There's a new viral marketing campaign in town from a well known large corporation. AimFight is the product of AOL's marketing department although the site tells you...

...two AIM programmers with a little bit too much free time on their hands. They're both mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and nonviolent people. Go figure.

Um yeah, ok, I believe that. Corporations these days have so much money that their developers sit around and twiddle their thumbs until they come up with a stellar idea and everyone in the 15 rungs of the corporate ladder think it's swell and agree to fund the project. Alright alright, I'll stop.

Anyway, the aimfight.com site is actually pretty cool. Just enter your AIM screen name and one of your friend's screen names. Then hit Fight! Whoever has the most buddies in their downline wins, it's really fairly simple but a cool use of data presented in a nice clean interface. Something right up my alley.

Here's AOL's explanation of how you actually win.

Your score is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. This means the score is constantly changing, and the winner of the battle will constantly change with it.

originally found on Smart Mobs.

Wow, I had no idea how much of a stir the release of the profiles tool inside of BlogPulse was going to be. I'm amazed at the number of people saying it's a Technorati slayer and how much they love this new feature in BlogPulse. Technorati's community manager is even excited about it, how weird is that? Doh! Here's a quote from the blog of Technorati community manager Niall Kennedy.

...The new tool from Intelliseek displays various information Intelliseek collects about a the top 10,000 blog URLs such as people linking to the blog, sites linked by the blog, most recent blog posts, and common keywords. They also provide a list of 10 blogs that cite similar links and text.

My favorite feature is the common keywords identified in recent posts. It would be fun to take a group of keywords and guess the blogger.

From the Blog Herald.

...Intelliseek’s BlogPulse has launched a range of upgrades to its blog tracking tools that could finally see the emergence of a Technorati slayer in the blogosphere.

The new service, BlogPulse Profiles, delivers Technorati like features including ranking blogs based on citations, and incoming links, in addition to outward citations, recent posts, keywords used on the blog (tags?) and interestingly a list of blogs that have common themes based on what they are linking to, interesting in terms that it delivered a number of interesting blogs I’d not read before but am actually really happy to have discovered...

...This is the first time we’ve seen a serious challenge to Technorati based on functionality and usability as opposed to blog tracking alone. BlogPulse profiles can be viewed here.

Mark Jen used the new BlogPulse profile tool to see his future. His 15 minutes of fame are over. Hey, it was a fun ride while it lasted, right Mark?

...According to blogpulse they are! Here’s the graph of my BlogPulse blog rank; clearly you can see a decline over the past month....

Rubel's having double-vision and is compelled to put up 2 posts about the new BlogPulse tool.

Should be interesting to see what happens tomorrow. Right now the profile tool is returning an http header of 500, which is a connection refused error. If this doesn't get fixed in the am then it's going to go from a huge success to a huge debacle and lots of ground will be lost in no time flat. Hmmm, wonder if the blogosphere will be kind. My guess is it will since many people have raved about how good the profile tool is and if they have to step back and say, wait I was wrong, then they lose face. People would rather deal with a minor delay than lose face any day, especially when they're "EXPERTS".

Now with more cowbell, Intelliseek released a new version of their BlogPulse blog search engine. In light of the recent heat a certain blog search engine has felt from the blogosphere, ahem [Technorati], I'm going to give you a little more technical and functional breakdown of the new features in BlogPulse. I'll also talk a bit about what makes BlogPulse different from Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket and every other blog search engine out there. So, not only will you get a breakdown of the new cool and useful tools in BlogPulse but you're going to also get the truth about some of the facts behind blog search most experts don't even understand. I'm sorry but I can't allow zip codes to get in the way of the truth when it comes to the story you're being fed from the media and every A-List blog search expert out there. Nuff said, let's dive in.

Some New Features In BlogPulse
(1)BlogPulse Profiles: Permits a user to plug in the url of
a blog and get detailed information about that blog, including rank
[available only for the top 10,000 blogs], rank trends, post trends,
citations, citation trends, sources, and similar blogs.

(2)Daily Analytics: Top Blog Posts, Top Blogs, Top News Stories, Top News
Sources that are cited in the blogosphere daily, along with RSS feeds for each.

(3)Streamlined User Interface: Tightly integrates all features of
BlogPulse cohesively [trend tool, conversation tracking, profile, etc...]

(4)Backend Enhancements: Discovers and indexes more blog content each day, increased performance of all end-user tools, and a few other enhancements.

BlogPulse Competitive Advantage
When I was testing out the beta release of the new BlogPulse search engine I found myself seriously doubting the accuracy of results it was returning. It didn't matter if I was searching for blogs that cited a specific post / url or if I was doing a general text search query, the results were off. I found that, on average, BlogPulse returned fewer results than the other major blog search engines like Technorati. It didn't make sense to me and I had to get a better fundamental understanding of the BlogPulse architecture and of the other major players' architecture.

Basically, sites like Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster are all using the same type of backend search engine as Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc. They've adapted the old faithful crawl model to include pings for several reasons.

(a) Saves on amount of bandwidth their crawlers use and servers required to act as crawlers.

(b) By only crawling a blog when it's either been cited in another blog or they've been notified in some form that a blog has been updated they're able to save resources.

Since most blog search engines started up as more of a cool idea than anything else, the ping model makes sense. It saves money, time, resources, processing power etc... However, the ping method is only one way in which sites like Technorati know when a blog has been updated. There's also a blogger.xml file, a weblogs.com xml file, and others that show the blogs updated by each service in the last x minutes. This saves even more time and resources for the blog search engines.

Back to the thought of using old search technology in a new way. It's kind of like a one size fits all approach to searching. It's one thing to adapt a standard search engine framework to accomodate niche verticals [tweaks can be applied] but it's a completely different animal to apply the same thought process to blog search. Blogs are fundamentally different than web sites and require a key understanding of those differences in order to return the most accurate and reliable results.

Reason For Discrepancies
BlogPulse isn't using a standard search engine at the core, it's using a technology developed specifically for blogs from the ground up. Yes there are some overlaps but BlogPulse is built upon a consistent data model [focused on blogs] and can systematically analyze large volumes of unstructured data in a timely manner.

When a search engine returns a hit-count for the total number of results for a search, typically it's unreliable [as I'm sure all of you using Google, Yahoo! etc. are aware of]. In the area of blogs, each aggregator / search engine out there behaves a little differently in "estimating" the number of search results that are there for the given query. BlogPulse doesen't "estimate" the result count. Rather, the count you see returne on BlogPulse is the "actual" total count of matching posts for the given query. It takes more processing time and power to compute this number rather than return an "estimated" result count but it's actionable data.

That's a fundamental difference in BlogPulse. BlogPulse returns data you can actually use in marketing efforts.

And Why Do I Care?
I'm glad you asked.

Two Reasons:
(a) You shouldn't always believe in the total hit count displayed by blog search engines (BlogPulse is an exception). This includes Technorati.

(b) If a service wanted to provide trend charting type of analysis [a fundamental time series analysis], accurate hit counts are an absolute necessity. There are no exceptions.

Beware Of Anecdotal Evidence
Bloggers out there who are now citing blog link counts from Technorati, Bloglines, Feedster, BlogDigger etc. [like Scoble has been] should be wary of issues like this, potentially lurking beneath the surface.

Let Me Give You An Analogy
I'd say BlogPulse is like running a sql statement fetching the exact number of blue widgets a co. has in stock. Whereas traditional search is like returning the number of inventory items that have %widg% in their description and applying an inflationary factor to increase the count and implied quality / size of results returned.

Blog Search Engine Index Differences
BlogPulse has openly stated the types of posts they include in their index and the reasons behind them.

... BlogPulse creates a full-text search index of all of the blog entries it finds every day. You can search this index through the BlogPulse search engine.

Additionally, BlogPulse analyzes the blog data in a number of interesting ways. These methods reveal the most cited links and key people that are referred to daily in blog entries.

BlogPulse also performs a unique kind of text mining on blog data to help reveal topics and themes within blog entries every day...

How can you compare the value of BlogPulse's approach to blog data mining with the other key blog engines having the following issues...
(a) You don't know what links they are counting.
(b) Whether or not blogroll links are counted the same way as blog post links.
(c) Whether or not they are actually indexing the full text of the posts or partial text of the posts, [from RSS] or what?

I did a bit of digging and got some closure on Technorati's process but nothing that gives me the warm fuzzies so I'll have to follow that up a bit here. Technorati's about us page gives us an idea of what they index but there are holes I'll have to poke through later.

Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.

From their publishers help page and their faq page.

...Technorati is an automated search engine that employs robots known as "spiders" to discover content on your site and its feeds. Please ping Technorati with each addition and update to your site to prompt our spiders to index your new content...

...Technorati specializes in searching all blogs, not merely those with RSS feeds, and instead of only indexing the RSS feed (often the first few hundred words of an article), Technorati reads all of the HTML code in a blog posting, and also tracks all of the activity around a blog or post such as inbound and outbound links...

Something important, Technorati does define inbound and outbound links and doesn't limit them to blog posts but appears to include blogrolls and such which may not be as important as links within the actual posts.

Inbound links refer to hyperlinks from other sources citing that weblog. Outbound links refer to hyperlinks from the weblog to outside sources.

These are some of the key questions that must be answered. BlogPulse has answered them in their faq section and I welcome similar explanations from the other blog search engines on this matter. Other issues I plan on addressing in the realm of blog search are timeliness of data, spam, performance, and a few others key to understanding the nuances of blog search based on the current market offerings. I may even put together a side-by-side blog search engine comparison chart if I'm really feelin it.

Blog Search Wrapup - Where Now?
I think I've given you enough data for one blog post. I'll most certainly have more to say on this subject in the coming days and weeks. It was very important to me that the fundamental differences in the underlying technology of blog search engines out there is uncovered. I'm not implying the major players are evil or anything of the sort but that the blog search community [novices and experts alike] are in general ignorant on the subject. How else could someone like Robert Scoble even attempt to compare the link counts of the various engines when he's not even sure of the proper way to conduct the searches, much less know how / where the data is being drawn from.

That's all for now. Feel free to email me directly if you want to engage in dialog other than a comment post on this entry.

I can be reached at jason.dowdell [at] gmail.com

A few technology entrepreneurs are talking about a new business experiment in which a business plan is open-sourced. Let me explain that a little bit before I give you my 2 cents on the subject.

Yes, you heard correctly. Business bloggers and readers will test their cumulative business knowledge by collectively starting and running a business - out in the open.

Robert May is in charge of this experiment and I give him props for doing something fairly interesting. However, he and the experiment are destined to fail in the traditional sense of business. i.e. They won't make more money than they make.

Dude, Jason, Don't be so harsh!
Business isn't for the faint of heart. If you're not willing to go all in and take risks then you'll never be able to succeed. However, risk-taking is only part of the equation, there are a million other factors at play. In order to navigate those entrepreurial waters you must have a clear direction of where the company is going.

This business plan has none.

You must be able to make split-second decisions and this experiment doesn't allow for that since everything is based on a vote and what the community wants. Remember what happened to Rome when the government let the people do what they wanted rather than what they needed? It Fell!

There must be clear leadership in business. This experiment allows for Robert May to present ideas for the community to vote on. However, he's open [from what I can infer] to taking ideas and determining whether or not they will be included in the proposed ideas for the business.

But even though he as the control of determining which ideas are up for vote, he's at the mercy of the crowd and has no final say [unless I've misunderstood something]. That's not the way business works. If the leader isn't able to have the final say, under normal circumstances, then the business will fail. It will fail from a lack of wisdom on the part of the crowd.

Crowds are dumb by nature
Think about it, that's how the Pied Piper got all those mice to drown themselves. Or how about the most recent WoodStock. The crowd went nuts and endangered themselves because of the mob mentality.

Company culture is often a reflection of the company's leadership. The employees that stick around are able to shape some of the culture but those employees were naturally selected based on criteria the CEO of the company laid down and they echo that culture. A company without culture has no soul.

Have you ever heard a church choir singing a hymn? Each person in the choir blends into the louder voice of the choir as a whole and it's hard to distinguish one voice from another. Compare that to an opera singer. You can hear every note an opera singer hits and you know exactly where he/she is because she's not beind drowned out by a choir [aka the crowd]. The opera singer is ultimately responsible for his/her performance and the crowd [aka the customer] will praise the singer for a good performance and boo the singer for a bad performance. However, if you're in the crowd and the choir sounds lousy, it's hard to point the finger. You don't really know who's singing on key and who's not.

Personally, I don't think this business experiment has a chance of succeeding because of the lack of ownership a crowd presents. The inability to issue responsibility to a specific person in the business [crowd] will bring it down.

On the other hand, this experiment won't fail for a lack of free publicity from a well executed viral marketing plan by Robert May. Hats off to him for coming up with a creative way to build up his own brand and get a lot of bloggers excited. You never know, I could be wrong... just kidding, I'm not.

Last week Michael Yang walked me through the preview of Become's new shopping comparison functionality. He showed me some of the features that may not seem apparent at first, especially if you don't actually try to compare similar or even different items. There are some pretty neat gems that will be overlooked if you don't give it a whirl for yourself.

Unique Comparison Shopping Features Introduced
(1) Ability to add / compare different items across multiple sessions.

In order to really use this feature you must click on the "SHOP" submit button rather than the "Research" button. I know it seems obvious but for whatever reason it's not intuitive.

This opens up your new shopping comparison experience.

(2) Ability to research specific items using crawl based search results rather than just by user feedback. Simply click on the research link below each item and you can do your own research on each item from Become's index. No other comparison engine does or can do this, that's pretty nifty.

(3) Unique shopping comparison filters that can be combined to fine tune your product results. You're able to restrict your results by price, brand and category, all at the same time.

Let me say that again in case it didn't sink in at first.

You're able to restrict your results by price, brand and category, all at the same time.

~me

This is huge!

Why is this huge? Cause nobody else has or can do it in the same fashion. Become is using their algorithm to supply additional research information on every item your search returns and noone else can do that or will be able to do that for some time if ever.

Well, that's it for now. More to come later.

So tonight I'm running through the blogspot blogs with the blogger navbar on top of them and I'm amazed at the amount of these blogs that are nothing more than spam blogs. These blogs are typically only set up to put up posts in an automated fashion and send users to another site that can capitalize on ignorant web surfers.

Here's a list of some of the urls I found tonight so you can do your own homework on exactly what folks are doing to spam blogspot. Unfortunately, I lack the energy required to break down each of the spam techniques but I think something needs to be said about all the garbage people are putting on blogspot these days.

Blogspot Spam Blogs
I'm not willing to link directly to these pieces of garbage but I'm providing the urls in plain text format so you can cut and paste them into your browser and see what's going on for yourself.


http://campers-rv.blogspot.com

http://educationsourceinfo.blogspot.com

http://ezzduplicationsource.blogspot.com

http://topfashionsiteinfoblog.blogspot.com

http://vacaincaltoday2.blogspot.com

http://lawhub.blogspot.com

http://25-nursery-rhyme-clipart-1.blogspot.com

http://auto-parts-emporium.blogspot.com

http://panicssnatch.blogspot.com

http://rexshops.blogspot.com


Well, I think that's enough for one evening. I went through about 40 blogs to find those spam blogs. I did end up finding some pretty good blogs on blogspot during my little jaunt. Some had decent pagerank scores and others had tons of comments to boot but none of them were on a subject I'm interested in so I'm not including them in here.

Hopefully, by posting about some of the garbage sites on blogspot, the blogger boys will be able to clean them up a bit easier. One thing I must clarify though, this isn't just a blogspot problem. Blog spam is all over the place now, with the advent of diy api's, any half-wit webmaster can roll their own CMS and be in the blog spam business in a couple hours.

SmartMobs is a blog I really enjoy from time to time. Today they have a post about the an initiative a cell phone chip manufacturer and a professional association are trying to get passed by the FAA. They want to lift the ban on cell phone use during flights.

What they don't understand however is that a cell phone is useless as a cell phone during a flight of any decent distance. Why? I'll tell you why.

(1) You can't use a cell phone to place or receive calls in flight because the cell phone doesn't get a signal at 30,000 ft. How do I know?

I did a little experiment on my last flight from Washington D.C. to Orlando, Florida. I turned my phone on while we were in the air and snapped a few pics. I had my phone on before we started our descent into Orlando International Airport and not once did I have a signal. Not even when we were a few hundred yards in the air did I have a signal. Perhaps I'll post the pics to my flickr account, we'll see.

(2) Say they lift the ban on using a cell phone in flight, what are people going to do with their cell phones? If it's a cameraphone or a pda you can get a few things done but you won't be able to check your email cause you won't have a signal. You can snap pics but you won't be able to email or SMS them to anyone so is that something you really need to do during a flight?

Who knows, but I'm not sure it's that big of a deal. Here's a link to the original story as it appeared on PC World.

Blog Spam Tricks Uncovered

It's Sunday and we just got home from having lunch with a great couple. On the way home both of our girls fell asleep so Shannon and I had time to get a couple things done around the house.

To Shannon that involves anything that doesn't make a lot of noise like picking up toys, laundry, sweeping, etc... For me it usually means catching up on reading blogs or something else online that doesn't involve work. Well today Shannon was doing her thing and I was doing mine. I went to Shannon's blog and after I got caught up on the goings on in my own house [by reading her blog] I decided to try the blogger "Next Blog" link at the top of her blog. So I clicked on it and found all sorts of interesting blogs. Many were in foreign languages, some were about cooking, others about legal advice, others about teen angst. But while I was surfing from blog to blog using the blogger bar found at the top of all these blogs I noticed something interesting.

I noticed that some of these blogs didn't have the blogger bar at the top of them. Now the way that bar works is like this... If you want to get traffic from other blogs hosted at blogspot [aka blogger.com blogs] then you can leave the blogger navigation bar at the top of your blog template and it will include your blog in the blogspot web ring. I'm sure any blogger employee reading this would cringe if they heard me call their blogger bar a web ring but for all intents and purposes, that's what it is. So if you have the blogger navbar on your site then your site is included in the pile of blogs that can be found via the "Next Blog >>" blogs. It's basically a way to get some traffic to your blog without you actively seeking it. The amount of traffic you get isn't going to be very much but you're not having to spend any money or do anything that requires effort on your own part so a lot of folks leave the navbar on their blogspot blogs.

Well, spammers have found a way to use this, like everything else online, to make money. Here is what and how they do it as well as a few blogs I've run across that exhibit this behaviour.

Blogspot Spam Trick Techniques
1. These blog spammers set up a blog that talks about whatever product it is they're trying to push. The usual suspects are online casinos, online porn, free software, mortgage quotes, asbestos / mesothelioma attorneys, anyway you get the picture.
2. They either automatically submit posts to their blogs using a custom built program that takes content off of other sites on the same subject and randomly generates posts about them on a daily [often times much more frequent basis.
3. They have affiliate links to the product they're trying to push all over their site and usually have a lot of images as well since they always attract the eye to them, more so than just plain text posts do.

So the first 3 steps don't have anything to do with blogger navigation bar, they merely tell you how these spam blogs are set up. Here's how these blog spammers get free traffic and hosting from Blogger to their blogs.

They use the age old search engine optimization tactic called cloaking. Cloaking is a technique in which you detect a search engine spider when it comes to your site. When the spider comes to your site you tell it what it wants to hear. In this case that would mean the blog spammers show the blogger navbar to the googlebot but not to a visitor to their site. However that's not possible since blogger is hosting the blog and the user cannot add any server side user agent detection in order to know when a search engine spider is on the site. Even if they could, Google has direct access to the contents of each individual blog since they store the data on their own database. Yet you can see live examples of blogs not showing the blogger navigation bar. So this begs the question...

How Are Blogspot Blogs Cloaking?
It's much more simple that you would even think. Since the blogs are using css for their layouts and positioning and each blogger can customize their own template, the cloaking is a piece of cake.

xHere are some of the cloaking techniques I've seen thus far.
1. Under the blogger navbar spammers will put the following css to the navbar is invisible to the blog's visitors.

style type="text/css"
!--
   #b-navbar{display:none;}
   #b-logo{display:none;}
   #b-search{display:none;}
   #b-more{display:none;}
   #b-getorpost{display:none;}
//--
/style

This basicaly calls out each of the styles blogger defined in the navbar css and hides them from the end user. So they keep the navbar code on their blogs but it's just not visible to the end user.

This gambling blog does that quite well...
http://internet-online-casino.blogspot.com/

This will be an easy fix for Google since all they have to do is look at the stored blog template and see if the blogger navbar styles have been redefined in the template in a place other than they normally defined them. They can also just see if any of those b-navbar styles have display:none values associated with them.

2. Splash page scam utilizing javascript. This technique uses javascript to load a splash screen disabling you from entering the blogspot blog unless you do as it says, click here to enter. The javascript is loaded above any of the html tags in the blogger template and clicking on the splashpage image will take you to a site you probably don't want to visit. The blog I found utilizing this technique was http://coolstuffofftheweb.blogspot.com/ and clicking on the splash screen would take you to site you shouldn't see.

They use a script provided by blogring.net that enables a user to create a splash page for their blog but this essentially disbles the ability for you to see the blogger navbar upon entrance into a site using the script. Here's the script...

!--Blogring.net Splash Screen Begin --
Click To Enter
div id=first onClick="showSite()"
IMG SRC="http://www.watchmeopenthehelloutofthisdoor.com/Fun/Lesbian_Dreaming.25.jpg" ALIGN="CENTER"

div id=second
style
#second {display:none}
#first {display:block}
/style
!-- Blogring.net Splash Screen End -- 
!--Blogring.net Splash Screen Begin --
script
function showSite()
{
if (document.all)
{
document.all['first'].style.display='none';
document.all['second'].style.display='block';
}

spammy script here - go to site to view for 
yourself if you really want to look at it.

/script
!-- Blogring.net Splash Screen End --

Blogspam Wrapup Notes
The highest number of blogs I found displaying the blogger navbar properly without apparent spam manipulation was 36. However, it was more like one spam site for every 5 - 6 Next Blog links I clicked on. When I clicked on no. 37 I was greeted with this url http://pandoras-box-starlog.blogspot.com/, a site displaying 4 huge blogs of Google AdSense ads and 3 huge blogs displaying affiliate links from AllPosters.com. This site appeared to be using traditional cloaking as well as blogspot spam techniques to accomplish this. Wow, what a waste of brain processing power just to make a few bucks and waste some innocent web surfer's time.

That site used <noembed> tags around the blogger navigation bar plus it hosted images from http://www.blogblog.com to cover up the navbar and added two extra lines of style with the following attributes...

width:100%; height:1px; position:relative; 
overflow:hidden; visibility:show;  font-size:100%; 
top:0px; margin:0 0 0; padding:0 0 0px; 
background:#EEFBFA;"

I'm showing you all of this just so you can see how something like a blogger navigation bar, intended to help you find more blogs in the blogspot network, has been used for illegitimate purposes. Yes I know that navbar also helps with blogger's branding and other things but that's not my point. Spammers will always exploit the latest technology, because just like law, there are always loopholes. I hope you found this piece interesting.