TechnoCloud

I often show social discovery wonder StumbleUpon in presentations to demonstrate the alternative forms of site discovery emerging on the web. To this point, I’ve just been an interested observer and occasional Stumbler.

No longer. Some influential soul discovered TechnoCloud and gave it the thumbs up to recommend it to other users. Cue a relative flood of traffic to the site.

Having enjoyed some brief spurts of traffic via Digg and Reddit in the past, the Stumblers seem a slightly different breed. Rather than the crash and burn mentality of leaving at the first click, Stumblers stayed longer and actually read some additional pages to see just why some of their fellow Stumblers thought it worthy of a thumbs up.

(It should be pointed out that this is partly due to a thumbs up for the homepage rather than a specific page, but I think the point still stands.)

See the record day in the chart below and happy Stumbling!

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Another oh-so-handy reference list from the recently list obsessed Mashable, profiling the increasing ‘How to’ video niche.

While YouTube and its many clones try to be all things to all people, these How To sites are proving that there is a market for niche video communities. The best of these sites are more focused, easier to navigate and are proving themselves able to co-exist alongside the traffic phenomenon that is YouTube.

This trend carries over to the series of niche social networks that cater to every topic from the environment, to pets, to writing and everything in between, some more successfully than others, alongside the traffic giants of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

Let me be (ahem, among) the first to categorise this sector: social nicheworking. Let’s see how well that phrase catches on…

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Adaptive Blue have released version 3.0 of the BlueOrganizer social bookmarking tool, with a Firefox extension that is a contextual search menu linking you into the ’social mediasphere’. On first look, it brings to mind the Hyperwords project with its contextual browser extension for interacting in more depth with the keywords on a page.

After a brief install and browser restart, you can right-mouse and see a ‘BlueMenu’ either for a highlighted piece of text or for a page as a whole. The menu opens into all the poster children of social media, with stalwarts Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr and the rest just a menu click away.

In theory, this click takes you directly to the tag or results page relevant to your selected term, but it doesn’t always work in practice. It worked fine for me on del.icio.us and YouTube, but just took me to the homepage of Wikipedia and an ‘all tag’ page on Odeo for my chosen search of ‘media technology’.

Helpfully, it opens the page in a new tab allowing you to explore multiple choices without losing your original context. There are revenue models in place for the existing product, with paid placement possible in the menu of default options and affiliate links to take you through from your search for a film to buying the DVD.

Why are we waiting?

Ironically for a tool that is supposed to save you time, my biggest grievance is with the menu load times - on one occasion over 20 seconds and regularly more than 5 seconds. This needs urgent attention, if its to evolve from a bit of fun for early adopters into a genuinely useful tool. It appears I’m not alone in this (see comments).

Also the tutorials could be a lot simpler and shorter, if it’s going to gain a large audience. Better to focus on the basics and let users learn more as they become more familiar with it.

Certainly the idea of contextual search is an interesting one that has many potential applications, particularly when the user is able to customise their search menu, evolving it into a viable portable digital lifestyle aggregator.

Image 1: loading - you may be watching this for a while…

Image 2: the menu in action

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Netscape have invested heavily in social software on their portal to try and reverse its decline from the heady days of early browser dominance. If you visit their homepage, you’ll see editor-generated content alongside Digg-style user submitted content, a signficant change from the me-too portal that came before it.

In the age of increasing content portability it’s interesting to see that a widget has been developed that allows you to display a rolling top stories widget (as seen below) which as ever you can plug into your particular flavour of space, be it social networking or media technology blog.

Nice enough eye candy with the pause/play button, but the real value would be in allowing you to customise this to your own news preferences.

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One of the functions of this blog is as a space to experiment with technology and to share the results, whether a Google widget or indeed social bookmarking on Wordpress as you’ll see below.

Thanks to the wonders of the Wordpress plugin community (and in this case Apostolos Dountsis), each blog post now has a neat line of social bookmarking icons at the bottom as a gentle reminder for readers to bookmark any post they deem worthy of wider scrutiny.

In a Web 2.0 world as fascinated by social bookmarking as it is with widgets, TechnoCloud would feel underdressed out and about on the web without this little plugin.

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Netflix are offering a $1m prize to the first person who can achieve a 10%+ improvement in their recommendation engine. They are making available sections of their ratings database and stress that all data is anonymous - after all they wouldn’t want an AOL data leak on their hands…

The standard Netflix model, as with competitors Blockbuster and Screenselect, is to get people to subscribe to a monthly service whereby they send you ‘x’ DVDs a month for a rolling fee. So if it’s a fixed monthly fee, how will Netflix get their $1m back by improving the recommendations?

• More recommendations equal a longer subscription time
• Competitive advantage for their service
• Encouraging people to move up the subscription ladder
• Driving people down the Long Tail of their content both to increase rentals and viewing of higher margin older titles. Long Tail originator Chris Andersen explains more.
• Feel free to add more in the comments section.

There’s also one other important consideration, PR, in what is a neat piece of viral marketing. An accessible $1m prize gets people talking - in the blogosphere (looks like I fell for it), in the mainstream media and around the water cooler. More awareness, not just of their website, but of their recommendation technology, means more sales.

Get it right and that $1m could be a snip…

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