How Does The Web Define Authority
The famous caption from The New Yorker cartoon reads, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” This is most vexing for PR and marketing types who find themselves trying to reach out and understand which bloggers and social media types might be influencers, which ones have some kind of authority, and which ones might be cobblers and tinkerers. It’s a complex question, and I don’t pretend that I can fully answer the title of this blog post. Instead, I wanted to do two things with this post: give PR and marketing types a place to start, and also give others a chance to weigh in on their take on authority and how it’s measured on the web.
If you find your comments going long, feel free to blog it, and link to the post in the comments section. Why not spread the idea out there and get your community chewing on it as well?
How the Web Defines Authority
It would be easy to bog ourselves down in definitions of the word “authority” itself. In this case, let’s agree that the working definition as it pertains to this topic is: a blog or website or even an individual person and their credibility, knowledge, and reputation on the Web. Is this close enough? How would you change this? If we agree, or are close enough, let’s go on.
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**Update**: Most people did NOT agree. They said that what we covered with the methods listed below dealt with web celebrity. The comments first in line all say something similar.
Great, then do you have other tools that you’d say show how the web measures authority? If the tools below measure web popularity, where are the authority tools?
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Google measures the authority of websites by way of PageRank. Understanding a site’s PageRank only tells you what Google thinks of a site. My site is ranked a 6, which is reasonable, but not extraordinary. Cross Google and they dump your rank fairly low. (SEO types, chime in here)
Technorati ranks your site by way of inbound links from unique websites over the last six months. Meaning, now that Seth Godin has linked to me here once, Technorati doesn’t care about Seth for another six months (as he relates to my site). Thus, your Technorati ranking is essentially a measure of whether you’ve written anything someone else has decided to link to in the last several months, and the number of somebodies is what determines your “authority.”
Alexa ranks your site via how many people visit it based on their statistics. I’ve heard conflicting information over the years as to how this actually is done. Instead of Alexa, I tend to use Compete, which I feel provides better, more actionable information. Just the same, knowing that more-than-a-few people visit a site gives one a sense of whether someone values it or not.
Yahoo provides a way to see how many inbound links a website has received via their Site Explorer. This again tells you whether someone’s efforts are resonating well around the web at large.
Hubspot puts lots of these together in one place with their Website Grader tool. (They also make Twitter Grader, and one for PR). It’s very useful in getting a quick sniff of a lot of the above results. (Maybe they’ll add compete.com?)
Other Ways to Determine Authority
As the web splinters out and content atomizes even more, there are new ways to determine someone’s reputation, potential level of influence, and more. But here’s where it gets a little wishy washy, and where I’m sure there’s more and more opportunity to dispute any of these ideas.
Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn give one a relatively quick snapshot of someone’s online interactivity. You can do a quick scan of a Twitter user’s last few pages of tweets and see what they talk about. You can use Twitter Search and see how many people respond to that user. If nothing else, you could see how many people are connected to this individual.
I flinch a bit when I say this. It’s not a numbers game. And yet, do numbers tell us anything about a person? Maybe. What’s your thought on that one?
Googling someone to see just how much of a digital footprint she leaves is also one way to see if someone has a presence on the web. I did this once with a “social media expert” that I met at an event, and unless they use an interesting alias, I couldn’t find barely a trace of this person either directly on several social networks, nor via Google itself.
Your Thoughts
What does this all tell you? Where do you go with this? How does an organization start to learn who’s who on the web, who might have authority and influence, and get some sense of the scope of what this person is doing?
Is someone already doing something useful and powerful in this space?
And if you found the ultimate source for determining the above, would it still help you trust someone you knew solely from the web?
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Photo credit, Juria Yoshikawa
Are Blog Search Services Less Relevant Than Traditional Search
Very interesting results blogged by Mukund Mohan about blog search relevance. He did a search in several notable blog search tools for “chris brogan” minus the quotes, and found less-than-stellar results. In the comments, you’ll see that I incorrectly recreated his search and did a little better, but it was still interesting to note.
Further, I feel that Google search, regular google versus their blog search, has really stepped up lately. I’ve been using that to find old posts when someone asks me for information. Yahoo and Ask aren’t so bad either.
So this is a shift from what I often advise people, with regards to finding relevant blogs. Should I be recommending straight up Google instead of the search tools? I’m starting to think so.
What’s your take?
photo credit, reedbiotch
Google Launches AdSense for Feeds- Breaks My Subscriber Count
As I’m reading everywhere, people woke up to the ability to monetize their RSS feed with Google AdSense instead of FeedBurner (my friends from Chicago). Great, except on the day that you launched, I’ve magically lost about 3,000 RSS subscribers. Coincidence? I’m thinking no, but hey, maybe I’m just not being a good citizen about it.
**Update: and in other news, Technorati just shifted their numbers dramatically, too. I do check in on my Technorati ranking, and this morning, I was 377. Not bad, eh? But this afternoon, not far after the Google experience, I just looked in there:
What’s up with this? Part of me feels like Obi Wan Kenobi: “I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”
I want my 3,000 friends back, please. Don’t be the new definition of the failwhale.
Google Gets Back to Nick
Nick Saber just forwarded Google’s eventual response to what went wrong. Because thousands of people wanted to know the answer to the question why, here’s the first part of that letter:
Hello Nick,
I understand that you may have questions about the recent actions taken on your Google Account. We understand and respect your concerns about your account.
Our specialists performed a thorough investigation of your account ID: nick.saber@gmail.com. It appeared that your account was compromised on 08/01, and an unauthorized charge of $490.30 was attempted in your Google Checkout Account. For security purposes, we suspended this account to prevent additional activity and charges.
We’d also like to assure you that the security and confidentiality of your personal information, including your credit card number, is our highest priority. Your information is securely stored on our servers, and won’t be shared with anyone except under the very limited circumstances described
in our Privacy Policy at http://checkout.google.com/files/buyerprivacy.html. To learn more about
the security of your account and personal information, please visit http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29075.We also understand your concerns regarding your account security. It is difficult to determine the exact nature of your account compromise. Please see below for useful information on safeguarding yourself online.
The rest of the letter reminds us not to fall into phishing scams, etc. Good advice.
But wow. Couldn’t this have started with an email saying, “Looks like someone was messing with your account. We shut it down to investigate.” Seems a little backwards to make Nick sweat for a day and change, only to reveal that someone tried to rip him off, and THAT’S why they shut him down.
Special note: Matt Cutts came by with lots of information once this story broke, and I’m grateful for that. Note to ALL companies: if you don’t have a respected face person like Matt out there, think about it. It does help.
What’s your take? How would you have handled it, if you were Google?
Lastly, I’m going to talk about this a bit more in my next newsletter, so if you’re not already subscribed, hop in!
When Google Owns You
Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:
Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]
That’s it.
Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:
Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.
And that’s it.
Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.
If he was doing something wrong/illegal/invalid, they might’ve said so (not thinking that he was). If he had been hacked, wouldn’t that be something vaguely apparent? I dunno, but it seems like that’d be the way.
So, what happens now? What does Nick do? He’s sent a bunch of emails. But now what? Locked out of ALL of Google’s apps, the apps that I praise daily, the apps where Julien Smith and I are writing a book. Should we be doing that? I didn’t see a problem until this. What if we’re the next Nick?
What’s your take? And what do you think of hands off customer service in this case?
**UPDATE: Nick got back in after quite a lot of work.
**UPDATE: Jay explains in the comments how this is supposed to work. Mind you, I’ve used Google for years as a non-paying customer, so Jay’s advice wouldn’t help. Right?
**UPDATE: Google Gets Back to Nick. We’ll be talking about some ideas based on this in the next newsletter.
Is Google Putting a Horse Head in Cuils Bed
Look at this Google Search result:
I just did a search on “Cuil” in Google, and the first result is a Google News post about why Cuil’s not much of a threat. That *really* ranks above the main site?
**Update 2: Matt Cutts came to the comments section to refute the post. I guess the brevity of my post didn’t permit me to give the right amount of disclaimers: 1.) I would never dispute the Goog’s search algorithms. 2.) Most everything I run my life on starts with G. 3.) I was mostly surprised by the result, not actually claiming that Google would manipulate a search result. 4.) Hey, Matt Cutts came by! Cool, eh?
**Update: I’m #5 because of personalized search. Guess I’m not #5 to everyone. Well, it was fun while it lasted. .. >>Formerly: And hey, I’m #5. Woohoo!
My point: is search a battlefield? People writing about Knol think so.
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Screencast of Google Reader
Google Reader is my often-touted RSS reader of choice. I’ve really not put the reason for that into words very well, so here, instead, is a screencast with voiceover. It’s a full screen experience.
**UPDATE: I ran out of bandwidth where it was, so I put a copy on Blip.tv (a great video host), and if you want to download the native file (better quality), it’s here.
That’s how we roll at [chrisbrogan.com]
Greasemonkey Script Adds In-Line Site Rendering for Google Reader
Turns out I was completely wrong. I reported earlier today (deleted to avoid confusion) that Google Reader added some new functionality. Whoops. It was a Greasemonkey script Firefox add-on called Better GReader.
Google Reader’s engineer commented below saying I’m wrong. He’s right.
Reminds me of something I say often: how WE see the Web isn’t always how everyone sees the web.
Sorry for crying wolf.
