Musings & Meanderings

In answer to the capturing traffic question on yesterday’s post and comments, I have new traffic here from SezWho.com but not from Read/WriteWeb.

As to Jitendra’s comment that one’s profile information can be edited, I clicked on that link on my profile and discovered that I needed to create an account with SezWho first. Not wanting to do this, I am only going to guess at what I’d expect to find, which is the ability to enter profile information for the benefit of anyone viewing my comments. If I could actually see the profile of who rated me, and also delete personal conversation (as discussed in yesterday’s post), I could better understand the incentive to sign up.

SezWho’s News/About Us page has links to lots of recent blog posts and articles about the service. You can also search SezWho on Technorati for another list, which is possibly how Jitendra arrived here. It might also be an interesting current search for anyone comparing search engine results.
to balance the positive coverage posts linked to on SezWho’s page above…
Geoff Livingston, a new Twitterer, tweets, “Not a good idea.” after his first encounter.

My trial comment was rated just over 2 stars. 3 is a good comment and 4 is a great comment and you can use that rating criteria to view only the best comments according to SezWho.

Objectively, I can understand why my comment, from a consumer and also business perspective but with no tech content, was not of ‘use’ or interest to the average Read/WriteWeb reader. I doubt, though, that most people will actually read all the commentary on an interesting post/topic and connect it to the star rating to form their own opinion. The comment immediately prior to mine said only, “This is such an interesting take on such a simple thing.” and received a rating of 3.5 stars. The commenter’s profile indicates that they might have been a SezWho beta tester (or closer).

Commenters who have (I assume) signed up have their website or url posted on their profile. If SezWho is actually capturing every linked posters’ traffic, though, why wouldn’t they display those posters’ websites in the profile also?

The potential of abuse with anonymous rating is what bothers me. SezWho requires entering an email address to submit a rating, but you can enter anyone’s. Being rated on Digg is not particularly invasive for those of us bloggers who aren’t mavens or seeking major traffic, although I still believe it affects all of us. Blog comments, however, or what remains of them, are somehow more intimate, and still the best potential for conversation in the public part of the blogosphere.

Last week, in a post about reputation systems, Dinesh Tantri said, “Reputation needs to be portable across the enterprise information ecosystem - a SezWho kind of distributed system for the enterprise.”

Imo, reputation also needs to be portable/aggregatable by its owner, which is related to the topic I commented on yesterday in my try out of SezWho.

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update added July 31st, 4:30 pm et

Although Jitendra posted here, I did not receive any direct or further communication, however…
The hover link has been removed completely from my name at the top of my comment (although you can still see the SezWho url, inside javascript, on the footer bar in either IE7 or Firefox)
The hover link over my name at the foot of the post has been changed completely to read verabass.blogspot.com. These changes appear to have been applied across the board.

Dear Jitendra and SezWho,
I may be just a blip of traffic in your stats, but I’m still an actual human being using services that you guys develop and promote. Respectful behavior is appreciated by people like me. It wasn’t optics that I expressed concern about, and transparency is usually a better policy.
Vera

Last week I posted on the Conversation on Comments, and talked, among other things about the rating by strangers aspect of SezWho. Being rated doesn’t bother me personally, but it does not strike me as a way to promote more conversation, and having a ‘reputation’ number assigned by unseen parties who may or may not even be participating makes me uncomfortable.

There are already plenty of reasons that cause 90% of open forum and comment readers to lurk, whereas the participation numbers in closed forums are something like 80%. (I can’t find the exact numbers or source on this, but when/if I do, I’ll edit this post here to add it.)

Today I made my first Sezwho comment, on the Read/Write Web post about information silos, and discovered something else that I’m not too happy about, which is that the poster’s name link to a url is no longer direct. It either goes through SezWho, or gets logged by them. I’m wondering how that improves comment conversation.

Aren’t there enough people tracking us already? Capturing commenters’ identities as part of aggregating their comments makes sense to me. More than that I’m not happy about. I realize that coComments, which I’m trying out, has similar aspects. The difference, to me, is that I make the choice to use coComment or not. I’m also musing on whether we’ll see any shift in the makeup of regular commenters with SezWho in favor of those who find this form of incentive appealing.

The primary feature of SezWho, which is a profile showing other comments made by the same poster, is attractive at first. I got to thinking, though, that if I make a comment of support to a friend on a more personal topic, it doesn’t always belong among comments I make on business discussions. So the feature makes me think about holding back on one or the other. It would seem that the alternative is more anonymity, and you know how I feel about that.

To improve the conversation further, my subject comment was then quoted (with a link/attribution to me) on a closed forum blog that it appears I’d have to register for to read. Maybe I’ll get an invitation.

Last week there was a surge of conversation about the term user.
Here are some links.

In First we trashed “consumers”, now we’ve effed up “users”, Antonio said,
“…every little company looking to make a similar run has a board full of investors asking the same question every month: “how many users have you got?” …The bummer about it is not the use of the term— but rather how much the constant focus on growing the pool of users quickly distorts any connection that the word user actually has to a real breathing person, even in startups that claim to be “user-centric.”

The conversation swelled to a point of calling for bloggers to post a promise to blackball the term users, with a few bloggers and commenters noting that they were proud of being users and didn’t mind the term. There were also few challenges posted to come up with a better, substitute term.

There was a lot of really passionate feeling at the heart of this conversation from developers who protest the reduction of human beings to a term or a blip of data, yet there was little conversation about who the users are, only about what to call them.

Does changing the terminology really effect much real change? I don’t mind being a user, or a customer, or a consumer in the narrow context of a transaction. I am also, as Antonio put it, a living breathing person. I may be just a blip in your traffic. By the same token, being a user is a blip in the total package of who I, and others like me, are. You can bow down and call me Your Royal Highness and it will not make any substantial difference in why you’re talking to me and what you want from me.

A few years ago, before the rise of blogging, the number of non-tech people interacting online was much smaller, but we were still here. In the communities and groups I’ve participated in, there was typically a very small minority of tech-savvy people who were there for other interests that we all shared in common. They’d help out if someone had a computer problem and that was it.

In some online communities, the administrators consult the contituents on things such as which new fun features they’d like or on minor issues to do with site/community policy. If there are help boards, members can gripe or ask a question, but their isn’t much constructive conversation, to the point that the silence is deafening. Users should start a group weblog about ‘user experience’, except that it might quickly devolve into satire.

The other day I posted that there is no tech speak for non techies and that they simply don’t care ‘how’ things work. That does not mean that they don’t care if it works or if it is of any use to them. I understand very well that there are big viewpoint and language barriers. What I don’t understand is, if the goals are to enable lots of traffic or build and expand online communities, why developers wouldn’t want to really communicate, and even commune, with the intended citizens.

If you’re a tech type or developer reading this, when was the last time you talked about life online with non-techs and how much time do you spend at it? If you’re a non-techie, when was the last time a tech person expressed any real person-to-person interest in your online experiences? I’m not referring to marketing tools such as surveys or other voting mechanisms, but to real conversation.

Anyone?

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added August 5/07:
Tests for Customer Focused Companies posted on August 3/07 by John Hagel.

Like most readers subscribing to hundreds of feeds, I’ve wished for a better way to track and follow conversations, including comments (such as this conversation on comments). Is coComment it? Not yet, but it’s the first tool for this purpose that looks promising to me, and, as is always the case, success depends partly on widespread adoption and use, so please do join us.

When I read Robert Scoble’s post titled Calacanis Asks Deep Questions About Social Networks I was following a conversation. It may not have had the depth of the most memorable ones, but it was a conversation nonetheless, and the bonus to reading this piece of it was the link to coComment.

Last night I set up a coComments page with the username Vera. You can read my future comments, or see the conversations I follow there, and can also subscribe to them directly on coComments, on Technorati, or subscribe here: coComments related to Vera.

I won’t add every comment I make or follow to my coComments collection, only those which are part of an ongoing or potential conversation. The site says it is still in early beta, so I’m definitely hoping that it adds features I haven’t found yet, such as the ability to link or group related conversations within one’s own account. It would also be good to see some ideas for an additional linking process between these content pages on Technorati.

Won’t it be great if the connection of blogging conversations, including the comments on them, can be improved?

196_?….perhaps I haven’t changed much after all…

Do the major events in our lives really change us, or do they just make us more like ourselves?