derek abdinor

“The blogosphere has hit the mainstream, according to a new survey, which reveals that 80% of Americans know what a blog is, 50% regularly visit blogs, and 8% publish their own blog. The survey also reveals that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14% of men.”

This via Slashdot. Some more stats I found regarding metrics of Wikipedia.

• In July of 2007 over 41 million people visited Wikipedia
• That represents  1 in 4 people online in the US (although Wikipedia is international)
• Wikipedia is now the 12th most visited website overall

I read in the Business Day that Mervyn King explained the market cap of a listed company as highly inclusive of non-financial items such as

brands, goodwill, the reputation of management, a company’s sustainability and the quality of its governance.

He added that a company’s market cap was no longer just related to its book value, especially in an age where social and environmental concerns were growing. Corporate governance is integral to the value of a company.

Those of us who have experience in the sustainability reporting ethos and King Code will naturally agree, and take heart from King’s affirmation. I take further interest (while wearing my Web hat) because you could have substituted the words corporate governance with “Web 2.0″, “online reputation management”, “CEO’s weblog” etc.

You see, Web 2.0 as applied to investor relations is about dissemination of information, access to information in various locations, reputation, communication and accountability. A blog by a board member and the related spinoffs (RSS, social bookmarking, comments, trackbacks) goes a long way to addressing previous corporate policies that were found wanting. Monitoring of the blogosphere and reacting to it, dissemination of corporate presentations, texts, videos, imagery through web and mobile are what it’s all about. Its governance by laying oneself bare, or naked reporting.

I’ll address this topic further in one of my talks or an article, its really important; Mervyn ought to blog.

Explainer:
Judge Mervyn King is the highly influential author of the King Code (I and II), advising to the World Bank and UN. He has dragged corporate South Africa and the JSE into being one of the leading exponents (as a country) in corporate governance reporting and the attendant practices of sustainability reporting and BEE.

Every listed company adheres to the JSE requirements of disclosing the practices by which they run the concern, and the trend of the last few years has been to examine the impact on the environment, social impact and economic impact (the triple bottom line) of their operations. In a resource-rich, large country like South Africa, one may think one can ravage the natural and human resources and damn the consequences (as evidenced in the last few centuries, the exploitation of the New World). Sustainability makes financial sense and moral safeguarding of an organisation’s impact.

I love the fact that MySpace has introduced millions to blogging.
I love even more that FaceBook has introduced millions to microblogging.

Spacers blog and respond by commenting all the time: isn’t that brilliant? Facers microblog all the time. Its the status update, right under your pic. They can also edit status by mobile, and you can subscribe to notifications by RSS feed: that’s microblogging! Love or hate the two platforms, they are unconsciously bringing radically new concepts to massive audiences. When I need to explain microblogging, this is the way I do it. If I have to still explain FaceBook: oi.

The word microblogging should probably fall by the wayside in time: too cumbersome. High environmental impact.

The last few days have been a flurry of buzz around microblogging in general and twitter in particular (Note: I started jaiku before twitter but prefer the latter). First, Dominic Jones wrote a visceral article about the potential use for it to disperse investor info (this days after SUN Microsystems released their results online ). Dominic’s article led me to some others, notably: Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media by David Berlind (ZDNET) and Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern.

my thoughts,

I see twitter as the bridge on these two continuum:
1. old media, website, blog, rss, twitter
2. letters, memos, email, IM, twitter

I’d like to see Twitter have a better admin interface, and the opportunity to easily edit your posts (if you’re all nerves and thumbs, it could be disastrous)

and

I want to use a microblog in the enterprise (2.0) field. Currently none of them are there. Your suggestions are all valid, and one of these would do well todetach itself from the ubiquitous-use market and go for a solid business platform. I would pay good (or bad) money for a business twitter. However, I think you realise too that they are all within sight of the big cheese and would it make sense to settle for second best?

Also, many ridicule Twitter for the fact that one can record one’s most inane moments and send them on. There is a service and a sale around that, and like it or not, its brilliant. Didn’t we all love 24 hour reality TV a few years back? Will we be able to pry microblogging out of the hands of an “always-on” culture?

I thought the battle for search was done and dusted, but I guess that’s before I discovered tags and the semantic web. Still, I have my means of getting information in the way I want it and short of paying Google for the pleasure, am happy to hit their energy-sapping home page.

Take a look at these other search engines, and the great narrative they are presented in (would have liked links). I rate Kartoo and Quintura, because they attempt to define the non-linear relationships of the cloud, and its quick-loading and fun.

And read this article about all the various new search engines and what they bring to the party.

spoiler: Seth Godin comes first, 349 follow. A South African appears at #106. A lot of PR blogs in there as well but no IR.

Criteria #1: Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.

Criteria #2: Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 20): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

Criteria #3: Technorati Ranking (1 to 30): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 30) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

One has to stop blogging as a method of storing info. Readers are not working for me, and I never get round to del.icio.us. I need my own intranet.

Since I found out about micro-blogging, I’ve been trying to think of ways to utilise this tool in the enterprise. I’m not convinced by certain things I’ve seen, while other bits have impressed. Here are some of the rationales:

• always letting people know: what are you doing? (they can check your blog or subscribe mobile to updates).
  This works for Barack Obama, and mall rats, and once or twice for me. Not convinced.
• Getting latest updates via a channel.
  This can get so irritating, I subscribed to Muti’s updates on Jaiku and went crazy every 2 minutes, so I unsubscribed. The new Nokias do a great job of subscribing to RSS feeds. I’m convinced that along with the camera and text absorption into the phone, RSS feeds delivered to phone is a killer app. Killer! Therefore the channels may be a bit out of time. Boo.
• As a sideblog. Sometimes a blog is too formal for a one-liner. Just like a printed letter is too slow for email, and email has become too formal when you can send an IM, a sideblog is, well, an aside. Its something you feel ought to be published, but does not warrant too much http to process. It’s like in a newspaper, page 2, “the world in brief”, those snippets. Brilliant.

In the meantime, “sideblog”needs to enter the Public Knowledge Repository.

Updates: Dominic Jones on Twitter for IR wires, and IMHO a “tipping point” article from  ZDNet

A recent analysis by Bear Stearns (BS) recommends that Yahoo! adopt a social networking (hmm, sound familiar in the local context?) by buying Facebook. One of my favourite Web 2.0 characteristics is that comment to a feature is regularly more illuminating than the feature itself, and in this case its true again; roll the good comments please:

• BS has questionable statistics, showing that the 35-54 age demographic as being the biggest social networkers. This is intuitively inaccurate ( ever seen the over 30s groups on FB?).
• Yahoo! Has all the social networking tools it will ever need. It had them in the 90s already. They cant see the wood for the trees, and good suggestions include merging them all into one powerful app, not 20 different ones (cf FB).
• Yahoo! Should not buy FB, unless it will do so only to remove a competitor. It should rather go back to its roots, or rummage around its dev shed and bring all its toys out and reengineer them for Web 2.0.

Yahoo!, WTF? You were the web for many years, synonomous with search, free mail and free hosting. I was hooked from 1999. Sure, I got mad when Yahoo! shut down my account after 6 months of inactivity and when my girlfriend dropped me via Yahoo! mail, but you were like the rock band one grows up with at 13 who can never do wrong.

PS: I’ve registered for another account and am giving Yahoo! another chance. They have the brains, for one. Its surreal writing about Yahoo!s fortunes as I did the same for my dissertation in 1999 when Yahoo! stood for everything the web could be.

A historic event occurred a few days ago with the release of SUN Microsystems’ fourth quarter and full fiscal year results, for the year ended June 30, 2007.
They issued the release to the market/public in the following sequence:

1. on the SUN website
2. via RSS feeds
3. through traditional paid subscriber channels
4. Form 8-K (US mandatory filing)

CEO of Sun, Jonathan Schwartz, is the poster boy for CEOs who blog. He’s just made my job a lot easier, and therefore I dedicate the next block ‘o pixels to his release:

“It may not seem like it, but this is a sea change in how Sun communicates with the world – and sets a path for other public companies seeking to drive greater transparency. I wonder how far off we are from ceasing to issue traditional press releases altogether… after all, no news agency could possibly suggest they reach a greater portion of the planet than the internet.”

The internet is about dissemination and distribution, at a fraction of the cost. By publishing online you won’t accidentally flip a Springfield-Nuclear-Reactor switch which will send out all your clients’ credit card details to adolescent hackers in the Ukraine.

Thanks Jonathan, well done. If everyone was content with “wait and see” then we deserve to be dominated by our technology, viz: fossil fuels, copyright, Office…

From the Guardian:

“Facebook recorded international growth of 270% in the past year, according to the latest comScore data, which shows the site’s estimated unique user figure rising from 14.083m in June 2006 to 52.167m this June.

Tagged, though still a far smaller site at 13.167m users this June, grew by 774% in a year and Bebo by 172% to 18.2m users.

Hi5 rose 56% to 28.174m, Friendster 65% to 24.675m and Orkut by 78% to 24.12m.

And MySpace? Its user base grew by 72% in a year from 66.401m to 114.147m users.

Globally, Facebook and MySpace are strongest in North America with around two-thirds of their audience from the US and Canada, but the same is true of Bebo which has 63% of its audience base in Europe.

Orkut is strongest in South America and Friendster in Asia-Pacific. I don’t get on with either of those sites, but I wonder whether regional trends are down to seams of friend networks or particularly features that appeal to different cultural groups?

It would be interesting to look at the features and usage patterns on different sites to try and work out what the trends are here, and which sites have the most likelihood of forming international networks.”