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Google has just launched SearchWiki within their search results. This toolset allows users to alter the results that they receive from google. They can move results up or down, add new results, or even remove them from the results. You can also add comments to search results.

Now, I should make it clear that this does not affect page rank, or even the results that other people see when doing searches. However, other people who are logged into google can see, via the SearchWiki icons, what users are doing with results. This allows the SearchWiki community to function much like reddit or Digg.

We’ve always said that the best search engine is the one that understands what the individual user wants … SearchWiki really puts that in action: this is an even deeper level of customisation than we’ve offered before, because people know best what search results they are looking for.

Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google

This is a great step forward for google. Rather than entirely trying to mathematically determine optimal search results they are actually able to incorporate opinions from people who are doing the searches. So while this won’t have an affect on most googlers, it does allow them to start to harness the massive community of people out there who want to work together to find better results.

I can only hope that this is a start of something that will provide more power to the social networks of users who are depending on google every day. Moving google a bit more towards the digg/reddit model could help to make results more relevant and also drive more involvement. Of course reddit and digg are also gameable, often times political or underhanded forces take advantage of this to bias results on the front pages of these site. Google is no where near prepared to give their rankings or results over to the mob. This method does seem like a safe way to allow those crowds to have their say without jeopardizing Google’s standing as the best way to search. Learn more about Google SearchWiki:

• Google SearchWiki tool allows user to personalise search
• Google’s Help topic on SearchWiki
• Google’s Blog: SearchWiki: Make Search Your Own

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.

I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a follow up to my previous article, Howto Twitter, I’ve written up a bit about the mass of applications that are now available as supplements to Twitter.
Follow this link to see the article:

There are, of course, too many to mention them all, but I have selected a few that I find the most useful, even on a day-to-day basis. For anyone getting started in Twitter, this list will help bring you up to speed a bit faster. For those who twitter everyday you may learn something new, and if not, let me know which apps I left out which should be listed here.

Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a couple of videos giving first Britanny Spears, then Barack Obama a hard time for how they are managing their twitter accounts. As always Gary has some great points, this guy owns the social space.

I completely agree - if Barack or Britanny are trying to own the space.

But what if they are just trying to provide another avenue for info about what they are up to. Isn’t that was twitter was started for? “What are you doing?” is the question, right?

Everything has its purpose. I follow a few news feedcasting twitterers because I like to get the news updates sprinkled in there. I actually don’t want a relationship, just straight news. So sometimes, having that info in twitter form is useful.

Read on…

NB: I hope that this doesn’t lead to an uptick of this type of twitter spam. But I think educating the non-spammers is more important.

Ok, I thought I’d write a new bloggeries about using social engineering to game twitter. Let’s start to covering some basics that many of you know. The best people to follow on twitter often have more followers than those they are following.

It’s basic economics, unless you’re a superstar like @WayneSutton or @GaryVee, you just can’t handle all the noise it generates. Even though reciprocation is the nice thing to do, I can understand when a big name doesn’t follow me. This leads to easily identifiable patterns, spammers are often following 1000s of people and have followers numbering in the 10s or low 100s. When I get followed by one of these chaps I quickly block them. Update:@EmailKarma pointed out that I should just go with d spam @spammer.

Find out what the spammers are doing…

Good products serve a need and serve it well. A crucial piece of solving problems is good workflow. And to truly have good workflow you need to understand the entire environment people are experiencing during and around the time of the problem you are addressing.

Lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time trying to think through the workflow for idek.net as well as twitwit.us. These two sites integrate with other services, and as such, I need to consider where people will be and what they’ll be doing when the use these apps.

Why do you care? Well, you always need to remember to attack every problem from multiple angles, because your users aren’t just coming at it from one place. They may have different goals and different needs that you may not have considered.

Once you’ve gotten all the variables better understood you can try to devise a workflow and solution that will efficient and enjoyable for your users.

I pulled together a quick primer for twitter over the weekend. It all came from a few tweets that I saw @TheRab make for some new comers that were following him. I figured that a Twitter Howto was due.

Check out HowTo Twitter

Please feel free to drop me a comment with anything that you think it missing. This is meant to to be a primer, not a complete walk through of everything twitter.

A lot of people are trying to make use of twitter for their business. There is no doubt in my mind that it can work. But there are so many ways to get it wrong. Want a short list? fine.

• Just hooking something up to your rss feed
• Pretending to be a company, instead of yourself
• Following everyone you can
• Only posting once a week
• Posting every hour
• Not replying to people

I could keep going, but you get it. Well, how about a small non-tech business that is getting it right? There are plenty examples of that too. Here’s one I just saw in tweetdeck from @SixPlates. Here we are, 4:00 on thursday, if there is a time of the week that I need a beer, this is it.

It’s personal, it’s short, and it gets to the point. I wasn’t really thinking of grabbing a beer, but now all I can think of is a nice cold beer in my hand. This works.

Kipp Bodnar (@kbodnar32) over at DigitalCapitalism.com, links to a very inspiring and frank talk from Gary Vaynerchuck in a recent blog post. Let’s watch it here, it’s worth the 15 minutes…

Kipp calls out what I also feel is the most important part of that talk: Be Yourself. Well Kipp actually goes a bit beyond that, his point is that if you are yourself and are not hyper-concerned with pleasing everyone then you will piss a few people off - and that’s good.

I’m not sure you have to piss people off, but I agree that you have to be willing to allow that to happen. Part of being yourself is being passionate about something. Being passionate lends to having very strong opinions and being able to stand up to others with differing strong opinions. And that’s where you provide value.

So where are you providing value? Who are you arguing with?

I’d ask you to forgive the lack of gusto exhibited here lately, but that’s something that blogs just can’t ask you to do. But I can at least explain why I haven’t been posting lately. There’s a simple explanation for this, Bronto has it’s Fall 2008 Release this weekend.

Is it a product manager’s job to test furiously? to write help docs? to give webcasts? to do a little coding? Well, it all depends on your level of dedication, and maybe a bit on your company too. But that’s one things I really like about Bronto, our dev team gets everyone involved in the process. We all work very hard to get a release out the door.

Being a product manager is about dedication and devotion to your product. You have to be excited about it, and you have to not just want, but ensure, that it is as good as it can be. Of course this isn’t just for PMs, it’s for anyone who can really get into their company. It’s for anyone that has passion for their work.

So for probably another week, I’ll still be hard at work, because I know this release will be a huge step forward for Bronto.