Brij Singh's Random Musings

Recommendation leads to commerce

Chris Anderson expanding on the Long Tail concept:

I think narrow-focus blogs and other microsites with high trust amongst their readers will be an essential compliment to recommendations within commerce sites. The first can create demand from scratch by interjecting recommendations into an otherwise interesting stream of content; the second steers it once a consumer is already in buying mode.  Both are great at encouraging consumers to explore down the Tail with confidence, pulling diamonds from the rough, wheat from chaff and signal from noise.

Subtle recommendation is what will link A-list blogger's content to the commerce.  I am already seeing some bloggers with good traffic doing not-so-subtle favors.  Though I don't see how anybody can avoid this development

Is Flickr a game?

Over there at Giant Ant's blog I  found this interesting analysis of Flickr. 

I’ve been trying for a week or so to figure out what flickr is. I mean I know it’s a photo sharing site, but what makes it so damn interesting? Then, last night, I finally figured it out: flickr is a MMORPG.

Read the whole analysis. Its a good one.  I like Flickr and never get tired of admiring their whole take on the community interface design.

Getting taggy

More on the tag-based applications -

Citeulike, Connotea

Plenty of neat stuff, specially for the academically oriented.

Pace of information change

We needed a database of certain type for one of our application. Dun & Bradstreet provides that kind of information.  While looking for that I bumped into this :

This is how they collect the information -

D&B has built the most extensive business information database in the world with over 82,000,000 companies. We collect and  receive information from a broad array of sources, including:                   

Direct investigations and interviews with  the company principals.

Payment and banking data from company suppliers, which provides over 650,000,000 payment experiences annually.

Suits, liens, judgment, UCCs, business  registrations, corporate details and bankruptcy filings from   state and county courthouses, resulting in over  130,000,000  records on file.

Corporate financial reports and filings within 48-72 hours of filing.

Contracts, grants, loans and debarments  from the federal government.

Web source and mining of over 27,000,000  domains.

News and media sources.

Yellow page and print directories. 

Thats not all , its the information change velocity which is interesting:

Information is dynamic. In the next 60 minutes:
285 businesses will have a suit, lien or  judgment filed against them
240 business addresses will change
150 business telephone numbers will change  or be disconnected
112 directorship (CEO, CFO, etc.) changes  will occur
63 new businesses will open their doors
8 corporations will file for Bankruptcy
4 companies will change their names                                                                                                                     

You can play your own trivia game by cross-linking these stats.  To reiterate the obvious - change is changing very fast.

Solving the attention problem

Attention.xml: Problem it solves -

# How many sources of information must you keep up with?
# Tired of clicking the same link from a dozen different blogs?
# RSS readers collect updates, but with so many unread items, how do you know which to read first

Its an open standard and based on the open source code

Considering the time I spent on Bloglines, cant wait to see this getting implemented asap.

About Bloglines I caught myself spending 2 to 3 hours on it sometimes. I am sure they must be salivating on how to monetize all this attention. As Om said they are a new black.

Conversation Map

Some of the ways one can observe the countless conversations happening out there is just fascinating. For example Conversation Map is an attempt to unravel linkages between large scale conversations happening over the internet.

On the Internet there are now very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) in which hundreds, even thousands, of people exchange messages.  These messages are exchanged daily -- and even more frequently -- across international borders. Unlike older, one-to-many media (for example, television or radio) where a small group of people broadcast to a larger number of people, VLSCs are a many-to-many communications medium.  Also, unlike older, one-to-one media (e.g., the telephone), the people engaged in VLSCs do not necessarily know the electronic addresses of the other participants before the start of the conversation.  For these reasons, VLSCs are creating new connections between people who might otherwise not even have imagined the other's existence.

These types of application will further reduce the interaction time and significantly expand the Long Tail based commerce and collaboration.