Webtropic

Cesar Rocchi of Posty wrote, on a guest post to Luis Gray’s blog,  a simple “Guide to Unfollow Uninteresting Twitterers”

In general, I agree with what he says but here I want to elaborate a bit on his first rule, because, although quite natural, it is a bit unfair.

The rule goes like this:

What language is this?
When I stumbled upon a tweet with “strange” characters or words I opened that profile and then asked: does she regularly post in this language? If yes then unfollow. Moral: how can I be interested in what is expressed in a language that I don’t understand?

“How do you find the idea of friendfeed language filters? Many of the non English Speaking users, post in two languages: English and their language. It is obvious that if one does not speak a language, he does not want to follow a person that posts into it. A language filter would remedy this”

Such a  filter could be used in  facebook news stream too, and, in general, in any kind of info ‘streaming’ service.

And, of course, I wrote my proposal  in  English so not to be  filtered out by those who should listen :)

I own various blogs. Most of them I channel to twitterfeed to generate notifications on twitter about new posts. I prefer twitterfeed to blog  add ons as it is a generic solution independent of  blog platform. It can be slow sometimes, but, then, who is in a hurry? I do not run news related blogs that sprint to catch the publicity moment.

Today I tried to add a new blog to twitterfeed and this way I noticed that twitterfeed now supports various shortening services, my favorite one included: urlborg.

When I post a link to twitter  I try to use urlborg as much as I can because it provides me with valeuable statistics: how many times my links are clicked.

Without this piece of information I would be practically twitter blind. Unlike blogs, in twitter you only have two measures to testify whether  people pay the slightest attention to what you say:

• Replies and Directs
• Clicks on links

The latter would be impossible without the use of a url shortening service that provides stats. And that is precisely what urlborg does for me.

And, now, by employing it in twitterfeed, I can have also stats for the autogenerated links for my blogposts.

I have to say here, that checking the referrers to my blog and the time spent on my blogs, I have observed that people coming from twitter stay the longest. Why is that I do not know, but it is something I cannot ignore.
One could argue that I could derive the  information about twitter originated visitors from other sources too, like Google Analytics.

True, but too many clicks away.

Besides, there is another valuable piece of information in the urlborg stats, that would be lost otherwise: the comparison between links of my posts and all other links. Do the first  carry less value (as they comprise a kind of self promotion) and how much less? This is what I am about to find out. I will keep you … posted :)

I have been thinking for the past two days which were my  gains, if any, from my participation to LeWeb. Listing a fair amount of   gains is the best defense for an event that has received a fair amount of criticism so far. Inexistent wifi,  scarce food and a cold room were sure a nuisance to most. But are these the things that attract us in a conference? No. They are enablers maybe, necesary preconditions for efficient work, but not the reason people fly over from other countries or continents.

So, what did I gain?

a. Getting out of the box

Our personal lives, our daily routines and jobs act like a lullaby to creative thinking. They reinforce the stereotypes we’ve acquired in the course of time and hinder our imagination. A frequently applied remedy is to step back, step aside, step out (call it whatever you want) for a while and see from a  different angle  things past and things to come. Doing so in complete isolation, or amidst  the distractions of a tourist destination, will not yield significant results. One needs new stimuli from  a crowd of smart, like minded people to  regenerate  his drive. LeWeb was for me just this: the perfect opportunity to sit back, listen to new ideas and perspectives, meet interesting people out of their daily routines, in a place where they had the luxury to pay me attention.  So I came up with a new idea about my business, which I believe can make a difference in the near future. And this despite the fact that I could not forget for a moment that back in my home country things had turned wild, people were burning cars and shops and tear gas was all you could breath.

b. Meeting the right people

Meeting interesting people is a good thing, but not necessarily a precondition for advancing you career or  your life. Meeting the right people, though is. With 1500  participants from 30 countries, you have to be a complete idiot not to find at least one person with  the potential to  be a catalyst for your plans. Thankfully, I found more than one and I am happy for it. Someone commented in Friendfeed whether the cost  of  this networking is justifiable. But that can only be appreciated by contrast: how much would it cost to arrange  meeting, say,  ten different people from four different countries and one different continent? Let alone the time required.

c. The European spin

Startups in Europe lack many things but most of all  lack  the publicity machine of their  US and Silicon Valley counterparts. Loic himself epitomizes it: he left Europe for the States in order  to have this missing link of success. Now, whether he’ll make it or not, it is a completely different story. But it is because of him  that LeWeb, unlike the other European events, is close to be the bridging event of the two worlds.  The closing session (:Gillmor Gang live from LeWeb), where the discussion eventually turned about the comparison of US vs European, brought forth this in the most vivid way. The stage was occupied by Americans and Loic was the only European trying to voice his arguments in a demonstrably soft and appeasing way. For me, as a European entrepreneur, this was a lesson taught. If Europe wants to make anything with its startups, then first needs to find a way to speak about them in a panEuropean fashion. Europe needs to create its own publicity machine for its startups, and needs to address Europeans first. Till then, it will be totally depended on the US and, probably, startups  seeking success will have to follow Loic’s example.

Closing this short note, I have to add that this was my first time to LeWeb, or any other major internet event. I have been in many corporate events before but nothing like this. For this reason I was more receptive than old timers and  more enthusiastic. Maybe after attending numerous conferences, I will also turn cynic and ironic. But till then, I am thankful for this first one.

Related:

Apologies for organizational issues at LeWeb
The Grand Le Web Mash-Up 2008
My Opinion on LeWeb Conference: We Should Thank Loic It Happened at All

Just read the news: Techmeme will abanbon its three year legacy of aggregating tech news in an automated way and become a hybrid (human eidited -auto aggregated)  news site.

I gave a quick look to how techcrunch and readwriteweb present the news and I bed to differ in my judgment.

IMHO the main reason that Gabe Rivera took this decision is the recently launced  Google Blogsearch.
Regardless how brilliant an engineer Gabe might be, he is all alone, and it is futile to compete against Google in its own turf. Adding the human flavor might make techmeme look more susceptible to bias, but in the end of the day, bias is a factor that can be only reduced. Not eliminated. And, as social bookmarking sites have shown as, human judgment is not trivial.