of minutes.

Pligg is unique compared to most other content management systems because of its flexibility. A web designer can do pretty much anything with Pligg because the software was designed to be used in as many ways as possible. Not only can a person with very little knowledge of PHP and MySQL install it, but they can modify and administer it with relatively little difficulty. For those who have a greater understanding of web languages, Pligg can act as the first step in a highly customized personal content management system.

But there is legal trouble in Pligg paradise, and it’s not coming from Digg or any of the other major players in the socially driven space. A former contributor to the CMS is planning on taking the rest of the Pligg development team to court. Free Software Managed to get an interview with Eric Heikkinen, the co-founder of Pligg.

Originally posted on March 19, 2007 @ 1:32 pm