It's Time for the News Aggregators to Come Clean

Correction appended about Yahoo's operations 9/12/08

A news story from 2002 about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy
tripped up investors yesterday when it re-appeared on Google News, Barry Schwartz reports. The Google News team follows with their own explanation.
However, the entire issue raises the lack of transparency that
permeates the major news aggregation sites. It's time for them all to
come clean.

According to Reuters
consumers are increasingly turning to news aggregation sites for their
info fix because of the growth of the mobile web and an appetite for
broad perspectives. These sites, which include Google News, Yahoo News, Topix and Daylife, differ from RSS readers. Feed readers also roll up news but they put the user in complete control of the sources they consume.

News aggregation sites operate without editors. So, they're prone to
the occasional glitches like the one that occurred yesterday. The
problems are deeper, however. Most of these sites also roll up blog
content and they don't tell you that. Yahoo just recently quietly started to link to blogs. Google is doing the same.

The problem is that these sites don't delineate blogs from news
sources. On the one hand, that's terrific news. I have long said that there's no such thing as social media - it's all just media. However, on the flip side, as we all know the quality can range here and that presents a
challenge for the reader in determining who to trust. Transparency can help.

Although this specific incident with United Airlines did not involve
blogs, it underscores the lack of transparency that permeates these
sites. They are doing everyone a disservice by not providing detailed
information on how they crawl, who they chose to crawl and why they roll up some sites
and ignore others. Give us information to help us make choices on who to trust.

--

Correction:: Yahoo has a team of 24+ editors based largely in Santa Monica, CA as well as some in satellite offices in New York City, Chicago, and Sunnyvale, CA. So technically, they aren't a news aggregator in this context. Further, they do clearly delineate news from blogs when linking to them.

CNN Twitters Its Way to Direct Audience Engagement

@acarvin tweet on CNN by Steve Garfield on Flickr

If you haven't been watching CNN on the weekends you've been missing out. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez has been increasingly using Twitter to engage viewers in conversation while on the air. He was particularly active during the lead up to the conventions and Hurricane Gustav. Now Sanchez is now taking his Twitter love to the next level with a brand new show called Rick Sanchez Direct, which debuts today at 3 pm EST.

Craig Stoltz has the deets on the new show. Sanchez is using Twitter to create a level of interaction with viewers that is transparent, authentic and captivating. Hopefully this will raise awareness for Twitter among corporations who will also start to use the platform towards similar outcomes.

Watch for more media to follow CNN in lock step. Newspapers are already jumping in. Newsday, my local paper, was using Twitter to track Tropical Storm Hanna as it hit Long Island on Saturday.

How Search Will Revolutionize Social Networking

Social networking is on fire. eMarketer predicts that in the US the category will reach 44.3% of Internet users by year's end. According to Google Insights, related searches are up 3,000% over the last four years.
It has a ways to go before it's truly mainstream on a global level.
(More than half of adults in 17 countries don't know what social networking is, according to Synovate.) Still the phenomenon is a sure thing, even though the individual winners and losers will surely shift.

What has me most excited though about social networking is a capability that isn't really in place yet in a powerful way - and that's search.

Much like the early days of the web, social networks have yet to fully
exploit search. Recall that before Google came along 10 years ago web search was
woeful at best and also un-monetized. Eventually that all changed. Even though Facebook's search is weak, already it's one of the fastest growing search engines. That's remarkable.

Search will become a core feature of the social network experience, add in social elements,
usher in easier monetization and in the process revolutionize advertising. Here's a look at some trends to watch...

TRUSTED SEARCH TRUMPS UNTRUSTED SEARCH - Do you trust Google? I do as does most everyone.
Do you trust what's in Google? For me, that depends on what I am
searching for and where it comes from. However, I do trust the 1,000
people I have added to my social network on Facebook.
In fact, it's why I limit my connections there to people I have either
met or corresponded with. I value what they talk about and share
there.

However, there's a gaping hole in the Facebook experience. While I can
search through my friends, find new friends and also groups, I can't
search the content my network creates. In addition, I can't go a
layer deeper to see what my friends' friends are sharing (as I can on Friendfeed). Look for
search to get embedded deeper into the social networking experience and create a split
between trusted and untrusted search. The impact on PR will be major here too.

Microsoft's forthcoming integration of Live Search into Facebook could be the first step toward trusted search. MySpace has already site-wide search and can tweak it to achieve the same. (MySpace and Microsoft are Edelman clients.)

CONTEXTUAL SEARCH ADS GET SOCIAL - Google and MySpace have an advertising agreement going back to 2006. Facebook and Microsoft have a similar arrangement that started last year. So the search engines clearly view the social networks as a monetization venue and vice versa.

Social
network advertising to date, though, has been a mixed bag. Everyone is
innovating. But the draw on social networks is your friends, which
makes it harder to be distracted by ads. Enter search. Watch for
contextual search advertising and programs like Facebook's social ads to mix. New models
will emerge where contextual ads are surfaced based on the content
created and recommended by your friends.

SOCIAL NETWORKS BECOME SEARCH ENGINES - If you went through my browser
history, you would be bored. I spend most of my time in Google's
universe of sites and on The New York Times site. Beyond that, you will
find a bushel of social networks - Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and
Twitter.

Now, what if I could interact with any or all of my favorite sites all
from a single social network and have my friends add value to that
experience? It's coming. Today, for example, on Facebook I use Six
Apart's BlogIt to Twitter. I also catch up with my favorite sports
teams using Sportsline's Facebook application. These are simplistic though. Notice what's
missing - I can't search the web yet from inside Facebook. However, on
MySpace I can. But this is the beginning.

In the near future the search engines will all create applications or
hooks into soc nets that let you search and annotate the web in
conjunction with your friends, changing the web experience. The image above from the Shifted Librarian shows how she is able to search her local library direct from Facebook. Now imagine that same search application gets social and you can see that a major evolution in how we mine the web with friends is coming soon.

The World's Clicks Don't Always Tell the Truth

The following is also my column in next week's AdAge...

The dirty little secret in the blogosphere is that bloggers get free books - and lots of them. Often they show up without anyone asking. Most of the ones on Web 2.0 or the Internet just aren't that good or are woefully outdated by the time they hit your Kindle.

Still, my Andy Rooney moment aside, there are two in this fall's crop has a stats geek like me really excited. They deserve a spot on your shelf - but with an important caveat.

The first is The Numerati by BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker. In the book Baker details how companies are hiring math geeks to dissect and make sense of mountains of data to spot everything from consumer patterns to future terrorists. An entire chapter is dedicated to discussing how savvy marketers are using data modeling to dig through reams of blog chatter in search of insights. Baker and his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, are even running a behavioral targeting campaign to underscore the value of studying ad clicks.

Click by Hitwise's Bill Tancer tackles the same theme but from a singular perspective - search data. Tancer, who makes a living selling insights to major marketers, leverages Hitwise's search engine data from ISPs and its panel to provide perspectives on what people Google for and why. Like Baker, the anecdotes range from the general to the esoteric. Click even features a riveting chapter on pills, porn and casinos. So, be sure to cuddle this book tightly in bed.

In the web era, data, not content, nor community is king. The companies and individuals who can make the most sense of our footprints and place strategic bets are the ones who will succeed. Michael Lewis illustrated this wonderfully in his 2003 book Moneyball.

However, data should not be relied upon exclusively. It can be wrong. At the Web 2.0 Conference last October Tancer predicted that KeepVid and Veoh would be two of the next hot sites. A year later, according to Google Trends, traffic to both is flat.

Data brings power but also a danger that marketers will over rely on clicks and ignore their intuition; knowledge gleaned from old school face-to-face interactions like focus groups, secret shopper visits and years of experience. Hook the traditional with the new and you're unbeatable.

How Globalization Handed One Blogger a Big Scoop

Philipp Lenssen has long been one of my favorite bloggers. He co-authors one of the best blogs on Google, which is also one of my obsessions. Today he scored a big scoop. Google's long awaited web browser is launching tomorrow. If you're reading this Tuesday or later, the browser is here.

So how did this happen? This is just my analysis. I haven't confirmed
with Philipp (who I have known for years). But I suspect
globalization is totally to blame.

You see, Philipp blogs out of Germany, where
there was mail service today. So a comic book tease
from Google that probably every big US tech blogger is going to
receive tomorrow once the US Post Office re-opens, was in Philipp's
mailbox today. Oops.

I would not be surprised if there are Google media embargoes that will lift
tonight at midnight. (For an explanation for how these work read this great post.) In fact, Philipp's blog post has prompted Google
to basically go ahead release the news via its blog
today even though it's a holiday and a very busy news day with a hurricane
bearing down on New Orleans and the GOP convention about to start.

The lesson here is that it's a global playing field. That can work to a
public relations professional's advantage or disadvantage but you need
to always keep it in mind. The world truly is flat.