Blog Has Moved

For the two of you who are religiously reading this blog, it has moved.

Our new URL is www.nuanceintelligence.com.

See you on the other side.

Organic, not Viral

Doesn’t matter if it’s search, marketing or other evangelism.

Here’s the great one-liner from Google Search Guru and former Technorati CTO Kevin Marks’ blog Epeus’ epigone that sums it all up:

I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

He’s right, and it’s interesting to see this meme finally coming online. What does it mean? A viral phenomenon is one that uses its hosts to ensure its own growth. An organic one nourishes the host.

A good friend, John Siewierski, said this to me another way a few weeks ago, “think about what you are doing for your network, not what your network is doing for you.” Pretty organic, John.

“Ask not, what your country can do for you…”

Location Intelligence in Web Traffic Metrics

I’m doing a fair bit of research into location intelligence, geo-coding of data, and data visualization for AWhere these days, and found out that Quantcast (competitor of Alexa and comScore) is now including location-based info in their reports.

From their announcement:

We believe geographic and business/organizational data will be a powerful characterization of publishers’ audiences, especially as advertisers begin to evaluate online media opportunities on a more targeted basis.

I thought the localization of advertising started in the ’97 and ’98 not ’07 and ’08, but it’s great to see the trend coming around again through another sales cycle.

Weekend Eye Candy

I got to visit with an old friend, musician, music producer and uber-geek Jim Ruberto for a bit on Friday.

In addition to talking about online reputation and Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses as a platform to support social networking and rapid development, he showed me some of the next generation graphics toys on the web (Jim was the first to tune me into Second Life, three or four years ago, where he was running an early online casino).

So, enjoy these:

1. PicLens – Firefox plug-in that provides a whole new way to surf images from lots of foto feeds, including the big photo sites, as well as Google image search and others. Lets you see entire collections (including dozens of pages of Google image search results) in one ‘photo wall’. Check this out now.
2. Photosynth – Microsoft’s newest image searching and matching technology takes a series of images of a particular area (they demonstrate with an ancient city center somewhere in Italy), and places the images in a 3D map of the area, as well as sorting by similarity, and estimating where each photo of the same location was taken from. Very cool, even if it doesn’t run on my Mac.
3. Havok – This graphics engine powers some pretty incredible online games and movie special effects. Their new physics engine provides eerily-real effects that is providing breakthrough reality for the way things work in the graphical realm.

Have a good weekend, and don’t spend it all in front of PicLens!

SocNet Measurement

The Collective Intelligence Foo Camp (CIFoo) just concluded. Lots of interesting pieces:

1. It’s run on an open WIKI server, demonstrating real trust in the community.
2. It’s got a relatively active social network attached, with good comments and lots of shared knowledge.
3. Slides are posted. I strongly recommend two based on key metrics for social network development (but search around for others):
   1. ROI for social networks. Good walk-through of the creation of a business metric to justify investment and measure return.
   2. Viral marketing performance metrics. Although set in a silly pirate metaphor, the review of a full viral marketing campaign reviews several key performance metrics that define web 2.0 campaigns

What’s the nuance? It’s another great un-sung benefit of all these groovy web 2.0 tools – the outer ring access to conferences and other curricula that provides something on the order of a 50-5 Proposition, which considers that you may get half the value of the conference by spending 5% of the time to carefully read and review the site, slides, presentations and comments. This is not to say that it will replace the conference – so much of those are about who you meet and how you connect – but it’s nice to glean key learnings from a distance.

GenGreen On The Move

Although Boulder has an impressive stable of businesses in the green / sustainable / eco milieu, Fort Collins, a perennial David to Boulder’s Goliath, is gaining a strong base with the addition of CEO Casey Verbeck to the GenGreen team (who’s got so much going on that he doesn’t have time to update his LinkedIN profile).

The site is building local guides for cities around the US (to start), and will be merging them with the usual social network tools. They’re just about ready to mix-in commerce, which has the eco market quite excited. Casey told me that there are over 120 green businesses in Boulder without a storefront, and no easy way for people to locate them. He’s committed to organizing that market.

Microsoft Gets a Cluetrain

Interesting to see Microsoft’s open channel to the development community, Channel9.  This isn’t your Ballmer’s MSDN (reference too obscure?).   I like their manifesto.

Death of the Chaordic Age?

Visa, one of the most interesting organizations in the world, is going public.

The Brits, both at the Financial Times and Economist (subscription, and well worth it) allude to the possible motivation as a hefty financial bail-out for stock-owning banks, who could collectively receive up to half of the estimated $18bn offering. All papers note that MasterCard’s shares are up 400% since their May 2006 IPO.

The Economist highlights key statistics report from “Nilson Report, a trade publication, [who] estimates that by 2011 55% of transactions in America will be cashless, up from 40% in 2005.” And all papers report that over $3bn will be set aside for anti-trust and unfair pricing claims now pending in various courts.

Never mind the fact that this will be the largest IPO is US history (read about that ad-nauseam), what’s most interesting is Visa’s structure and origins.

DeMystify Above The Fold

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki’s excellent blog, we read a good post on Fluid Design that counters the age-old web maxim that you had to get everything (especially ads) above the fold.

visitors just completely overlooked the ads because they were coming to the site to read the content and didn’t give a doodle about what sat on the way top of the page. And really, when people were reading the content, the ads were too high to see and/or click on and website owners and their advertisers were not making any mula.

I think I first had this argument in 1995. Nice to know I was right (and on the losing side, IIRC).

SocNet Analysis Tool Analysis (and Tool)

Nice to see people drinking the web 2.0 collaboration kool-aid in a good way.

The editors of Complexity and Social Networkers, a blog from the Institute for Quantiative Social Science and the Program on Netwoked Governance at Harvard, had begun a comprehensive search for social network analysis tools and libraries. Not having found a single wellspring, they posted their findings on Wikipedia, and called for others to help fill it in. As they explain,