robert scoble

The debate for what determines “influence” among online content creators has been raging for years.

Scoble is right when he says all bloggers matter. Chris Brennan, who publicized the Kryptonite lock security flaw — was on no “influencer” list — yet his content forced Kryptonite to recall millions of dollars worth of locks.

However, Scoble is also right when he says “it’s still a Google world.” This means the bloggers who are topping organic results certainly do have more direct influence — depending on what the searches are. All research shows that millions of shoppers rely heavily on traditional search before buying. This will certainly shift significantly over the coming years, but for now we believe it’s the pivotal online arena to leverage.

Our process at the Parnassus Group for helping companies connect with appropriate bloggers, content-creators, and other influencers is becoming more and more reliant on analysis of traditional search results. Luckily, we have automated processes now to make this a fairly straightforward effort.

Here’s an example. Imagine that you (are clinically insane) and are about to enter the market with a new digital music player. Who is influential in that space? Who do you solicit for input?

Some companies might do a search on Technorati and see who is deemed as being the most “authoritative:”

Then they’d fire up Outlook and start emailing.

We have a different approach, one that we feel much more closely aligns with true “influence” and is more likely to flag bloggers that might actually care about what you have to say. Here is the cliff notes version of our approach — the actual process we use is more complex, and uses more data. Even this abridged version we think provides results superior to traditional Pagerank and Alexa-centric approaches.

The first step is to discover what searches are relevant for this space. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the simplest one is to find a smart (and strongly aligned in market) vendor who has been buying keywords for some time and to leverage their optimization efforts. Fortunately, we’ve compiled keyword data for thousands of companies, and millions of keywords. Since Apple is not buying search terms to sell iPods, for this example — we’ll use Circuit City’s ipod sales portal. As it happens, they’ve bought several hundred terms that we can analyze.

The next step is to rank them. In this instance, we’ll prioritize based on how often the term is entered by searchers. Here are the top twenty:

These 20 account for 96 percent of the search volume measured for the terms at hand.

All we have to do then is review all of the organic search results for these 20 terms and catalog the top five posts or articles contained in each result. That provides us with 100 content items. We then tag each content bit with a source, and then compile the sources.

In the case of iPods, here is what we see as being the “real” influencers. For search results that matter, these are the high ranking sources:

We were surprised to see Gizmodo running so far behind Engadget in this analysis — but there are many more products and searches to be done. Some CES exhibitors might argue it’s because Gizmodo focuses more on vendor-disruption than on editorial compared to Engadget.

Note the vast difference between who we think are influential and who Technorati says are authorities.

Let us know if we can do an analysis like this for you. Just email me: Steve [at] parnassusgroup [dot] com.

Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, studies the biological basis of the human need for information. His research opens a window into understanding why many people are willing to scan thousands of tweets a day, or to hover over a newsreader for hours ingesting many scores of feeds.

The answer is that humans in general are “infovores” and are wired to generate pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids when discovering new information.

“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.”

Are Robert and many other bloggers becoming too dependent on these opioids? Is there a downside to being an information junkie?

“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”

Regardless, I’d hate to see Robert change — from my vantage point he’s managing his anti-boredom campaign quite responsibly.

Reporter Lee Gomes provides more detail in today’s WSJ article Why We’re Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data.

I’ve spent the better part of yesterday and today trying to wrap my brain around exactly what Open Social means for social networks, online community builders and users. And while it may mean many things for all of these groups down the line, that all depends on one thing: developers developers developers developers!

Because right now, that’s really all that matters to Open Social. It won’t really start to mean anything until developers start doing cool stuff with it.

But this is not the Field of Dreams. Even if you build it, they might not come.

And who are “they?” Users, users, users, users. And not just any users. ACTIVE users.

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The money quote from New York Times blogger Saul Hansel raises some interesting questions:

Think about Facebook. If you like Facebook, it’s still because of its core features — the way it lets you communicate and keep tabs on your friends. If you like any of the new applications, it is because on the margin they let you do what you already like doing a bit better. You can throw a sheep at someone instead of poking them. I haven’t seen a Facebook application so compelling that you would join Facebook just to use it.

What he’s not taking into account is that the aggregate of all the creativity that goes into an open social environment may approximate or even supercede some of the great features that get people obsessed with Facebook. That possibility is largely up to the individual “containers” (networks) on the system and the API itself.

At this point, if I were Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be taking a wait and see approach to open social while working my ass off to improve the core Facebook features that lead people into these “Facebook killer” conversations in the first place. For example, Robert Scoble spent a lot of time yesterday talking about all the limitations that Facebook places on its users.

The slightly over the hill online social networking behemoth MySpace has announced a partnership with Zazzle that will allow users to sell custom tee-shirts via their profiles

This makes perfect sense. Merchandise is a great way for artists to make extra cash, and the one place where Facebook still has nothing on MySpace is in the world of music self-promotion.

Because while some pioneering artists have ventured into Facebook territory — Brandi Carlile was my friend, until she removed her profile — the fact that a user can have only 5,000 friends is a real turn-off for artists whose MySpace fans number in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

Of course, Facebook never intended entertainment world self-promoters to make use of their site the way they make use of MySpace. If Tila Tequila had tried to build her following on Facebook, we sure as hell wouldn’t be watching her sleeping in a bed with 16 lesbians and 16 straight guys on MTV right now.

Facebook created a walled-garden environment where friendships were supposed to resemble — if not exactly replicate — a user’s real-world connections. Since I’m not bosom friends with Christina Aguilera in real life (I wish!) her being my friend on Facebook wouldn’t make much sense in Mark Zuckerberg’s world. But in Tom Anderson’s corner of the Web, I can be her buddy, along with 470,902 other people.

A lot of people think that this means Facebook has no designs on MySpace’s last bastion of dominance, but I see it differently. Zuckerberg has always wanted Facebook relationships to resemble real-world relationships, but that’s not how people are using it. Facebook will have to adapt to actual user behavior or die a slow death.

Since they like to keep things neatly controlled and categorized, I would guess that their long-term strategy for creeping into the music world space is going to resemble their moves in the politics arena.

My prediction: they’ll eventually launch an affordable freemium service that will allow the Tila Tequilas (and Robert Scobles!) of the world to have unlimited friends, special profiles, and access to premium content-sharing applications that will allow users to embed and spread their blog posts, songs and video content far and wide.

It’s just another sensible way to monetize a site whose current valuation is way out of step with profits.

I woke up this morning still thinking about what Kara Swisher wrote yesterday. She has a good point that a lot of the “big head,” applications are pretty infantile. And as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his keynote at Graphing Social Patterns yesterday, there isn’t really much of a useful long tail in the Facebook application world yet.

So I decided to go through my own application bar to see how the platform has served me. I found that I have four basic kinds of applications installed:

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