People are starting to figure out that they can stay on top of ideas, opinions, and news by tracking blogs through RSS feeds and news services. I mean mainstream people, not techies and early bloggers (my first was 1999).
Why does this matter? Well, I get found now for mentioning Kintera's likely delisting from Nasdaq. Or Blackbaud's high prices. Or Salesforce.com outages and overblown platform. Or Britney Spears and her long diary entries about my amazing software. It's about the keywords.
At some point though, keywords will no longer be unique enough and a simple alert will not be specific enough. Actually that point is now. The signal to noise ratio is growing rapidly in favor of noise. So all of those Google alerts I've set up are becoming annoying and tough to manage. Google doesn't discriminate, it grabs whatever's got the keywords.
Here's an example. I've got a news feed for "Charlie Crystle". I mean, who wouldn't? He's a vocal guy with a lot of opinions, so I've got it. I just deleted "surveillance cameras" because the alerts were coming too fast to be meaningful anymore (sadly), and changed "single-payer" to "single-payer healthcare".
But there are people out there with "Britney Spears", and they get this irrelevant blog post as a result. Others get it because of the Kintera reference, and others because of the cameras reference. Which means they are getting useless feeds.
Feeds need more context. Feed grabbers are general, unaudited. I want my feeds from trusted sources. Google is no longer a trusted source. So what feed grabber will let me limit my feeds to sources I feel are relevant?
Sigh. Gotta get back to dinner so I can talk about Britney Spears, how her Kintera stock is worthless, and how Blackbaud is unlikely to help the Obama campaign now that Charlie Crystle is endorsing Juan's software over eTapestry, unless of course the Giants beat the Patriots, at which point Fred Wilson should be happy while Steve Fafel will be eating his human rights safe t-shirt.
Yeah, I know, half of that stuff was obtuse.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Signal to Noise Ratio
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2 comments:
RE: "So what feed grabber will let me limit my feeds to sources I feel are relevant?"
Good question.. I've been testing out a service - not quite ready for beta - that lets people do keyword alerts for specific sites, which has some definite potential - if there's a particular website you enjoy and want to know anytime THEY mention Kintera, for example, it would be useful. I think the folks behind it might have a decent model there, assuming the website's content is good enough that people would want to sign up for the service.
Then again, even though I get a fair amount of garbage in my Google alert feeds, I also find an equal amount of news from sources I never heard of before.
And keep in mind - RSS still isn't at the mainstream level most of assumed it would be by now. So while I've got a need for these services, I'm not sure what the widespread need is.
What prompted the post was a phone call from someone who saw the Kintera post and wanted to partner with us.
Not a bad thing, but I also got a call from someone who saw a job posting and wanted to sell consulting services. It will be interesting to see if my site gets any spike because of yesterday's post...
so marcus, you're local, send me an email sometime.
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