Think you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Take a look at the new features at Delicious.com and you’ll think otherwise. Yahoo has announced a series of upgrades that makes Delicious — the granddaddy of social bookmarking — more relevant and useful than it’s been in years.

Sure, SEOs and online marketers have continued to appreciate the value of getting a bookmark on the Delicious “Popular” page, but regular users will appreciate today’s upgrades. They involve a new take on hot/fresh bookmarks, new sharing features, and improved search functionality. Here’s a look.

Twitter-based Fresh Bookmarks

The most obvious upgrade is a new tab on the Delicious.com home page called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Yahoo is so sure of the value of this new tab that it replaces the old “Popular Bookmarks” as the default view on delicious.com.

The web pages listed here use a new algorithm based both on what delicious.com users are bookmarking and what Twitter users are talking about. Each page listed includes a “Recent Tweets” indicator that can be clicked to see who’s-saying-what about each topic.

Yahoo says the pages listed on this new tab will use factors such as the number of delicious.com bookmarks and tweets, and those tweets don’t even need to include the URL of the bookmark. There’s an obvious concern over noise and spam anytime you bring Twitter data into such a bright spotlight. Delicious will need to watch this closely.

The links on this new tab will come mostly from the technology, web, politics, and media categories, Yahoo says. For regular users, this could be a welcome change of pace from the web design-heavy content that usually shows up on the Popular tab. But others are sure to prefer the old home page. It would be nice if users could choose which tab they see by default.

What’s Yahoo using to power this? Well, you may recall my article earlier this year about Tweetnews, a mashup that uses Twitter conversations to rank articles appearing in Yahoo News. That was a pet project of Yahoo’s Vik Singh, and this is its first official use on a Yahoo-based product.

Improved Sharing

Delicious gets a little more social with a new “Send” tab that shows up when you’re saving a bookmark.

It was always easy to send bookmarks to your Delicious network, but this tab now includes options to send the link to Twitter and/or send it to friends via email.

New Delicious Search Options

Perhaps the most functional addition is an improved search engine inside Delicious itself. Delicious now shows suggested searches, a “filter by tag” option, and a timeline-based chart that reveals when pages matching your keyword have been saved. This last feature makes it an important indicator of what you could call Delicious.com Trends.

The new search results page will sometimes include rich content, too. In the screenshot above, you can see two bookmarks of YouTube videos — those videos can be watched inline without leaving Delicious. Yahoo says other content, such as Flickr images and Yelp local data, will also show up in its search results when appropriate.

Final Thoughts

It’s tempting to write off Yahoo in light of the recent search deal with Microsoft, but the reality is that the company still owns some of the crown jewels of their online space. Flickr and Delicious are two of those, for sure. Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005, and in the intervening years has made few improvements — a redesign last summer, along with minor things like better browser extensions and web site badges. Along the way, Yahoo lost Delicious founder Joshua Shachter to Google, too.

So, these announcements should be welcome news for all delicious.com users — a course reversal, almost. Delicious isn’t dead. Yahoo’s still paying attention to it. And all of a sudden, it’s cool again.

Delicious has now relaunched under Delicious.com with some new functionality. The old Delicious was at del.icio.us and should soon redirect to the new dot com address. Along with the domain change, the Delicious site has been redesigned to aid newcomers on using the site. Here are before and after screen captures:

The old de.licio.us:

The new Delicious.com:

Other improvements include:

• Speed improvements make the pages load much faster then the old version.
• The search engine has been “overhauled” to be much faster and smarter. The search feature will now search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network.
• Improved RSS feeds and APIs
• New delicious discussion forum for additional support

Are we watching an awkward transition at Yahoo or something more like a collapse? To declare my biases openly, I hope it’s the former. Yahoo and Google need strong competitors to keep them on their toes. But what’s happening at Yahoo certainly does not look good. The company has gone through several “reorgs” in the past year and it appears there’s another one coming.

The impending reorganization seems, paradoxically, both a driver of the recent executive departures and a response to it. Techmeme has lots of gossip and discussion about the Yahoo employee exits. In particular, TechCrunch reports on the decision to leave by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter:

I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart [Butterfield] in terms of pushing my point of view.

This is the “other side” of being acquired by a larger company. Similar complaints have been made by entrepreneurs about Google, most notably in the cases of Dodgeball and dMarc, whose founders left Google in frustration.

The impending Yahoo reorganization is speculatively laid out in the Wall Street Journal and in more detail in AllThingsD. While few things are clear, it appears that a good deal more responsibility for both monetization and products will flow to Hilary Schneider, who is highly capable but has only been with the company since Fall, 2006.

There’s also been increasing speculation about CEO Jerry Yang’s tenure, given the turmoil. On a press call yesterday I was being prodded to make dire predictions about Yahoo’s future. I’m cautious about being glib about the whole situation. Yahoo has been “down” and come back before. For example, Yahoo was slumping in 2001, during the previous recession, when then CEO Tim Koogle quit the company.

There are still many talented, smart people at Yahoo and if this transition is skillfully managed, the company can come back. However, the stakes are much higher now than in 2001.

The Delicious Blog announced the release of a new beta version of the del.icio.us bookmarks extension for Internet Explorer. The new version helps the IE version catch up with the Firefox version, which was released on April 30th.

The new features include:

• Extremely high performance implementation allows for near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
• Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
• Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
• Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista

For help using the extension on Firefox, use this Yahoo Group, and for help with the IE version, use this Yahoo Group.

Yahoo has sent word that they are testing integration of data from their Delicious social bookmarking site within the Yahoo search results pages. For some users, a search will now show whether a page listed in Yahoo results is also on Delicious and how it has been tagged. It brings back memories of Yahoo My Web integration and, before that, how the Yahoo Directory used to work. More below.

The screenshot above from Yahoo is an example of this. In a search on java, you can see under the page description for Java.com how you are also told:

40 people bookmarked this page under: java - software - sun

Don’t see it yourself? I certainly don’t, and Yahoo itself says the implementation has not been rolled out to everyone. From the heads-up email Yahoo sent us:

Some users may start to see the del.icio.us icon as part of search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages as well as the tags that people have supplied for those pages.

As you know we constantly run tests to improve the user experience and overall quality of Yahoo! Search ….  keep in mind this is only a test. We will of course also let you know if we decide to roll this feature out to all users.

Here’s the larger version of the screenshot Yahoo sent, where I’ve highlighted in red how several results get the Delicious integration:

Is the Delicious data being used as part of the Yahoo ranking algorithm, to help boost results? Yahoo didn’t say, but I’m following up on that. [NOTE: Yahoo has now confirmed that this is only a display change and that rankings are not altered by Delicious data]. Personally, I doubt it. That could very well come, but Yahoo doesn’t seem to have the infrastructure in place to start doing this — Yahoo My Web, for example, was never acknowledged to boost results.

The integration itself is similar to how Yahoo My Web used to work. Yahoo What Web? Back in June 2005, Yahoo rolled out its own homegrown page bookmarking service called My Web (homegrown, unlike Delicious and Flickr, which were purchased).

My Web still exists, but Yahoo pulled way back from it. For a time, you’d get pages tagged on My Web integrated into search results very similar to how Delicious information is now being shown. Here’s an example of that:

That integration got dropped entirely in October 2006.

One thing you have to wonder, or perhaps feel sad about, is why the Yahoo Directory now seems to get less respect than Delicious. No disrespect to Delicious — it’s a great resource, and I use it myself. But the Yahoo Directory WAS Yahoo — a list of human edited listings of what’s supposed to be the best in various categories.

As Aaron Wall pointed out today, you have to hunt to find the damn thing these days. Yahoo Answers gets featured on the Yahoo home page, but not the Yahoo Directory. If you do a search for something like java, results from the directory are nowhere to be seen.

Consider this evolution of Yahoo over time. A search for shoes in 1999, with the directory dominating the results:

By 2002, directory links had been shortened, but they were still at the top of the page:

By 2004, the directory section was gone, but at least a site listed in the Yahoo Directory and showing up in web search results got a "Category" line under its listing:

Now in 2008, you have to ask what the purpose of the Yahoo Directory is to Yahoo other than apparently an easy way to get site owners chasing links to pay $299 per year. Harsh? As I’ve covered, it’s not like actual searchers can easily find the directory. At this point, you have to wonder if there are more site owners and SEOs that know it exist than searchers. Either show that directory some love or kill the thing off as part of the overall restructuring and consolidation (Flickr-Photos; Yahoo 360; Yahoo Podcasts) that’s been going on.

At the very least, killing the Yahoo Directory will save me and others from having to explain why while Google says don’t buy links, it is still OK and even recommended to buy links from Yahoo because of the apparent human oversight that the directory provides.

Perhaps editorial oversight isn’t the only requirement Google should have, when considering what’s a "good" paid link. Perhaps visibility of the directory is also important. If you’re selling links from a part of your site that’s largely hidden away from the majority of your users, maybe that link — regardless of all the editorial review — shouldn’t get counted any longer.

For more on the Delicious rollout, see discussion on Techmeme. ]]> http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-tests-delicious-integration-in-search-results-13172/feed 0 http://searchengineland.com/live-blogging-smx-social-media-keynote-qa-joshua-schachter-of-delicious-garrett-camp-of-stumbleupon-12446 http://searchengineland.com/live-blogging-smx-social-media-keynote-qa-joshua-schachter-of-delicious-garrett-camp-of-stumbleupon-12446#comments Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:00:24 +0000 Vanessa Fox http://searchengineland.com/beta/live-blogging-smx-social-media-keynote-qa-joshua-schachter-of-delicious-garrett-camp-of-stumbleupon-12446.php

The closing session for the first day of SMX Social Media is a keynote conversation with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon. We’re going to learn more about the landscape and future of social networking.

More coverage at Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal.

Garrett is up first. He cofounded StumbleUpon six years ago. For the first four years, they were based in Canada, then moved to the company to Silicon Valley. The company was recently bought by eBay. Danny mentioned a NY Times quote that said just because people stop watching TV in favor being on their computers, they aren’t going to stop channel surfing. Garrett talks a little about how StumbleUpon learns from what you like and recommends pages that are useful to you.

Joshua is up next and Danny notes that Del.icio.us was sold to Yahoo in 2005 (it was founded in 2003). Users have manually bookmarked things 100 million times. Joshua notes that it’s hard to find things after you initially discover them. He initially started Del.icio.us for personal use but found that people came to read what he had bookmarked, so he built out the sharing functions and things took off from there. He notes that he gets a popup when one of his friends saves something and wow, I had no idea Del.icio.us could work like that. Creepy, er, I mean cool!

Mostly this session will be questions. Danny wants to know about tagging usage and spamming. Joshua says that with tagging, “I find this interesting” and “I want you to find this interesting” look similar. But both he and Garrett say that they aren’t so much into spamming as a usage of their system. Garrett says that content stands on its merits. If it’s good content, it’ll get voted up; if it’s bad content, then the community will vote it down.

What about the challenges of being acquired by a large company? Joshua says they have 3 million users and that scale alone is challenging. He thinks he couldn’t have scaled to meet the needs of so many without the support and infrastructure of Yahoo. Garrett says they are staying very independent, the team and culture has remained the same, and eBay is mostly there for support.

How about actively vs. passively seeking? Joshua says search hasn’t changed much in a while and social meta data might be a way to evolve things. The strong partnership with Yahoo search means they can explore this a bit more. Garrett says StumbleUpon data is pretty clean — you have clear signals of pages being voted up or down. You don’t have the noise of the entire web like you do with major search engines. They don’t concern themselves with the entire web — just the top items people are voting for.

Any changes to StumbleUpon with the acquisition? Garrett says not so far. They have a different business model, their own team, and independence. What are they gaining with being acquired? Have their end goals changed? Both say they have additional funding, technology, scale with the new parent companies. Del.icio.us says they had just about maxed about before the acquisition and now has lots of resources, access to engineers who have experience with scale, and a customer support team. He says Yahoo hasn’t changed their direction or goals.

How was it that StumbleUpon took off? Garrett says the move to San Francisco made a big difference. They hadn’t hit critical mass before and that move helped them get involved with influencers. People became aware of them and they got more attention. Firefox also made a difference. Joshua notes that both teams worked for years before getting attention and it was really all that work that is being rewarded now.

How did they know they were on the right track? Garrett says he built it for himself. He wanted to browse sometimes — not only search. Once he had a remote control for the Internet, he thought others might like it also. Joshua also built Del.icio.us based on what he needed. As the engineer and the user, you learn about what works fairly quickly.

It is harder to implement things now, being owned by a large company? Joshua thinks dealing with a larger scale is what slows things down. When you have 10,000 users, you can experiment and break things. When you have 3 million users, you need a testing cycle.

Garrett agrees that when you have tons of users, you can’t just spring things on them. You need testing and documentation and usability research. The current redesign was first tested on a beta group of 800 people, who gave them feedback and helped them fine tune it.

If you believe in collective memory and collective voting, why nofollow links? Because they are trying to discourage spam. Danny wonders if it actually is a deterrent. They say yes. And if they could eliminate spam other ways would they get rid of the nofollow? They said maybe, but they think that having nofollow keeps away the motivation for spamming.

Joshua notes that with the flexible tagging, people can build add ons that he never intended and he uses those types of things to figure out what features to add next. For instance, lots of people use the tag “to read” to keep a list of what to read later. Garrett says they are looking to potentially make an API available so developers can create new things.

Are they looking to get more into social networking a la Facebook? Joshua says Del.icio.us wants to stay lightweight. They may add a bit of work groups and things, but don’t plan to be Facebook. Garrett thinks StumbleUpon is in between Del.icio.us and Facebook regarding social networking. They do plan to add social features, but keep them content-focused.

What about StumbleUpon’s pay features? Garrett says they’ve only launched some early features and that it’s been promising, so they’re definitely planning more. They are planning on offering more feedback about ads based on user behavior to help advertisers for instance. What about user feedback? Are they all irritated? No, since the ads are reviewed manually, the pages are relevant to the user and aren’t obtrusive. Less than 1 and 20 stumbles are paid and they plan to keep it at low volume.

Neil wants to know why Del.icio.us locks up if you have too many friends. Joshua says that’s being fixed in the next version. Neil says he’s excited to use Del.icio.us again. Joshua seems very pleased about that thought.

If someone pays to be added to StumbleUpon and it gets a bunch of positive votes, will those votes still count and keep the page popular once payment runs out?: Sure, if people like the page, it will start to rank naturally as well. You only pay for pages served through the ad system.

Is the StumbleUpon home page going to be refreshed more often? It seems kind of stale. Garrett says yes, it’s just that it’s not the main priority since most users get to content through the toolbar. And it’ll take some work to get algorithms in place to get fresh, relevant content going on the home page.

Joshua and Garrett have both gone from private lives to public lives. And with social bookmarking like this, some people are hesitant to reveal even the sites they are bookmarking in public. How do they feel about privacy? Joshua says people need to learn about privacy online, decide what they want to be public, and no how to keep online behavior private (with Del.icio.us, you can make bookmarks private). He says the downside to all of this is less privacy. The upside is that you can aggregate knowledge of many people. Is it worth the trade off? That’s up to the individual. And if you really care about privacy, don’t put information online. (I’ve thought a little about this online privacy thing before. It’s a conundrum.) He says that people have written in to complain that their bookmarks are public and he thinks, well, it is called “social bookmarking.”

Garrett notes that some people want levels of sharing and Joshua says this is good in that otherwise some people might not share at all, but on the other hand, if you make things too complicated, people won’t use them. Garrett says most people choose to share their stumbles.

Have they thought about unified profiles across social bookmarks? Well, Joshua says they don’t have a lot of sites exactly like them who they could integrate with. In fact, Yahoo MyWeb is their biggest competitor. Hey, that’s right. What’s up with that?

Tamar would like to star things she stumbles. I think Joshua might be thinking that she should just save it to Del.icio.us. Not that I’m trying to start a Xander and Harmony style Buffy fight with the two panelists or anything. OK, maybe.

All in all, a day chock full of social media tidbits. More social media goodness and live blogging tomorrow.

I’m back for more live blogging of SMX Social Media. This session is all about social bookmarking and tagging. You can categorize and share information using things like De.licio.us, StumbleUpon, and Technorati. This panel includes Guillaume Bouchard of NVI, Michael Gray of Atlas Web Services, and Neil Patel of ACS.

Coverage is also up at Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable.

Guillaume notes that you can leverage social networks. Once your story is on one, you may be able to use that to get to another. For instance, if your site is submitted to Digg, people might see it and bookmark it on Del.icio.us. He says things have gone way beyond just saving to favorites.

You can now share bookmarks with your networks. Sadly, most of these links are nofollowed, but by having your pages on these sites, you expose them to more people who might blog about them or otherwise link to them. You probably won’t get quite the traffic of social networking sites like Digg, but they are still worthwhile. These sites are used by traditional media, so using them can really pay off in that regard.

You should optimize tagging as much as possible. Research the popular tags and see what’s related to your industry. Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites index tags exactly as you type them. For instance, if you enter “buffy, bunnies,” that will be indexed exactly as that and not as two separate tags: buffy and bunnies.

Manual tagging is not unlike anchor text for links. Make sure you’re using tags based on the keywords you want to optimize for. Automatic tagging tends to be more black hat. You can do more widescale tagging in this way. It’s often not useful for people, but just for search engines. Tags can be misused for spamming and he notes that search marketers just might be aware of making things too noisy.

Now we’re looking at Technorati. You can tag blog posts and Technorati picks up on this. You can claim your blog on Technorati and can encourage people to make it a favorite. You can add a widget to your site that readers can use to favorite your blog. Technorati doesn’t drive tons of traffic. For instance, even the most popular blogs only have around 3,000 people who have favorited them in Technorati. But you can use Technorati to gauge if your blog’s popularity is gaining or slowing down.

Flickr uses tags as well. And the comment links aren’t nofollowed, so go links! You can, for instance, submit a Flickr photo to Digg and can have a link to your site in the comments. You can use the photostream on your blog and other nifty things, although I’m not sure how these things drive you links or traffic. It’s all about popularity though, and everything helps, I suppose.

YouTube can drive tons of traffic. You can share videos, embed the videos into your site, and link back to your site in the description.

Now we’re looking at some site called Facebook. I think I may have heard of it. You can create a widget or group to drive traffic back to your site. You might also check to see if any groups exist about your company, so you can get involved in the discussion.

Michael is up next. He’s here to talk about Del.icio.us. He notes that you can add as many tags as you want. You can see how many people have saved a particular page and what notes they may have added. It’s interesting to see how people save your page and what they say about it. You can also do research to see how people tag pages that are similar to yours, so you can target those terms. It’s low-tech keyword research. Use the tags that are used most often.

You can see when people have saved something, which can tell you who bookmarked a page first. This may help you identify early adopters or people who are particularly interested in your subject matter.

You can subscribe to specific tags, which can help you keep track of your industry, see upcoming stories, and see what other people are doing that’s working.

You can send your friends network links, although the Del.icio.us network may not be the fastest way to send things.

The Del.icio.us home page shows what’s hot. You can see the active tags, which can help you know what’s hot right now. The popular page is where it’s at though. That’s where you get the traffic. Unlike Digg, Del.icio.us has people on it other than young, American, tech males, so you can use it to reach more people.

You can search over Del.icio.us, which returns first the results of things you’ve bookmarked, followed by the results that have been bookmarked the most. When you tag something, you can see tags you’ve used before, what tags Del.icio.us recommends, and the popular tags that others are using.

So how can you use Del.icio.us to drive traffic? Write about things that people are interested in. Find those who are active in your niche and add them to your network. Add bookmarking widgets to your site to encourage your readers to tag your stuff. Pay close attention to your titles, since those who end up linking to you are likely to use that title as anchor text.

The popular page is updated every four hours. Time your stories at lower traffic times so you have a better chance of getting on the popular page. You can see how many people have tagged a story “recently,” which is within that four hour window. You can use that to see how many people have to bookmark a story to get to the popular page for that update period.

Be careful with gaming the system. Del.icio.us may ban your account or start discounting your bookmarks. And no one wants that.

Next up, Neil is going to talk about StumbleUpon. It’s apparently one of the most popular social networking sites around. The home page displays popular stuff, as does the buzz page. Over 3 million users are on StumbleUpon and it can drive lots of traffic. It doesn’t do as well with getting links as some of the other sites, but the traffic is not only great, but continues over time. [To step away from live blogging for a second, I can vouch for the StumbleUpon traffic. When I have had a page of my blog on StumbleUpon, I not only get a traffic surge, but I get residual traffic for a really long time.]

StumbleUpon also has older users, which means they actually are old enough to have credit cards and can buy things without asking their parents.

You have to install the StumbleUpon toolbar to make use of it. You can use the toolbar to submit something, vote it up or down, or browse through things people have “stumbled.” You can also send links to your friends.

Titles aren’t as important as with other social networking sites, since users are browsing directly to the pages. You do want to make use of the tags and topics though, since that’s how users navigate through. As with the other social networking sites, you can see what the popular tags are so you can tag your stuff based on what people are looking for.

Neil’s now telling us how to spam your friends with links to your Stumbled page that requires your friends vote for your page. And on that happy note, we’re on to questions.

Someone wants to know more about finding out who bookmarked your stories first. Michael says it’s a lot of research, but you can find really influential people who like your stuff that way.

How do you pick a username? Michael Gray says he registers company names just so no one else can register them, but he doesn’t use those for his active account. Neil says he’s incognito. I’m sure that’s just to avoid stalkers.

How do you leverage friends? Mostly it’s easy to send links. Guillaume said he and his friends sometimes have social days where they all are at home on separate IPs, working the system. This can help you be seen as having an active account and not someone who’s just gaming. Michael says the sites can detect bots. Neil says that you’re in it for the long term, so doing really shady stuff that works in the short term can cause you more trouble in the long run.

Why does StumbleUpon bring such long term traffic? It’s not time sensitive like Digg. Mostly people use the toolbar to browse through what they’re interested in. Michael likens using StumbleUpon to channel surfing. You need a picture or something else interesting to get users to stop on your page.

Use automated script to submit? Michael says to experiment with your neighbor’s open wifi, because your IP can get banned.

What about buying StumbleUpon submissions? Those are tagged as paid and users ignore them. Just use your friend network.

Michael thinks that it’s possible that Google pays attention to what people are surfing to via the Google toolbar and since those with a StumbleUpon toolbar are likely to have a Google toolbar as well, then even if users stumble right on by, Google will see that as a page view, and that can’t be bad. (I have no idea if I’m using this “Stumble” terminology properly, so just humor me here.)

What about B2B sites? Use a lot of this social networking stuff to get the links, but probably not so much for the traffic.

Michael also notes that some people import their Del.icio.us bookmarks into their blogs, and unlike on Del.icio.us itself, those links are not nofollowed (how’s that for a double negative), so they may count towards PageRank calculations.

How do you get friends? You have to spend the time building up your network. Reach out to influential bloggers. Use a consultant who already has a friends network. Or hire someone internally to spend their time building up social networking profiles for your business. Particularly for sites with limits on how many friends you can add–pick people who are active, not those who rarely log on.

Now we take a break while Danny tries StumbleUpon. He likes cats and search engines and StumbleUpon eerily seems to work and serves up exactly that. He critiques the lack of lolcat speak in the cat picture. Seriously. If you make a picture of a cat speaking, make sure it speaks like a cat. Otherwise, the cat riding a shark underwater won’t be seen as credible.

Do search engines use Del.icio.us data in ranking sites? After all Google Webmaster Tools lists those links. Well, the links are nofollowed, so they don’t count for PageRank credit. [Another live blogging step aside -- I have it on good authority that Webmaster Tools lists all links, whether they count for PageRank or not.] But search engines may use those links for discovery purposes. Guillaume thinks that popular links may be noted by the engines. In any case, all the panelists figure it can’t hurt.

How can large companies capitalize on social media? It may not work, but it’s worth a try, particularly since it’s so inexpensive. It’s hard to calculate ROI, but then again, it’s hard to justify brand advertising too. At least this is more measurable. You can measure if you are getting traffic, links, or search rankings boosts.

Should you use the same username across all accounts? And do these profiles rank on Google? Michael says totally use them for reputation management, but you might also want to use separate accounts if you’re planning to submit the same content across all sites. Neil uses the same username since he can use the reputation he’s gained on one site to get instant trust on the other sites. Use the same avatar and description so people can recognize you and follow you across sites. Guillaume echoes what Michael said in that if you are doing things that are shady, if you use the same username across all sites, you might lose them all at once.

Danny is now using a Google search for “Steve Rubel” and notes that he’s working social sites for reputation management and is dominating the SERPs. I feel compelled to link to my blog post about using social networking profiles for reputation management again. Hey, it’s relevant; not spam!

And on that drumming-up-links-of-my-own note, we’re on to the next session.

If everyone else is pushing out the quick previews of the new Delicious, hey, we’ll add to the screenshot fodder for now. These are from an invite-only preview now out. There’s no set launch date for the public beta, but Delicious founder Joshua Schachter emailed those in the invite with, "While we still have a lot of work left before we launch, I’m happy to say that most of the major pieces are now in place."

The new home page:

The default "Hotlist" view on the existing site changes to "Popular Bookmarks," and you can toggle to the Explore Tags view:

Drill into a particular tag, and you can see Saves in new blue boxes along with breadcrumb-style trails that show related tags:

You’ve also got three levels of detail for viewing bookmarks. Compact or one-line mode:

Medium or two lines:

And large or three lines:

We expect to spin around later and look at how it actually works in more depth. In the meantime, TechCrunch has a short review, as does Search Engine Journal, and there will be more showing up on Techmeme soon. I’ll leave you with this massive screenshot of features as listed on the preview’s What’s New page:

The del.icio.us blog announced an upgrade to their Firefox extension that enables the easy bookmarking of pages. The changes include:

• Searching and browsing your bookmarks can be done directly in your Firefox browser
• You can edit your bookmarks within Firefox
• You can define which tags to display in the Firefox toolbar also

For a full tour of the new Firefox del.ico.us extension check out the quick tour.

More coverage can be found at Techmeme.com.

A newly published patent application from Yahoo, Using community annotations as anchortext, provides a hint at some of the research and work that Yahoo is doing to incorporate user created tags, annotations, bookmarks, and social profiles into the way that they index and organize information, and rank that information.

Danny asked me if I would mention a recent SEO by the Sea post here, where I went into some depth on the processes described in that document. It is at Social Trustrank and User Annotations as Anchor Text. One of the most interesting aspects the patent covers is how trustrank might benefit from interactions between Yahoo and users of Yahoo services. You’ve possibly heard of trustrank in conjunction with the paper Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (pdf).

Instead of just pointing at my post though, I thought it might be interesting to also point to some little cited and little discussed papers that also discuss user tagging, annotations, and how those might help strengthen the offerings from Yahoo (with a Google Base mention for good measure)…

Social Search

Raghu Ramakrishnan, who joined Yahoo this summer as Vice President and Research Fellow, provides a very detailed presentation on the subject in Community Systems: The World Online. It’s a long presentation, but is a great way to come up to speed with what Yahoo is doing in the area of social search. An extended abstract of the presentation gives a hint as to what is included:

A natural question is whether we can exploit shared community interactions to improve other Web activities, in particular, search. We call this social search, and there are broadly three ways to use social interactions to improve search: 1) Use shared annotations (tags, comments, ratings, etc.) as metadata to improve search result ranking; 2) Use shared activity profiles to connect users with a mutual interest in being connected, as an extension of search; and 3) Create communities of purpose that are empowered to collect and integrate repositories of data harvested by crawling the Web.

Social Metadata

I was able to locate some other documents that explore this area from Yahoo. One that comes very close to the processes described in the patent application is Towards the Semantic Web: Collaborative Tag Suggestions, and it shares a couple of authors with the patent filing. It goes into detail on some of the lessons that they’ve learned by looking at how people tagged pages on their My Web 2.0, and discusses steps that they will take to try to improve the service based upon that analysis.

The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, December 2006 Vol. 31 No. 4, has a Special Issue on Web-Scale Data, Systems, and Semantics (pdf), which includes a couple of interesting documents from Yahoo and Google. My link leads to the full issue, but I’ve also linked to the Google cache text copies of the documents if you would like to go directly to those:

• Content, Metadata, and Behavioral Information: Directions for Yahoo! Research
• Structured Data Meets the Web: A Few Observations

The Yahoo document focuses upon the overall efforts of the Yahoo Research group in the future, and allocates a very strong role to the use of social information into their plans for that future:

Today, however, the number of distinct users generating useful metadata is growing rapidly due to three factors. First, the emergence of simple Web authoring tools such as hosted blogging software makes it possible for authorship to migrate from the elite to a much larger base of online users motivated to express themselves. Second, the introduction of new models for explicit creation of metadata versus content, such as tagging and bookmarking (e.g., through del.icio.us), the creation of rich profiles (e.g., myspace.com), or even the creation and publishing of multimedia content (e.g., youtube.com) lowers the barrier from authorship to lighter-weight interactions like commenting on somebody else’s content. And finally, there are situations in which content consumption itself is a generator of useful metadata.

I thought it was worth pointing out the Google document in this Bulletin because of some of the insights that it provides to user interaction in the building of Google Base. In the creation of customized search engines through Google Base, it’s the creator of that search engine and chosen collaborators who decide upon what is important, and what should be annotated. They talk a little about these kind of annotations in comparing them to those from Flickr:

There is a third class of structured data on the web which is the result of a variety of annotation schemes. Annotation schemes enable users to add tags describing underlying content (e.g., photos) to enable better search over the content. The Flickr Service by Yahoo! is a prime example of an annotation service for photo collections. von Ahn [14] took this idea to the next level by showing how mass collaboration can be used to create highquality annotations of photos.

Research on Flickr

Speaking of Flickr, what kinds of things might Yahoo be learning from looking at the ways that people tag images? Inducing Ontology from Flickr Tags provides one look at some research being done on that subject. Here’s a snippet:

Based upon our experience and that of others (e.g., Naaman et al. [6]), we hypothesized that images will be annotated and most easily retrieved when emphasizing several key facets: place, activity and depictions. The Flickr community also seems to emphasize another facet that might best be described as emotion or response. In our results a large proportion of the shared vocabulary is tied to placenames, although we expect that model refinements will produce more of a balance with other facets.

One area that has to be of concern when user-based information is used in a service like Flickr is privacy. You may have heard of Yahoo’s Zonetag service, in which people can upload photos from camera phones, and have the locations of those images recorded based upon GPS or cell phone triangulation. A study that looked at privacy concerns of users of ZoneTag shows another aspect of the use of user created information: Privacy Decisions for Location-Tagged Media

Future Research

Yahoo research about how people interact with applications on the web is going far beyond counting and indexing tags and annotations, and trying to understand social networks though. This paper on how people interact with remixing media, and the decisions made in the creation of videos shows another area that they are exploring: Community Annotation and Remix: a Research Platform and Pilot Deployment.

The statement from Yahoo Developers Network’s Chad Dickerson about Yahoo’s acquisition of MyBlogLog, Bloggers unite! Yahoo! joins forces with MyBlogLog is in part an announcement of the acquisition, but it’s also a welcome from the Developer’s Network to the folks behind MyBlogLog. There are quite a few folks behind the scenes at Yahoo working on how to use social search in the services they provide.

To return to Raghu Ramakrishnan’s statement above, how will Yahoo “exploit shared community interactions to improve other Web activities?” MyBlogLog provides some opportunities at collecting community information that Yahoo didn’t have before. It will be interesting to see how they might use that information.