For a while I’ve looked at News Summarization sites and gotten a headache.  Colombia University used to have a News Blaster, a News Summarizer, out for several years that creates a virtual newspaper and timeline of events - but it does not actually simplify anything for you. 

I looked at something tonight that’s much closer to what I think a News Summarizer should be, called the 2006 PostGlobal Power Barometer hosted on the one of the Washington Post’s blogs.  Looking at today, November 28th:

This is basically a "Widget" and I’ve mentioned this a couple of times this week ……Widgets are good at getting people engaged with the content - if the Widget is good, and this one seems to be.  Here’s some of the data that powers this widget.

"..Drivers

• UNITED STATES

• NBC declares Iraq in a civil war…but no one can figure out exactly who’s on which side.
• Former US Deputy Sec of State suggests the stakes in Afghanistan are larger in the near term than those in Iraq because the potential for spillover into neighboring countries is greater.
• Some thought leaders are suggesting the US is having success in developing a new alliance of moderate Arab allies (read traditional monarchies including Saudi Arabia) that could put significant pressure on Iran. Some of these same thought leaders blame the US democracy drive for many of the problems that the new alliance of "less-than-democracies" would resolve.
• Global Thought sees US influence in the Middle East declining dramatically…likely to be replaced by China, Russia and/or Iran.
• South America takes another left turn…Chavez ally Rafael Correa is headed for victory in Ecuador’s presidential race.

• CHINA

• China is looking to seal a $100 billion 25-year oil & gas deal with Iran…before sanctions are imposed.
• India thought leaders are beginning to discuss the risks of a "Chindia". Hu signed lots of trade agreements during his recent visit but didn’t deal with territorial claims…and what happens to India’s trade balance in a China free trade situation?
• The Zambian people, unlike many African leaders, are asking whether Chinese investments mean livable-wage jobs or more sweat shops.
• Global Thought is discussing China’s increasingly successful efforts to position itself in key areas of the world as the A2A or "Alternative to America"…a great marketing tool in today’s global political environment. Hugo Chavez likes A2A as he forms a "mutually beneficial partnership" with China.

Every country on the chart has raw data - the only question ……. is that data summarized by a human OR is it extracted off the web, using data mining techniques.  It looks like a person still needs to filter though and write a couple of sentences - but I’m not sure.

But it’s not so much this data… you could do the same thing with say……Topics, like Op-Eds, and you could also do something like this….maybe, with House Plans (my architectural clients).  It’s not the specific data - it’s the way it’s represented via this "widget" that I find, very useful.

Ever get the feeling the profiles you read on MySpace are faked?   More and more, they are being faked in order to generate viral marketing results; I read about one case in Read/Write/Web today.  Seems like the results are pretty good- but the end does not necessarily justify the means.

So what’s the formula?

Create a campaign drawing upon a number of social networks such as youtube, myspace, flickr, etc.  Seed the sites with what appears to be real profiles and real photos, but are faked.   I find this part of the post revealing.

"…..On the strategy of the social network campaign, Niccolò said:

"Our strategy was to focus on viral seeding and social networking, no traditional media adv online. I have no idea of the exact number of people going from Social Networks to Website [...] because we worked with a lot of social networks.

More than quantity, what I like to point is the quality of the relationship between users and Campari. Client is very happy about the close relationship between the brand and the users.

What I like is that we created a community of people that we can further talk about red passion."

Some people might argue about the quality of the community - because the profile of "Red Passion" (the 28 year old Italian woman) is fake. How can you have a real social networking community around a fake, marketing-driven user profile?

That’s what I’m wondering too…..as people become more saturated with social networking the bar will be raised….and it already is ….. according to the comments on the Read/Write/Web post (comment 1) (comment 2)

Often I look at my Webmetricsguru.com weblogs - running sitemeter - and come up with insights.  Some insights can’t be shared - but I’ll talk about them generally.

Recently I had met with a demographics developer and today I see Lehman.com looking over my post for that developer.  Would I surmise that the developer is being considered for investment purposes?  Maybe ….

That’s just one example - another was a well known university looking for Microsoft’s Demographic information….. you might wonder why?

Is the University going to buy or get something from Microsoft?  Or is it part of a research project? Don’t know….but it’s awfully interesting.

A Litigation Law Firm was looking for ……information on the founder of a Web Analytics firm…again, won’t say who… but it’s interesting ….just wondering about the "why" of a search - and how well your analytics solution records it.  And if your gathering that data …are you getting anything out of it?

Is it a good search…or a search you’d rather not have someone do?  Well, you have no control on what people actually do once the data is out there.

And who’s that?  MMA/Carat

Sure seems like they spent a long time on something….. I wonder what?  I won’t tell.

Interesting stuff you can pick out of Weblogs.

Avinash Kaushik brought back some good stuff from London last week - bottled up in his latest post over at Occam’s Razor. 

1) Engagement metric - How is your site doing vs. Customer Expectations.

According to Avinash people now regularly expect "more" than what their website experience (on your site?) delivers:

‘Early in your existence (or when the Internet started) the red line was lower, websites had very robust / delightful capabilities that were way ahead of customer expectations (maybe they were not quite as savvy or they did not care). But as the web has evolved and our customers have become increasingly sophisticated the slope of the yellow line (customer expectations) has a much steeper gradient.

Another thing Avinash picked out of the same presentation - Persona’s are important and some are more important to you than others and that value can be calculated (much as I have calculated the value of a page for some of my clients).

"…I am not sure how Value is computed but you can use Profitability or Customer Loyalty or Net Promoter or Least Likely to Switch (in case of phone company) or Most Amount Spent on Add-on Services or other such metrics. Pick the one that makes most sense for your company."

Avinash pulled from another presentation to highlight cross channel conversions - including offline conversions (How can we measure success in a non-line customer experience world? Tough questions with evolving answers), similar to my example in Measuring Multi Channel Marketing - an open question to the Web Metrics Community of Talladega Nights.

 "…We execute marketing programs and measure effectiveness as if the process is linear. But in reality as the red, green and purple lines indicate customer behavior is very different and we are not very well set-up to measure effectiveness. If you come to the website (the red line above), read reviews, go to the store, look and touch the products, talk to the sales person who totally wow’s you and you go and buy the product (all in one day). Who gets the credit? Your Google PPC program? What if your path was the one shown by the green arrows? Off-line then online then offline then online?

Avinash has been saying for some time that Clickstream data alone, is not enough to measure conversions - and he continues that line of reasoning here:

"…This is all the more reason that your core web success measurement strategy can’t rest on the bedrock of clickstream data, if it was not already limiting before it is very much so now. Taking steps to incorporate other measurement sources such as surveys or remote usability or market research or collecting information via registration etc are going to be critical. And who knows that else is around the corner. [Qualitative data. Survey Best Practices.]"

I would read Avinash’s entire post a couple of times over - and download the presentations.

I was sensing there was more to the Yahoo Newspaper deal, announced last week, than meets the eye; ConversionRater picked up on what I did not see.

"……Yahoo still lacked the powerful contextual source of data that the other players already had: newspapers. Fortunately, they had the agency relationships and credibility to help the newspapers realize the potential locked inside their context and user base. Look at the recent announcement in this context. Yahoo grabs a new behavioral data source to mine – and perhaps access to the inventory to resell behaviorally. How can Tacoda compete?

Take it to the next level. Why wouldn’t these publishers think about plugging in Yahoo’s entire ad serving capability? They’d get world class behavioral, contextual, inventory forecasting, and other technologies. They have leverage and credibility. They understand how to work with an existing sales force. Doesn’t that threaten 24/7 in their core market? Doesn’t this make it that much harder for Google and other networks? And what about MSN, who’s still not really in market?"

I’m not sure about this - but my "spider sense" …. or whatever it is …. was "tingling" and I could not figure out why.  Maybe Pat McCarthy got it right - and Yahoo figured this all out ahead of time - and made the right call.

Time will tell what comes out of this.

Online Marketing Blog has an interview with Lawrence Coburn on Marketing with Widgets and Widget Analytics - it’s interesting to read for a two reasons:

A. Widget Analytics     B. Examples of Successful Widgets.

"Widget analytics is still in its infancy. Currently, you can get a rough idea of how many times your widget has gotten picked up by doing backlink searches on Google, Yahoo, or Technorati using the “site:” qualifier to isolate the big widget aggregators like MySpace. Inbound traffic from widgets can be measured by checking your log files. However, as of now, there are no off the shelf solutions to help widget publishers understand exactly how folks are engaging with their widgets. There’s a company called Clearspring that is working on this problem, and I look forward to seeing how they progress."

I did some research on on Clearspring and this is what I came up with

"Clearspring, currently in preview, is working on widget technologies for widget developers. The company asked not to share any visuals of their offering until they launch in January, but was open about their plans. They have explained their strategy in terms of three major components:

• Write once embed everywhere
• Widget service container
• Widget usage analytics

Clearspring can track how many times a widget was invoked.

"Because the company wraps widgets into a container, they are also able to track the usage of widgets. This is an interesting and very useful service as it will allow developers to track which sites are most effective. The analytics data will be viewable on ClearSpring.com and will be similar to the traffic charts offered by most web hosting companies, only it will show the actual user clicks on the widget. "

Clearspring, for a publisher, allows creation and updating of any widget created with this platform.

And for a Developer

I wrote about Widgets recently for Brand Marketing, and threw in some ideas on what kind of Widgets some of my clients could develop, given what they offer in content and services.

In the interview with Lawrence Coburn, Lawrence gives 3 examples of "successful" Widgets -  IE:

"… A widget that I think is great is the iLike widget. iLike is a social music discovery site that features an iTunes plug in that captures all of your iTunes listening behavior. iLike spits out a widget that displays your most recently listened to tracks, as well as your top bands overall. The widget is also a music player that allows readers to play samples of the songs from your own iTunes history. This widget is updated in real time, and is a great example of a widget that is powered by implicit, personalized data.

Bitty Browser is another widget that I like, that I think provides a glimpse of the next generation of widgets. Bitty Browser is an embeddable web browser, that allows publishers to embed mini versions of their favorite sites within the expience of another site. Unlike most widgets which offer snapshots of content, Bitty Browser enables a fully functional experience within the body of the widget.

A third widget that I’m a big fan of is the community widget provided by MyBlogLog. The MyBlogLog widget attempts to provide social networking functionality like user profiles and user to user messaging across various blog properties. Blog publishers embed the MyBlogLog code in their sidebars, and MyBlogLog displays thumbnail photos of the blog’s readers within the widget. Clicking on a thumbnail launches the reader’s MyBlogLog profile page, and allows basic social network functionality like testimonials and messaging. Readers are also assigned to blog communities based on their reading habits, and introductions are facilitated to similar readers."

It’s known that readers of email are not able to accurately gauge emotion based on the words in the email.  Now email is evolving to the point that how you end your email is now much more revealing of the true state of a relationship according to the New York Times.

"What’s in an e-mail sign-off? A lot, apparently. Those final few words above your name are where relationships and hierarchies are established, and where what is written in the body of the message can be clarified or undermined. In the days before electronic communication, the formalities of a letter, either business or personal, were taught to every third-grader; sign-offs — from “Sincerely” to “Yours truly” to “Love” — came to mind without much effort. "

"…Although salutations that begin messages can be tricky — there is a world of difference, it seems, between a “Hi,” a “Hello” and a “Dear” — the sign-off is the place where many writers attempt to express themselves, even when expressing personality, as in business correspondence, is not always welcome.

In other words, it is a land mine. Etiquette and communications experts agree that it is becoming increasingly difficult to say goodbye."

I found the following statement telling:

“In business you want to maintain the highest level of formality until the other person indicates otherwise,” she said. “Mirroring isn’t a bad thing to do. You’re letting the other side set the level of familiarity.”

Just read Gary Angel’s post on Web Analytics Tool Evaluation - it’s long but worth reading.   I’ll summarize Gary’s article.

Web Analytic tools are really not built to track people, they’re more like "filters" that you can mix (more or less) to capture the approximate segment you want (IE: people that come to a page on your site from New York City last week - show me only those people and what they did).

But the tools don’t really track the full behavior - because they’re not really designed with that in mind - as Gary pointed out.  You can do two things to compensate (and I’ve done both).

1. You can tag the URLs of any event you care about and then use the analytics tool to filter on the custom URLs with that tag (doable but a lot of work).

2. You an create a special Campaign tag and place it on the page you want to track during the time period you want to track - it’s similar to a Surfaid/Coremtrics Spot Tag, for example.

The second method works - well - but has to be set up deliberately - as does the first method.

That’s what Gary Angel’s post is about and the tools we have to work with today don’t really capture the full range of what people do.

Gary’s article is worth a read.

Developing tools that make life easier for your target audience seems to be the way to go - someone just developed a way to link lyrics to most songs you’d play in WinAmp or Windows Media Player according to Google Operating System.

"Good things are simple and come in small packages. If you wanted a plugin for your music player that finds and displays lyrics for your songs, Lyrics Plug-in is a good answer. It’s free, small (around 60 KB) and available for Winamp and Windows Media Player. You don’t have to configure anything, the plugin works well out of the box.

The drawback of this plugin is that the lyrics database is not very big, so you may still find famous songs that don’t have lyrics. But it’s easy to add them."

That’s cool!  My wife loves Clay Aiken and is constantly looking for the words that go with his songs - and it’s not just his songs.  Tools like this build community.

OK, so there’s not that many lyrics yet… you can always enlist the community to add lyrics of the songs they like to listen to.

Forget about Search Engine Traffic - build tools like this for your audience.

CyberNET picked up on a new Microsoft project that tells your future ….. at least, it’s amusing!

"Microsoft has really out done themselves this time. Out of all the companies in the world leave it to Microsoft to predict your future with Zoltar…and surprisingly they developed it to be very amusing.

You just have to enter in the name of the person that you want it to predict the future for and it will quickly tell you what lies ahead of them. After it predicts the future of the person that you requested it will give you an option to download Windows Live Messenger or to send the fortune to a friend.

If that starts to get boring just leave Zoltar sit there and things will start to happen. I have noticed a boat and limo “driving” along the ground as well as clouds floating in the sky."

I thought this "game" was very amusing!  I put in several friends and family names and got a different fortune every time.  You can also download the Windows Live Tool Bar and send the fortune to a friend (viral).

Now just think ….. this Flash Tool …. might get a lot of people to download Microsoft Live Toolbar and try Microsoft Live.  Just think if some businesses did this kind of thing - but based around something they do….. like house plans, travel industry (I was just talking about that in my last post).

Here’s an example of using the web to develop a community of people who will download the Microsoft Toolbar and send a fortune to a friend.  I’m not downloading the toolbar right now …but I am more open to it since playing with the Tales of Zoltar tool …. it provided a good laugh - which is more than a lot of sites give me.