Lisa Barone has some problems with Wikipedia and she is not afraid to explain them.

Complaint #1: It puts non-expert information at the top of the search engine’s results page.

This is a perfectly legitimate concern. Wikipedia is often edited by people who are not experts on the topics that they are addressing.

The search engines are supposed to reward authoritative, expert content. Wikipedia is not a subject matter expert.

Complaint #2: Wikipedia pushes expert information farther down the SERP.

As a direct result of complaint #1, those people that are experts in their fields don’t get the search engine rankings that they deserve.

We’ve heard time and time again that the search engines reward expert content… If that’s true, why does Wikipedia rank so well? Wikipedia does not fit into this description. There’s a difference between a lot of information and quality information.

Complaint #3: There’s a reason Wikipedia ranks so well in Google. Something fishy is going on!

I don’t for the life of me know what it is, but there’s got to be something there. I want to know what makes Wikipedia rank so well and why 40-50 percent of newly created Wikipedia pages appear in Google’s index with 100 hours of being created. Does Google index your site that fast? I doubt it.

Is Google indulging in some old fashioned favoritism towards Wikipedia? According to ComScore, Google traffic to Wikipedia has risen 166% year over year.

Lisa has more to say.

Originally posted on February 19, 2007 @ 3:11 pm

While I am personally of the belief that the revolution will be socially bookmarked (and consequently socially driven), Jonathan Mendez believes that it will be videoized. Who knows, perhaps it will be videoized and then socially disseminated. In any case, while you prepare yourself, here are 7 steps to optimize your YouTube tags and contribute to the revolution:

1. Make sure your tags are relevant to you content.

2. The more tags the merrier.

3. Spread your tags out among your clips.

4. Use adjectives.

5. Have some category descriptor tags.

6. Match your title and description with your most important tags.

7. Don’t use natural language phrases

Wise words Mr. Mendez, the revolution thanks you.

Originally posted on February 20, 2007 @ 9:28 am

Everyone is familiar with Google’s youthfully idealistic “Don’t be evil” mantra that has awarded them great praise from their users as well as scrutiny from the press anytime they falter on that promise.Such high aspirations appear to be the trend among the young founders behind some of the Internet’s biggest names.

Another example of this trend would be Digg, with their equally ambitious principles upon which they founded their company.

Digg’s recent decision to remove the top users list underscores their commitment to retain non-hierarchical editorial control and is a prime example of one of their idealistic founding principles. What’s more, Kevin Rose himself has stated numerous times, that it is Digg’s intent to drive traffic back to the originating site. This being the reason why they have not implemented a caching service for sites downed by the “Digg Effect.”

In Kevin’s own words from the October 2nd, 2006 issue of Newsweek:

We really want to continue to drive traffic back to the original source and give credit back to the authors of the articles. It’s really a symbiotic relationship between the two, because we can’t exist without these good, quality sites and the content that is provided online, whether it comes from a blog or from a major media outlet.

Kevin Rose Future Of Web Summit Speech Audio Clip

Now look at a recent statement by Kevin on the December 18th, 2006 Digg The Blog blog post announcing new features:

Videos Enhancements
Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.

This means that Digg has implemented a feature that embeds the submitted video within Digg for users to watch without leaving digg.com.Currently only three video sites have been included in the on-Digg video previews; YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video (College Humor has also been included in the thumbnail previews, but not the on-Digg video previews feature). As Digg has mentioned in the past, if you run a video site and want to be included in their thumbnail and video preview features on their site, you should email them and they will do what they can to accommodate your site.

Now while this seems like a great feature for digg users, it directly infringes upon one of Digg’s most important founding principles; driving traffic back to the originating site. This is especially dangerous for video sites, as it has the potential to hurt their profitability. Digg has previously driven significant amounts of traffic to both prominent and emerging video sites, allowing them to generate ad revenue from the surge of traffic they received on their site, which allows them to generate the cash to needed to cover the high bandwidth costs associated with being “dugg.” Digg is still using up the same large amount of bandwidth from these video sites, but now they aren’t returning anywhere near the amount of traffic to the originating site, which means they generate little to no ad revenue by being “dugg,” and still have to pay for the huge bandwidth costs associated with the “Digg Effect.”

I know from personal experience with helping run Colbert On Demand that it is very difficult to successfully monetize an emerging video site to the point of profitability (as well as to scale it) due largely to the unevolving state of the hosting industry. With this move of embedding videos directly on Digg, it detracts from video sites ability to generate revenue from their content when being “dugg” and can affect their ability to become profitable.

This is only the first instance of Digg infringing on a founding principle that, has to this point caused webmasters around the web to praise Digg and work to better integrate their site with Digg. This could cause a turning point in the support webmasters have given Digg, especially if Digg implements further features that detract from sending traffic back to the originating site.

Originally posted on February 17, 2007 @ 7:37 am

Yesterday Yahoo! launched a new service, Yahoo Suggestion Board, which placed user generated suggestions for Yahoo’s various services/ portals into a “Digg Like” voting site. The Digg mafia on the other hand went mental, defacing the new Yahoo service with immature messages such as Digg rules, Digg clone, don’t copy Digg and other stuff rubbish. In light of the vitriol expressed by users of Digg that Yahoo somehow copied or stole the voting premise, in a similar way the very same people carried on when Netscape was relaunched, let’s consider the notion that Digg is an original idea itself.

It isn’t.

Did Kevin Rose invent voting? Did Kevin Rose invent the concept of democracy, even if we all know that Digg at best is a festering, rotten and corrupt democracy reminiscent of Soviet Russia (remember, everyone voted in the USSR, it was the choice of leaders that was limited).

No, Kevin Rose didn’t.

According to Wikipedia, democracy is agreed to have had its roots from Aristotle, with Ancient Greece having the first recorded democracy of any shape or form.

According to Digg users, is Kevin Rose Aristotle? I wonder how many digg’s that concept would receive?.

Of course the history of democracy and voting has evolved much since ancient Greece. Our modern democracy (both in the US, UK and Australia) has its roots in the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which followed the Glorious Revolution. The founding fathers of the United States stole the idea of bicameral rule when establishing Indepedence in 1788, and other countries have followed the leads of both the United Kingdom and the United States, often in a combination of both systems (Australia’s Washminister system of Government).

Maybe Kevin Rose was secretly behind all of this?

Switching to the online world, voting and online polls have been common on the web since roughly 1994-95, indeed I can remember using 3rd party polling on a website I owned in 95. Did Kevin Rose create all of this?

Digg is a variation on the democratic theme, as is Netscape, as it Yahoo Suggestions, Reddit or any other of the similar sites out there. Digg does not and will never hold an exclusive right nor license to voting online. If this is indeed what Digg users are suggesting, lets all rally against Digg for stealing the idea from Aristotle, the leaders of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the founding fathers of the United States, to name but a few :-)

Tags: Digg, Yahoo Suggestions

Originally posted on February 15, 2007 @ 6:07 pm

[With apologies to The Ramones.] The story Human Immortality: A Scientific Reality? was on digg today and got me thinking. Sure, you can make a lot of jokes, but consider it seriously for a moment because you’ll likely be there someday too. It’s not just that longer lifespans are being achieved, more people are accomplishing it. The average lifespan for men and women 20 years ago was about 72 and 76, respectively – give or take a year or two.

So what exactly are our seniors going to do after normal retirement years? No one is going to survive on Social Security until 120-150 years of age, which is the possible lifespan range for Baby Boomers. That means people of Generation X, Y, Whynot, and Next are going to live even longer. They’re not going to be slinging burgers at that age, and many companies won’t even hire new employees over forty, without putting them in the proverbial mail room. If today’s citizen is expected to change careers 3-4 times in their life, what happens to someone who’ll live to 120?

If you’re less than thirty today, that could very well be you. Even people over thirty could reach an age of, say, ninety. Do you really want to be going through the interview process at that age? Probably not. What’s left for you? Blogging. Documenting your life experience in a usable fashion.

Why not? The 80s were called by some as the beginning of the information age, but as far as I’m concerned, the information revolution started when blogging started. Not the diary blogs, though they have their places, but the informational blogs that educate, that document life.

Potential niches for grandpa and grandma bloggers? Education and tutoring, Get Things Done, Productivity, Relationships, Personal Finance, Health. Do I need to go on? Good blogs can and do make money. And with municipal wireless networks sprouting up all over, grandbloggers can do it while they vacation.

Originally posted on February 16, 2007 @ 7:38 am