Thus they are most likely targeting me with the message using some kind of IP delivery – looking at which country or region my IP address originates in, and as I use a Polish ISP, they sometimes give me information in Polish.

After you switch display language, it looks a little like this

Facebook was translated using crowd sourcing – to be honest I am not sure it is the best option – it is certainly the cheap option, and gives users some additional sense of ownership which can encourage brand loyalty, but I am not convinced it is the best option.

I am not a native Pole, in fact my linguistic skills are a source of constant frustration for my Polish wife and her family.

Whilst Facebook clearly state the translations are for information purposes only, I shouldn’t be able to pick up glaring translation flaws in a matter of minutes, within headlines… just scanning pages.
Note:- whilst in the games industry one of the roles I performed was coordinating the localization of over 100 SKUs from English to Polish, and occasionally translation Polish > English but that was often more like rewriting the manuals

Here is an example from the terms and conditions

Hmm, definitions and constructions… referring to grammatical definitions and constructions

Unfortunately “Remonty” in Polish means “Renovation” and unlike other similar words, is never used for anything to do with grammar.

The following alternatives would be suitable.

Definicje i Konstrukcje
Definicje i Budowa (zdań)

Google Translate Does It Better

Plugging the same phrase into Google Translate, which recently added support for Polish gives much better results than were achieved using crowd sourcing.

Google Translate isn’t perfect by any means, it needs to expand the dictionary considerably, and probably include specific thematic dictionaries, but recently I have used it to translate from Polish to English for friends and family with reasonable success.

I expect such blunders from professionals translating from their native language into a foreign language, but from such a huge company using crowd sourcing on a large scale, with professional management, I expected much better.

There are other bugs, along with a sense that they didn’t include a solution to take into consideration gender.

Facebook isn’t an open source project with limited resources.

Many bloggers look on their activity on social networks, social news and microblogging sites as an extension of their blog. For instance I look on my Stumbleupon blog as an ideal way to publish asides, or as a legitimate way to share cool content without having to worry about copyright issues that might be associated with sharing RSS items using Google Reader.
I am not a big fan of posts that are just a big links roundup.

Whilst it is easily possible to create a mashup of multiple RSS resources and feeds, and then combine them in some kind of universal widget, often the results are disappointing.

Blogcatalog Make It Easy With “My News Feed”

Feeds have now also been added to Blogcatalog profile pages

You will also notice in the top right corner of the widget that you can easily subscribe to the social lifestream of your favorite bloggers as a single feed.

Privacy

You have full control over what is shared from within Blogcatalog Dashboard setting

Bugs?

There are a few

I had to do a little CSS hacking to get the widget to display correctly with my theme, but I am sure Daniel from Blogcatalog will get those sorted out quickly.

The RSS feed needs a little work. There are duplicate lines, and it would be good to include snippets where available. I am also not sure I am a big fan of the tracking links on the blog posts that appear in the RSS feeds, but that probably helps on Blogcatalog ratings.

Disclaimer: I do some consulting with Blogcatalog

Tech bloggers enthuse about the growing number of social networks online, but there have been 1000s of social communities online for years, where people spend a huge amount of time in valuable interaction.

I would actually argue that the interaction that happens on niche forums is far more valuable than occurs on social networks such as Facebook or Myspace – the discussion groups on Facebook are almost impossible to really follow, and creating one seems more about creating a convenient way to broadcast to your group members on Facebook than the actual interaction that happens in the group.

Here is an overview of what a forum profile looks like with social network features added – they also have a competition to win a widescreen monitor based on who creates the best profile.

I went delving into the blog functions a little and noticed some bugs

The auto-discovery is set for the main forum feed rather than individual blogs – this might cause indexing problems

There is a problem with the blog navigation – the link from a profile to the blog is a little unclear (a graphic View All), only individual posts have anchor text, then from the individual posts there is only small breadcrumb navigation, and for some reason an overall forum category for “Member Blogs” is empty.

The RSS feeds on the front page are being served with Ajax which isn’t a major problem if you don’t want them to transfer any juice, but they include the Feedburner RSS tracking links. For me that is a problem, because it invalidates how responsive readers are from your RSS feed.

WhyDoWork – What makes it social?

I think the activity stream on the front page is a good example which takes WhyDoWork beyond the forum spectrum, allowing you to see where your friends have been most active.

When I have spent lots of time on forums in the past, this is the kind of feature I would have appreciated to improve the signal to noise ratio, and in fact is one of the best features of many activity stream products now being launched.

WhyDoWork are a recent advertiser, not that I have had advertising slots available for sale for a long time. They have linked to me in the past from their blog, Matthew is a regular reader and contributor in the comments on this blog. This isn’t a paid review, it falls into that grey area Google have yet to define which I mentioned in my recent reinclusion request – then again, so many SEO blogs are running Adverts for Google Analytics these days, without any disclosure in the content – that sucks for users

I do benefit potentially from long term promotion of Blogcatalog and by giving their competitors equal coverage I also gain a benefit, because if for instance MyBlogLog becomes a massive success, the value of competitors as a viable business also increases.

Thus it is actually with a very heavy heart that I am going to write what might be my first ever critical review of MyBlogLog.

It is my hope the MBL guys take this as constructive criticism, which I haven’t honestly seen on any other blog over the last couple of days since the features were announced, other than what seemed to be a universal yawn.

What Is Wrong With The Activity Time Line?

MyBlogLog have so far added 42 services, and I am only looking at a few of them.

However based on a comment over at Brian Solis the LifeStream currently supports

- Bebo
- Deli.cio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- Jumpcut
- Last.FM
- MyBlogLog
- Netflix
- Stumbleupon
- Twitter
- Yahoo Answers
- Yelp
- YouTube
- Upcoming

Here are some quick annotated notes in a quick screenshot

Now I wouldn’t be so harsh if I hadn’t already read this comment by Eric on the Techcrunch writeup

Sadly, this feature has been ready to launch since June of 07, when it would have been a pioneer instead of a follower. Regardless, I’m psyched that the rest of the team had the temerity to stick it out at Yahoo in the belief that they would get to start launching killer features.

If this has been ready for 8 months and just needed pushing out of the door, you would expect a few refinements.

I have seen a few comments on the Techcrunch article suggesting that there is a lack of control of what you see in the timeline, either for privacy or information overload.
It is true that Blogcatalog have this side of the feature set more refined, but at the same time I am not a great fan of micro-management, and it is not needed with the current maximum of 40 people you follow… possibly because not enough people have added their services yet.

Tags

The way MyBlogLog has tagging implemented has always bugged me – all tags on the site still lead only to people and communities that have been tagged manually in the MyBlogLog system, rather than using the tags supplied within content with rel=”tag” or categories.

Here is an example

Those tags from Matt’s delicious feed lead to MyBlogLog’s internal tagging system, not where you would expect… either Matt’s or the global tags on Delicious. Very annoying.
It is equally annoying when you click similar tags below RSS items and again you are not presented with content.

No Mentions of Blogcatalog

Here are some reports on the MyBlogLog new features, but they ignore Blogcatalog

ReadWriteWeb
Techcrunch
Mashable
Louis Grey
Cnet
Brian Solis (Brian I am disappointed)
Webomatica
Download Squad

Best of all, Read Write Web did a round up of 35 Life Streaming sites, and for some reason Blogcatalog didn’t make that list either.

I know everyone is talking about FriendFeed which has some useful viral ideas to encourage everyone to sign up, and their Facebook integration really kicks butt.
I have a problem with FriendFeed – it is trying to grab the conversation from the various services with an internal comment system. I am not sure that is healthy.

MyBlogLog have added some kind of blog comment monitoring system, that is a good idea and something I have nudged the Blogcatalog guys about a few weeks ago, but moving the comments to FriendFeed? I am not happy with that.

If you want to compare, here is the current list of “LifeStream Supported” services on Blogcatalog

Amazon Wishlist, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Myspace Blog, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube

I believe there are 15 others on the way soon.

There are some inherent problems with all of these platforms… information overload and lack of specific topical areas or niches. Once you go beyond your core friends, the noise increases.

I really want to throw a wide net for information retrieval, but I only want some of it.

Update

For those unaware of some of the features introduced by Blogcatalog over the last 6 months here are some links to relevant articles.

For the programming geeks, you might be interested in the BlogCatalog API which was introduced August 2007

If you are looking to differentiate between MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog, I wrote this article back on July 2007 and it covers many of the differences which are still true today.

More recently, Blogcatalog partnered with SezWho to enable a comprehensive comment feedback system. At that time they also surpassed MBL on Alexa, though as everyone knows Alexa stats are not the most accurate to go by, and the unique differences between the services create a different usage profile.

To compare social graph features, I would suggest my article from when Blogcatalog introduced their dashboard 2 weeks ago. Of particular interest for many are the very specific controls available to protect your privacy, or to control which information you receive from different people.

p.s. I don’t class the problems previously with the messaging system as a negative review – I think that was more a general outburst from the whole blogosphere.

There is a World Outside Your Fishtank

Within “blogging” social networks I have been pushing to have a reason to add someone as a friend for a long time. Blog broadcasts, built in feed readers and OPML will eventually provide a reason to join communities.

I know that MyBlogLog are planning to also launch something similar and I have a feeling this will likely kick off more people claiming Blogcatalog is just a copycat of Mybloglog.

I first had a sneak peak at the Dashboard a few days ago and gave Tony from Blogcatalog a lot of ideas for features, such as:-

• adding snippets to the social news items, Digg buttons (title, desciption and button = old Digg Interface… yay!)
• merging URLs from multiple submissions
• pulling in friends from all your social profiles

The thing is, Blogcatalog was already collecting feed items, and displaying those from the communities you joined, and there was also a need to somehow draw other discussions taking palce on Blogcatalog into a single portal – discussions – groups – broadcasts

The social profiles have been available for some time, it is just they weren’t being used effectively, and because there was not such a purpose in updating the profiles (unless you know a little about SEO, branding and reputation management), it actually makes testing and reviewing the new features difficult.

So what is really needed is for people who have Blogcatalog accounts to add their social profile information until such time as friend data is being pulled in from places like Twitter directly through their API.

Then again, you might not want to see all the updates from that many friends all on one page – it is something that needs careful thinking about, and I have some ideas I need to map out for the development guys.

Note: I would certainly look on this interface as alpha or beta stage – as more data gets added, it is certainly going to get crowded, and I have also noted some delays in updates, though that appears to be an internal bug, as the data does seem to be fetched to other pages.

Update

I am certainly not perfect and missed something whilst digging around, which was actually mentioned in the full announcement on the Blogcatalog boards.
This is I suppose one of the negatives of previewing something before the official announcement, and wanting to post early.

With the dashboard settings, you can choose to follow the social graph of up to 40? people – as I didn’t spot this on my own, maybe something needs to be made a little clearer for new users.

You also have full control of both what you see and what you share with others

I would of course like the option to see all of my contacts on every service, and all my friends on Blogcatalog, with an option to create multiple views depending on how much noise I have time for.

There is even enhanced privacy, allowing you to selectively remove items you don’t want shared.

When you look at the combined data, it can get a little scary – this is all public data, and it hasn’t taken much to combine it and create an overall personal online profile of all your activities, even those that might normally be slightly more hidden, such as stumbling a friends blog in a topic you might not normally be associated with.

The interface is actually a lot more complete than I first of all realised.

As usual I am trying to give balanced coverage, Mybloglog had an article all to themselves the other day.
Specific dislosure:- Since July 2007 I have had some financial involvement with Blogcatalog as a consultant, though I try hard to give fair and equal coverage to their competitors.

Ebay have now launched their own Social News site to highlight the weird and wonderful best items for sale on Ebay, past and present.

What is strange is that it doesn’t appear on their community “sneak peek” though it is still in beta.

There also doesn’t appear to be any mention of it on the Ebay blog.

How much traffic a site like this could drive really depends on how much Ebay decide to promote it, but it if you are a regular on Ebay, it might be a good idea to invest a little time in building up both your profile and those of your products.

Valleywag was a little critical, saying they are copying Digg and Craigslist but considering Ebay already own Stumbleupon, this was a logical direction to take.
I wonder if they might integrate the 2 in some way, allowing you to Stumble the Best of Ebay.

What Is Social Spark?

• Advertiser Social Network
• Advertisers Interact With Bloggers – build up a network of media outlets for their niche
• Highest Standards in Word of Mouth Marketing – PayPerPost have up until now been responding to market forces and allowing the market to define itself. They are now going to be taking a proactive roll to lead the industry.
• Unique Blog Welcomeâ„¢ Sponsorhip – this is an amazing idea using overlays to present a blog sponsorship greeting to a visitor, and then the advert minimizes in a corner of the display. This is a much more visible method. From what I have seen this is a lot like the various types of corner advertising, but visitors will have already been greeted with a message.
  (this would also be a cool aleternative to popups & interstitials for any kind of marketing message) This option doesn’t take up any screen real estate.
• Accountable Analytics – current methods for advertisers to present the viability of advertising on a particular blog basically… suck – you name it
  • PageRank is worthless – you can have a site with a PageRank of 7 and almost no traffic, and at the same time have a PR3 blog that gets thousands of visitors a day.
  • Alexa & Compete are easily gamed and are highly biased in many verticals such as web design, SEO and technology, and the sites people in those industries frequent.
  • Quantcast would be useful… but very few sites include Quantcast code on their sites, even those who are marketing aware.

  Advertisers will be able to compare CPM and CPC advertising spends across their whole advertising spend and have full access to demographic data.
  The aim is to provide advertisers and bloggers with as much relevant statistical information as they can.

• Open Platform – Izea will have their own API that will be available to the public, but will also leverage Google’s recently announced OpenSocial API
• Feedback – Advertisers can leave feedback on Bloggers, and Bloggers can leave feedback on Advertisers – everything is open…. transparent
• Integration with RSSBrief
• All data is searchable – this helps Advertisers find suitable bloggers to promote their brand
• Real Rank based upon Real unique visitors and page views (with widgets available to display on your blog)

Here is what a blogger profile will look like

Colleen and and the amazingly fast Jim have already got posts up before me.

Colleen loves the idea of realistic stats not based upon PageRank and Alexa.

Jim is expecting the existing PayPerPost service to die off

Sponsored Posts in Social Spark

• Dynamic pricing for all blogs to maximise the return on investment for an advertiser
• In post requirement for disclosure badges
• Return on investment by tracking clicks within the interface on information links
• Advertisers can pay for additional opportunity exposure in the marketplace
• Bloggers can book advertising for a whole week and reach out to advertisers on opportunities they are qualified to take.
• Review exchanges
• Two Types of Links
  • Required Links = Nofollow
  • Suggested Links = Does not have to be Nofollow

Blog Sponsorship

• Sponsorship is per day
• Medium Rectangle or video

Here is a very rough screenshot of the blog sponsorship configuration page, the advert appears much nicer on an actual page, but isn’t the fancy kind of fly in advert I expected.
I didn’t see it flash animated coming in, or how it hides exactly.

What wasn’t specified is how they handle tracking within RSS but the sneaky side of RSSBrief is what I was expecting.
All blogs crawled by RSSBrief and can be approached by advertisers, and have been crawled already.

This system is in Alpha… moving into a closed beta, full launch in January 2008 – hopefully I will be able to do some testing and be allowed to write more in the coming months, but I will need to bend Ted’s arm… a lot.

For those asking, I didn’t catch any direct reaction to PageRank other than it isn’t exactly very reliable or truthful about whether a site being looked at is good or bad.
Lets face it, we all know PR8 sites that actually suck and are almost all duplicate content, and PR2 sites that are 100% original content.

Update

The technology “A List” have titled their own announcements with typically controversial titles, though what they have written is surprisingly neutral.

Mashable with PayPerPost Launches Social Network for Shills comments:-

The bigger question here, at least to me, is will IZEA start to receive a bit of positive press from the “A-Listers” that have made a living out of deriding them and calling the system evil?

Michael Arrington’s titled “PayPerPost’s Latest Gimmick – SocialSpark” is neutral other than the last line:-

There’s absolutely nothing distasteful about it as an idea. But to the extent it furthers the pollution of the blogosphere by encouraging more paid shilling, it makes us all worse off.

But the best line is from Michael Arrington in the comments

Zizi – no, there are legitimate reasons for bloggers to work for PPP. Writing paid posts isn’t something I would do, but with proper disclosure it certainly doesn’t cross the line (in my opinion). It’s the edge cases that create the train wrecks.

Now considering Michael Arrington, from the stage of the 2007 Mesh conference called Ted “The Most Evil Person In The Room”, I look on the above as quite a significant change of heart.

Are we likely to see Techcrunch running transparent statistics from SocialSpark in the future?

Update

Ted Murphy has posted a few more details of SocialSpark on the Izea blog.

I love his concluding remark:-

All required links in SocialSpark sponsored posts will carry the no-follow tag (or something more appropriate) because… well, I guess the most advanced search algorithms in the world need our help.

Ted has some interesting observations about why this new community won’t encourage advertisers to buy directly (though maybe some advertising they will buy direct).
He also emphasises that Socialspark will be the first service to provide an auditable trail of disclosure for the advertiser, and have a totally open database that anyone interested can see.

Gooruze seems to be a misspelling of “Gurus”

Gooruze is a new social network for Online Marketers. You can post articles and news items, there are lots of discussion groups covering specific online marketing verticals.

Even the discussion groups seem to be based around a limited blogging interface.

When you publish articles, it seems as if you or anyone else have the ability to tag your content after it is published, though that doesn’t seem to be true of every blogging interface.

Under your profile you have the ability to add feeds to automatically populate your personal blog on Gooruze, though it has to be claimed by mentioning a URL AndyBeard.gooruze.com

That URL actually redirects to your individual member profile – my Andy Beard profile is a little barren currently, I suppose I should add some content.

The Gooruze team describe the service

The Gooruze difference is dedicated, ranked, quality information. The content is created by members who share real experiences and insights in the form of articles and news. The posts are tagged, rated and commented on by the community to deliver quality articles and information.

So is Gooruze the service you have been waiting for, the site that will suck you in to the extent that you will live there until you meet your maker (other than doing some occasional work) ?

I am not quite sure how being active in a social network really brings you closer to a 4 Hour Work Week.
Even with Sphinn which is much less complicated, just news items and articles, people spend much more than 4 hours per week browsing and voting on stories, and that drives traffic to your blog… potentially.

Gooruze might be too complicated for many, and finding the information and discussion important for your business so far looks a little time consuming.

Power Tip:- I have just tried claiming my Stumbleupon account/blog in Gooruze, lets see if it works.

Update – I now have my blog and Stumbleupon feed being fed to Gooruze, and that in turn is claimed in Technorati, along with my Stumbleupon feed.

Update 2 – I have now written my first article covering Gooruze Landing Pages – I would love to hear what you think (and some votes)

Article publishing on Gooruze is a little mundane currently compared to what you are used to here on the blog. I can’t include inline images to explain a particular point, and a lot of HTML formatting options are not available.

Other areas of the site do include the ability to include inline images, including your profiles, though not all of the editor boxes have the buttons to indicate the possibility.

The BlogCatalog REST (REpresentational State Transfer) API allows the retrieval of public user and blog data based on a set of input parameters. This page outlines the various types of requests that can be executed and provides example requests and responses.

I had a play around with it early today for the first time and a couple of bugs were cleaned up since then and I think developers will find the terms of use fairly unrestricted.

I have actually suggested some additional changes to the terms, so I wouldn’t assume they are set in stone.

I also spotted on the forums that Blogcatalog are giving away free platinum memberships to people who use the APIs creatively.

Other Blogcatalog Changes Over The Last Week

• You can now search the forums for previous discussions before submitting a question
• There is no longer a need to provide Blogcatalog a link to identify you as the owner of your blog, this can be achieved with meta tag verification.
• You can now make modifications to your profiles without having your blog added to the moderation queue of new submissions. (improve those landing pages)
• The Blogcatalog broadcast system is now available to everyone
• Blogcatalog now create their own thumbshots for higher quality, and possibly higher reliability

Specific Dislosure – I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial

The first thing I suggest you do is pop over to Blogcatalog and grab a free 7 day trial of their supporters service, so you can actually try out some of these new features (today may be the last day this is available)

Features limited to pro users (currently) include their new broadcast service, which is quite topical after the reaction to the MyBlogLog broadcast service launched a week ago.

Broadcast Messaging

Blogcatalog describes this as:-

What is a Broadcast?

Broadcasts allow you to unobtrusively send a mass message to all users who have added you to their BlogCatalog friends list.

The first thing to note is that this is based around the friends feature, and not the community feature, so if you add someone as a friend, that is giving them consent to send you broadcast messages.

Broadcast messages:-

• Don’t send an email
• Only appear on your profile
• Can only be seen by you
• Cannot (as far as I can see) contain URLs

The one thing it is missing is email notification, and possibly including the message in the email (to make it useful)

Blogcatalog does already include individual settings for every other message sent by the service.

It would be fairly easy to add one more setting to the same page, and it is quite likely that options in the code exist, though I would suggest that the default configuration would be to have the option set to off.

There are 2 reasons why it might be unavailable currently:-

• Servers – there is a big difference in server load sending out occasional messages, and broadcasting emails to 100s of people at a time. That is actually one of my reservations about using comment subscriptions on a blog, and why I use SMTP with gmail for my comment subscriptions.
• Intrusion – Daniel the lead developer of Blogcatalog, after he read my review of the MyBlogLog Messaging System, messaged me suggesting the Blogcatalog mass messaging system in development for the previous 3 weeks would be much less intrusive.

I think once Blogcatalog has some heavier duty servers, it would be nice to see some kind of selective email delivery included, and I would actually appreciate being able to include links.
Links are not stated as being allowed HTML, but maybe they can be included anyway.. I have to test it.

Shout To Shout

I could claim that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the biggest innovation so far from blogging social networks… but it isn’t, it is just common sense fairly well executed. I am sure it can be improved using ajax, tabs and threading in some way (hmm think Gmail), but for now just the fact that you can have a conversation with someone, and actually display all the conversation on the same page suddenly makes messaging on Blogcatalog useful.

I actually had a problem grabbing screenshots for this, because almost all the conversations I have are in private, so I have just picked on Daniel, and blurred it.
This is just part of one conversation…

New Design

Blogcatalog has had a general overhaul in look and feel – now is the time I wish I had kept a copy of their front page without the annotations.

Before

After

The changes are more cosmetic than anything, and feature throughout the site with minor touches, although I haven’t looked to see if all the XHTML has changed significantly.

On the front page the major difference is the addition of the “The Blog Spotlight” which highlights people who are paid supporters of Blogcatalog. The “languages” had already been replaced by the latest discussions.

What I would like to see is an increase in the amount of categories being displayed. Some of the largest categories are fairly sidelined as far as traffic and link juice are concerned.

Supporter Benefits

One pro benefit I would like to see is the ability to change blog descriptions without them having to pass through some kind of approval process. I have tweaked categories in the past, and the changes went live fairly soon, but I would much prefer as a supporter to be able to make changes on the fly.

With the new Twitter updates being displayed, it would be good to show more than one entry as a single entry can be fairly meaningless. Hopefully the other services planned will not be in the same place on the page. Adding my Diggs or Stumbles is great, but I would want them in a less prominent part of the page.