One of the most important factors would almost certainly be the comments.

What is one of the primary reasons people click through from an RSS feed to actually visit a blog?

Almost certainly it is either to read comments others have made, or to make one of their own. It is not to view advertising… at least for most.

How would a machine, such as Google differentiate between original source and whether a piece of content is valuable to include in its search index?

Factors could include:-

• The content within comments – keywords, language structure, length etc
• The number of comments
• Update frequency of the page (gaining additional comments over time)

Sure there are other factors, such as links

People link to comments on blogs, typically using a #fragment – the link is going to the blog permalink page

How many times have you found the answer to a question by reading a blog comment?

For me it is actually quite frequently – comments quite often provide alternatives to the original content that offer improvements.

A large part of blogging is engaging your audience in conversation

Business blogging is about engaging your customers

It hasn’t happened yet, but soon a blog might become no more than an RSS feed that is read on another domain, and discussed in small communities of friends, sometimes private, sometimes public, but still fragmented conversation.

Sharing In Google Reader

I have probably been the most vocal in my dislike of Google Reader sharing.

Google reader is one of the most effective tools for creating splogs
RSS Readers should provide publishers with a choice as to whether their content can be easily shared further than the original subscriber.
Bloglines have discussed and implemented access control, and Facebook even uses it

Fragmented Comments

I totally understand Paul from Friendfeed in his analogy with films, that he wants to discuss a film with his friends, and that YouTube isn’t exactly the epitomy of stimulating conversation.

But the intent of a movie or YouTube isn’t to stimulate dialogue at the venue, otherwise they would improve the venues. In fact YouTube was purposely designed with viral intention, for the content to be syndicated and for conversations to happen elsewhere. With the YouTube API, Google wants to hand off being the publisher (and their legal problems) in return for advertising $.

Many bloggers on the other hand blog to stimulate conversation on their own blogs, to generate page views, and maybe make a little money from advertising or services.

Engtech @ Internet Duct Tape

As a content producer it’s really nice to see discussions happening around the content I’ve created.

But at least I know how people are reacting… with the explosion of social media / social networking I have no idea what people are saying unless I’m actively a member of those communities.

As a content consumer it’s much more convenient to respond to content on the community where I found it from.

The fragmentation of discussion might be bad for the content producer, but it makes things so much easier for the content consumer. I know which way this trend is heading…

(A smart person would build a social network scraper to reimport the comments from there into their blogging engine software — if you know of any plugins like that then leave a comment)

Nico in a recent comment on my post “How To Add FriendFeed to Technorati”

Thanks for that information. I got everything running now.

I hope it gets me some fresh content in form of comments to my blog posts.

A very simple wish, but the chances of it happening are remote, especially for a foreign language blog unless FriendFeed becomes popular in Germany.

Warning Signals From September

Whilst the writing was on the wall before hand, especially in hindsight, when news leaked about a potential commenting system in Google Reader, there was a fair amount of controversy.

Whilst Google have since implemented the sharing of items with your gmail contacts automatically in Google Reader, nothing has appeared regarding activity streams and commenting.

Isn’t that odd?

The thing is, if Google implement this, there would be public outcry – it is not just bloggers publishing RSS feeds, but also major news corporations.

How convenient that Friendfeed was launched a few weeks later by a bunch of former Googlers

I don’t think there was any kind of conspiracy, as an example Paul Buchheit had been outside Google for over a year, and other founders were also working outside Google on new projects.

Previous relationships would however potentially make Friendfeed a very comfortable acquisition target after it had matured and the public opinion was appeased.

Add Comments to RSS or RSS to Comments?

First off, I expect someone to come out with some kind of Greasemonkey script very soon to work in Friendfeed, so that you can pull in items from the original site without leaving Friendfeed. I am amazed it hasn’t happened already, as there are already scripts for use with Google Reader.

Then think of Flickr – I have already seen this wish from Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter

wish FriendFeed added some AJAX, hover-over lightbox Flickr photo popu action

You could probably do that in Greasemonkey for the early adopters, but eventually add it to the main Friendfeed interface, and people would never have to visit Flickr to see full content pictures.

Alternatively it would also be easy to integrate Friendfeed comments into Google Reader

Disqus Too

FriendFeed are not the only possible solution in town – recently funded Disqus (and a number of others) for instance would make a great replacement for the ailing comment system on Blogger. Blogger commenting stinks.

At the same time why limit Disqus commenting to only blogs that have installed the javascript code? Wouldn’t it make sense to allow Disqus commenting for any blog or RSS content, whether they ran the code or not? People using Disqus would still see it, and possibly trackbacks could be sent to the blog that there is a dicussion just so the author is aware of it, and encouraged to join and maybe switch commenting.

RSS content could also be pulled into Disqus at a later date, it would enhance conversation to have it all tied together on one site… like it used to be, even if it is only as an iframe pulled from Google Reader (why show annoying advertising)

Smart Business… Maybe

Fred Wilson actually wrote a little about Friendfeed as well, I do agree with him on this specific statement

So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to whats’ going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the web.

Grabbing attention and content is smart business, but what happens when you have to monitor conversation on 20 or 30 different comment aggregating services, not all of which have an open API (of that I am confident at least some will provide)

Traffic, SEO and Accessibility

Disqus currently have some problems with this – it is javascript, a blog owner loses long tail traffic directly to their blog.
It also poses usability problems for people using non-javascript browsers. They don’t even get to even see that comments exist somewhere – that is likely a legal issue in lots of Europe.

There are benefits – serving comments is a database hit, and a comment being updated changes the cache or part of the cache serving the blog post – comments should really be served as an embed or in an Iframe, with javascript enhancing the content, not serving it.

In general, comment systems are fairly prehistoric, and could actually bring in more traffic. Rather than being extra content to an original article, they could each be treated like a twitter tweet, and then served on a page with its own title, that is also used as anchor text linking to the comment on a permalink page. That would turn a blog post with 50 comments into 51 pages of unique content – some would be a little weak on content, but others would be substantial.

This isn’t new, it would be just like old threaded forum scripts.

If data was stored with timestamps in XML, then it would be easy to integrate it and possibly cross-pollinate the conversation, but would commenters always want an author to know about their conversation?
Thus you would need various privacy settings and discussion groups.

The Race To Kill Blogging

I don’t think in this scenario blogging would really exist – you would have original content producers, but there wouldn’t really be a need for the blog platform. A blog post would purely be the starting point in a distributed conversation thread which would contain other blog posts, or just simple comments – it is just another node in the conversation.

Back to CompuServe, Prodigy, Usenet, FidoNet, CIX and AOL

Fragmented discussions are nothing new – once the fragments are joined back together, it is a bit like a timewarp or things going full circle 20 years.

Actually 20 years ago was so much easier. I was on CIX – you could use an offline reader and “blink” to download your threaded discussion messages – a much more efficient workflow and very little if any advertising or spam.

Sure you would present the data differently – in those days my Commodore Amiga with 4MB of memory was a beast, these days that could be taken up by a single webpage.

Do you really want to go “Back To The Future”?

I am however an interested observer, and I have a number of questions buzzing around in my head that remain unanswered.

This is more a collection of “what ifs” than anything else, discussion points that have no real factual basis, from someone with very minimal knowledge of how the financial markets work.

Microsoft Should Only Increase Cash Offering

Yahoos seem to want $40+ per share, which would effectively value the stock at close to a 7 year high. If Microsoft stock was similarly valued based upon their own 7 year high (which wasn’t over 2 years ago), then the original equivalent of $31 per share in stock would be very attractive.

Most of Yahoo’s investors are institutional, possibly long term investors, who also have holdings in Microsoft, Google and Time Warner.

For me the strong play from Microsoft would be to offer $35 per share cash, or keep the existing $31 stock equivalent based on valuations the day it was made public.

Have some kind of firm “either/or” clause, and some additional guarantees based on stock performance for those that choose the stock.

My gut feeling is that many of the institutions want some kind of deal, there just has to be a viable alternative for those Yahoo investors who still regard Microsoft as the big Satan.

An increase in the cash offer, and a slight rewording of what is on offer could well reduce the amount of cash that Microsoft have to fork out rather than increase it.

Yahoo – AOL

It is funny, a Yahoo <> AOL deal would essentially create a monopoly situation in Email and Instant Messaging worse than a Yahoo <> Microsoft deal, so I am sure we can expect another post on the Google blog objecting to such a merger.

The synergies between Yahoo & AOL are such that the sum of the individual parts would be greater than the whole, thus a merger would be a defensive move rather than one that would stimulate the kind of potential growth Jerry Yang is predicting.

Microsoft To Buy Google?

This is never going to happen, but just to compare notes

• It would create the best shareholder value
• It wouldn’t create any new monopolies in a specific vertical
• They are polar opposites, but the combined company would have so many synergies, it would be frightening

Put Larry and Sergey in charge of the combined entity, open source not only all Microsoft products, but also all Google’s. In some way get rid of software patents.

The crux? Back to the old browser wars – competitors to Internet Explorer rely on Google for financing.

Previous $35 Bid?

Even if Microsoft previously bid $35, that was based upon their own stock price at the time of the bid, which was above $34 per share.

Poison Pill or Suicide Pill or Sandbagging

I know so much about investment, I had to look up all the terms, browsing around on Investopedia

Ultimately I know that I currently use Yahoo and Microsoft online services so rarely, both must be doing a lot wrong.

You are never going to get a deal where the synergies are as compelling, but equally as impossible as a Microsoft <> Google merger, so you have to look for second best.

Google have an unhealthy share of my online attention, thus I would like an alternative. I am not sure forcing Microsoft to pay more is good for the long-term future of a combined company.

What I don’t appreciate is poor reporting – I can see in the numbers that Microsoft isn’t actually offering less than it did previously as far as a stock deal, and this is more to do with timing with Yahoo’s Annual General Meeting than Microsoft taking advantage of a drop in share price that has affected all major stakeholders in the sector.

A Quagmire Of Ineptitude?

My brain is the one which is bogged down in thoughts about things I really shouldn’t be thinking about, thus writing something hopefully will clear the mind and I can get on with something constructive. Maybe others will do the same or at least improve the quality of their reporting so I don’t have to think too much.

Microsoft <> Yahoo doesn’t seem like a perfect deal, but I can’t see another deal stimulating enough growth to offer Google any competition.

Update

It looks like Microsoft have responded to being given the cold shoulder – I suppose it adds a little insult to injury that Microsoft press releases seem to always appear on Yahoo news first, and that is the source that often appears on Techmeme.

I thought it was strange that the story hadn’t been submitted to Digg, because it was already appearing on Megite.

Here is the story I submitted on Digg linking through to the original article on Reuters.

However if you do a search on Digg, the article just doesn’t exist…

I am not talking buried, it is as if the article has entered some kind of black hole of censorship.

Here is a search, and it includes buried stories.

The 3 most current search results are about autos.aol.com that are 3 days old.

I know there is a little bad air about Digg/Netscape, but censoring every single story regarding AOL just isn’t fair game.

The Reuters news story is being syndicated far and wide, but the Digg story is linking to the original breaking news.

If Digg wishes to maintain relevance, and its insistance that it is the users who are filtering content, and not the owners, they need to have a lot more clarity about these stories that seem to disappear from the Digg system.

As for AOL News, I think it is a major step forward. I have a 7Mbps connection although it is via an international connection – the page loads much faster than news.yahoo.com and actually faster than my blog homepage (oops)

The code is quite clean and light, and there are interesting pictures throughout the page, not just in the top 3 stories.