Ian On The Red Dot

He gives a preview here. Some thoughts on the app’s link-tracking.

Yongfook’s new project to help track and measure social media campaigns is basically a souped-up URL shortening service focused on helping businesses instead of the average social media user who blogs and twitter.

A URL shortening service basically takes a very long link and makes it into a shorter one. What happens when someone clicks on that shorter link? The service needs to resolve that shorter link into a longer one and redirect the browser to load the original page. During this resolution stage, two key data can be captured: the click and the originating page for the click.

Of course, Google Analytics can be massaged into being about to provide this data, but changes would need to be made in the behavior of the administrators (if not the code) of the publishing and linked sites.

It would be trivial for such a service to allow campaign sites being run by the PR companies to add a DNS entry to point a sub-domain to the service. What this does is that it prevents the creation of obscure shortened URLs that point to potentially malicious sites.

So instead of getting http://urlshort.com/1231872138 which gives no indication of the endpoint, we can get URLs like http://socialmedia.nike.com/awesome_sneakers_campaign.

Of course the latter link isn’t exactly shortened, but you get the drift.

Once the creation of these links pointing to a campaign’s page (i.e. a page promoting a newly launched product ) is done, these little ‘peas’ can be sowed all across the web.

Now, whenever someone clicks on a link, the app can get data to generate beautiful reports.

I guess what happens now is that when PR companies start generating social media releases, the URLs would now all be using a shortened URL or at least a URL generated by the service.

No more http://www.nike.com/campaign but http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign.

The beautiful thing about this is now PR agencies or any other company for that matter who engages bloggers can start being sure which group of bloggers are worth the engagement. Imagine creating two campaigns for the same site. One to target the ‘in’ bloggers and another to target people on forums.

Each campaign will produce two different links. So, you get http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign-a and http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign-b which effectively point to the same site. Now, you use two different links for two different sets of press releases. The service would make it much easier to identify which campaign is more effective.

If a blogger uses the souped up link, data capture is easier and I’ll know which blogger to stop inviting.

If the use of this service catches on in Singapore, we might start seeing which bloggers are the ones ‘not wearing any clothes’.

The idea is a simple and beautiful one. The use of URL shortening services has exploded alongside the growth of social media. Yongfook’s app and other similar ones targeting the same space are using the common behavior of social media users to generate more useful data for companies.

Final thought – This service could potentially even help businesses and PR companies assess the portion of marketing budget that should be spent online. Why? Hint: links aren’t just published online.

Had lunch with Pat Law today and we were discussing about BlogOut 2009 when she shared about the new project from celebrity web producer Yongfook named Rippl3.

She shared that the project was described as being a tool to ‘Set goals, track success, make sense of your social media campaigns’. Immediately, my mind started racing. How would anyone implement such a tool? More importantly, what would yongfook do ( i.e. WWYD ) to create such a tool?

Incidentally, Yongfook also goes by the name ‘Jon’, so it really is ‘WWJD’. He was born for this.

Anyway, I digress. I looked into the name ‘Rippl3′ and wondered whether Yongfook was alluding to the phenomenon of waves radiating outwards from the point where a pebble drops into a body of water. I described the phenomenon and Pat said something like, ‘that’s like the logo’ ( not exactly sure what were the exact words used ).

The logo in question:

The phenomenon in question:

So how could such a phenomenon be used to explain the concept of tracking influence in social media?

Simple. You drop a message into a social system and track its effects across time and people further away ( in terms of network connections ) from the original recipient. I’m of course simplifying. The above is the ‘what do you do’. Not how. Not why.

The more detailed thoughts will occur after Blogout 2009. I need to digest this a little more.

I’ve been playing around with some ideas in my head about how URL shorteners can enhance the social media and blogging experience. So using this post written by Leah Culver as a starting point, I started work on my own URL shortener to be deployed on Google App Engine. This is the first iteration of the project.

The converted URL for this blog – http://obl.appspot.com:80/c/4

The site does only one thing at the moment which is to take a long URL and convert it to a relatively shorter URL. Since I haven’t gone and buy some super short domain name like http://is.gd/ or http://bit.ly, the resultant URL isn’t that short. However, the good thing about the way the service has been setup is that when I do get a better and shorter domain name, the service can easily be ported over without ‘killing’ the earlier created URLs.

From the Wikipedia entry:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSE: DJI), also called the DJIA, Dow 30, or informally the Dow Jones or The Dow) is one of several stock market indices created by nineteenth century Wall Street Journal editor and Dow Jones & Company co-founder Charles Dow. Dow compiled the index as a way to gauge the performance of the industrial component of America’s stock markets. It is the second oldest continuing U.S. market index, after the Dow Jones Transportation Average, which Dow also created.

The average consists of 30 of the largest and most widely held public companies in the United States. The “industrial” portion of the name is largely historical—many of the 30 modern components have little to do with heavy industry. The average is price-weighted. To compensate for the effects of stock splits and other adjustments, it is currently a scaled average, not the actual average of the prices of its component stocks—the sum of the component prices is divided by a divisor, which changes whenever one of the component stocks has a stock split or stock dividend, to generate the value of the index. Since the divisor is currently less than one, the value of the index is higher than the sum of the component prices.

A while back, I read about this URL shortening service bit.ly. Apparently, it is so good that Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb called it the TinyURL of the future. Two things that it does which is really useful – it provides stats and caches the page linked to.

I was thinking about the innovation going on with bit.ly and other url shorteners and how they could actually help monetize an individual’s social network which is a rather crass thing to do but I’m sure that are people willing to do it.

Imagine this – instead of just shortening the url, you shorten the url using a seed. For example, now when I shorten the URL ian.onthereddot.com, I get http://bit.ly/2xRGSq. What if I give both the url to shorten and my username on Facebook.

The new shortened URL will be linked to me. Whenever I share that link on Facebook, statistics can be gathered to show how effective my sharing is because that URL can be traced to me. So instead of just knowing that traffic is coming from Facebook, you can tell which user is sharing on Facebook and who is helping generate the traffic.

So, how do you monetize your social network?

You guarantee that your sharing can generate X amount of traffic. Someone offers a price for that X amount of traffic. You decide if it is worth abusing your network for that 30 pieces of silver.

You start sharing links. The URL shortening service is able to track if you are meeting the quota. If you meet the quota, then, you get money.

hmmm….sounded better in my head.

I was trying to fit a message into the 140 characters limit when I realized that while some academics and intellectual snobs have bemoaned the quality of English used on services like Twitter and the bastardization of the language, I realized that Twitter can actually help us improve our English.

Remember all those summaries you had to do in Secondary School? Well, Twittering with proper English words forces you to learn how to say what you need to, or want to, as succinctly as possible. You might be compelled to improve your vocabulary by learning synonyms and antonyms.

Of course we can just continue to use lol, wtf, rofl, omg or just make up new ones. However, I think the use of such services, while condescendingly referred to as symptomatic of our snacking culture, might help us if we allow it to.

Any teacher planning to create a course syllabus around the use of Twitter as a tool to teach English? Imagine a game being played with Twitter where players actually improve their English at the end of the day.

Hmmm…

Is it possible to have a site powered by a CMS without the need for the site to store any of their own content on their own servers? If so, what would the solution look like?

First, the non-idea. Let’s not build the whole infrastructure from scratch just to implement whatever ideas we do have for taking the Youth Olympic Games online.

Example of an Idea: Hey, you know what, let’s allow people to share their homemade videos of the YOG.

Example of what we should not do: Build our own backend to store the videos.

Example of what we could do: Host the videos on YouTube. Create a website that allows people to upload their videos of the YOG. Use the new YouTube API to save the videos on YouTube servers. The YOG website just aggregates videos stored on YouTube.

Why: Save Money. Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants. Don’t Do Something From Scratch Just For The Sake Of Doing It.

Now, for my idea.

We setup Flickr-booths around the island with iconic buildings and scenery as the background. People take photos at the booths and the pictures are instantly uploaded to Flickr tagged appropriately. A YOG site aggregates these photos.

How to do this. Simple actually. Get Apple to sponsor tons of their iMacs. Protect their computers with a telephonebooth-like shelter. Use their PhotoBooth software as well as plugins like FlickrBooth to take the photos and immediately upload it to Flickr.

Do a similar thing for videos. Again, get Apple to sponsor tons of iMacs and put them at spots around the sportsmen/sportswomen village. Use the iSight camera to create videos which are immediately uploaded to YouTube. I’m sure a simple plugin can be written for this if it has not already been done so. A YOG site aggregates these videos.

Let’s look at the cost here. Hmmm… There are the computers and the booths and the website to aggregate links to the videos and photos. I think cost of computers and booths can be covered by sponsorship and official partners.

Last part of the idea which might be the one with significant costs – all participants of the YOG are issued some EZLink-like card which contains all the important details about them. When they take a photo or make a video, they tap the card against some device attached to the computer which then appends all these details as tags for the video or photo. Even better, use RFID so no tapping is needed.

The metadata is needed so that the YOG website can better aggregate the videos and photos.

This is my idea. What do you guys think about it?

Recently, someone posed as a representative of Nuffnang and posted a bunch of comments on a blog. The(new)mediaslut wrote a blog post giving advice on how to deal with the issue of an imposter. That post highlighted steps that can be taken after the fact of impersonation.

So the question I asked myself was how to prevent anyone from posing as a representative of a company in this new online media landscape with blogs and comments.

Specifically, how does a representative of a company establish his or her identity?

There are two ways which I am aware of.

1. Leave your name, email and site’s URL.

Presumably, the email you leave will be a secret which is used to identify yourself to the blog’s administrators. However, emails are easily harvested and it is actually a trivial thing to find out the email used by the representative of a company.

2. Install a blog commenting system to handle the identity of commentators.

Four examples of such systems:

a. http://www.sezwho.com/
b. http://disqus.com/
c. http://www.cocomment.com/
d. http://www.intensedebate.com/

There are a few problems with such systems:

1. The system has to be integrated with a blog.

2. Unless the services all use OpenID, people who like to comment regularly would need to have an account for each system.

3. Even if all the systems implemented OpenID, data regarding the comments made by a user would be stored in separate data silos with no aggregation of data across services.

So, I would like to propose a possible solution.

There will be a company, let’s call it COTRD, which establishes itself as an identity verification service for companies. COTRD is responsible for authenticating a user’s identity – the user is verified to represent the company or a company can setup accounts to be used by their representatives. The commentator, representing a site or company, who would like to establish his identity on a blog, first logs into COTRD to post the comment. Once the comment has been posted on COTRD, the user then posts the same comment on the other site with a link back to the comment on COTRD.

The idea behind this solution is to make use of the third field in the form when leaving a comment – the ‘Website’ field. Most people would just enter a URL for a domain (i.e. ian.onthereddot.com). What if, instead of just leaving the domain name of the website, the URL left is a permanent address to a comment hosted on COTRD?

Since, only the authenticated representative of the company could have left the comment on COTRD, if the comment on COTRD matches the comment on the blog, then that comment must have been made by the representative.

An analogy would be this. Only two people have the key to a house. Let’s call them Boy A and Girl B. Girl B receives a note from a stranger who claims the note is from Boy A. The note contains the words – ‘I Love You’. Now, Girl B goes back to the house, and sees the words ‘I Love You’ on the wall. Since only Boy A could have left those words because he was the only other person with a key to the house, then the note, or at least the words on the note, must have been from Boy A.

Of course, an astute observer might ask why can’t a company just post the comment on their own blog as a post. They could. But blog posts and comments are two different beasts and a company might not want to muddle up the content of their blog with every comment they had to post on other blogs.

A company could of course set up a separate blog where only comments are posted on it, so COTRD would have to provide other services to companies using its service.

Below is a comment highlighting the use of a service like COTRD.