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Reader alert: technical PR blogosphere discussion ahead…
I’m still not sure…
Sab Keil from Germany (who’s just released his podcast on ‘English for non-English speakers’ in Second Life) suggested a little while back we introduce the ‘bisr’ tag in del.icio.us.
I know that Rubel is a heavy user of del.icio.us, Neville is a user and no doubt they are not alone in our world. But I confess I have only used it a few times and remain uneducated enough to still prefer my athoc IE toolbar [no link because it is a tool that athoc no longer publicises; I got mine years ago from the old Webmonkey site. Here's a bit of help screen info. At least they still support it, although it doesn't yet sit happily with IE7 beta].
That is because I see, for me, del.icio.us as primarily a bookmarking site; I haven’t explored its tag-mining or tag-sharing elements yet. Wherein what would make it different to, say digg? I admit my ignorance enough to be able to ask. Every week, it seems, a new social sharing service launches, I join most of them for further information about them, then get underwhelmed.
I fully admit that it may very well be my lack of investment in the service that causes the underwhelment (if that is such a word), but surely if a dunce like myself can’t ‘get’ the idea of the site or a service within the first two minutes, hook me in and make me truly want to be involved then the site is not doing a good enough job of communication?
The challenge with the ‘Attention Economy’ is that social media places such a huge burden on it.
I am reminded of those prognosticators in the 1970s who foresaw a time when we would all be working three days a week because computers would get our work done and free up leisure time for us. Instead, the ‘bar’ of productivity and customer expectation has been mountainously raised and we work harder than ever to keep up.
Social media is no different. Now that we have almost-instant access to the very thought substance of 65million+ people, we have more information and preoccupations than could ever be dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.
BUT…
Having just poured a bit of luke-warm water onto Sab’s idea, Sab DOES raise an interesting point, that Steve Rubel also recently highlighted — the handy nature of the ‘informal’ network that has been facilitated by the blogosphere.
As an example, the other day I found some interesting information about a real-world business application for Second Life and knowing Shel and Neville’s interest in Second Life, emailed them both about it (I didn’t have time to blog about it myself - client deadlines and stuff…). Shel took up the baton and ran a post about it.
I definitely see some value in a collaborative approach to information/link sharing amongst our peers; a recent email train amongst a group of us comms and advertising industry-related podcasters proved the value of that. I just don’t know of a useful, easy to use and intuitive tool that will facilitate that, seeing that some of our community are voracious posters and some less so. A group wiki has been tried, but falls into the ‘yet another place to go and spend precious time which I don’t have’ category.
Perhaps Steve’s beloved Blummy is the answer…
Any views from others in the PR community?
UPDATE: - perhaps the tag cloud from swiki, as seen on Shel’s blog, is the answer…??? But there’s no transparency about who is in the community in that tag cloud; is it just Shel or are others also monitored?
Blog-entries in Search Results - Introducing “bisr”
Blogs do influence search results. We know. And in presentations, we would like to show. Everybody has his own two-five examples, often the same ones. (e.g. dell). I think it would be great if the PR/marketing bloggers would share these, therefore I am introducing
bisr (short for “blogs in search results”)
I am talking about tagging blog entries in del.icio.us, with the following syntax:
“bisr”, “searchterm1″, “searchterm 2″ (if applicable), “searchengine1″, “searchengine2″ (if applicable)
To qualify for the bisr-tag, a blog-entry needs to be found among the top 10 results, on the first page. Furthermore, to keep this tag meaningful, everybody gets to submit only entries from his own blog in the beginning (which I violated already be tagging the dell result from Jeff Jarvis) and only ten entries. This is to ensure that a monthly check whether a tagged page still qualifies, does not take too much time (this is done by the submitter). Please keep in mind not to tag the search results page, but the blog-entry.
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Shel Holtz 08.03.06 at 3:04 am
Lee, the tag cloud on my blog is related to search and nothing else. The Swicki is a search engine that I’ve configured to produce PR and communication-focused results. The tag cloud represents the keywords that people have used when searching via this subject matter-focused search engine.
Lee 08.03.06 at 3:48 am
Oh, on closer inspection I see what you mean. Hmmm… do you remember what the tag cloud we used to use about 12 months ago was that tagged the dominant words in our own posts?
Sebastian 08.03.06 at 4:19 pm
Lee, I am glad somebody found this worthy, I have begun to think I am out of my mind with this.
The bisr-tag would qualify as microformat I guess, don’t know if Shel agrees. And the consequence would be a simple site, where the reuslts would be aggregated in a nicer layout than delicious. Delicious is just a means here, very simple and effictve though.