PubSub Sandbox

Scott Johnson points out in Fuzzyblog that he was having issues with a PubSub subscription until he realized that we use a default OR as part of our query syntax.  His search for Feedster johnson (which, BTW, comes close in wordage a Hootie and the Blowfish album and song, Fairweather Johnson, but I digress) would bring back any matches for the word Feedster or any matches for Johnson, which is not desirable (unless you are performing some really odd research, and we don’t judge!).

Thus, I’m sure that he has since changed his search syntax to Feedster AND Johnson, which will probably bring back more relevant results.  The term Feedster is narrow enough that he probably doesn’t have to add any other type of search criteria, but let me indulge our readership.

If someone decided to only link to the Feedster site and not actually write the name Feedster, the subscription query above would not match the results.  PubSub has a uri: attribute that fixes this.  So, we’ll add to Scott’s query string.

(Feedster OR uri:feedster.com) AND johnson

This also might not be as useful as it could be as some may also link to Scott’s blog and not write the word Johnson.  Thus, we’ll add to the string:

(Feedster OR uri:feedster.com) AND (johnson OR uri:fuzzyblog.com)

This also helps if someone spells Feedster or Johnson incorrectly, that, while not likely, has happened (My subscription query for all matches to PubSub includes the term Pubusb.

Last, it is also possible that the word Johnson will be mentioned with Feedster but have nothing to do with Scott himself.  A quick fix would be to use our /within operator syntax.  Thus the following can be added:

(Feedster OR uri:feedster.com) AND (”scott /within 2 johnson” OR uri:fuzzyblog.com)

So, what was once a simple query (which will probably work well) became something else.  I may be going a bit overboard with many of my “ifs” above, but we have to remember that when writers are posting to blogs, they are not looking for ways in which blog searchers will find their posts, but are writing for themselves.  It’s up to the searcher to use as much boolean logic to grab as much relevant data as possible.

On that note, we wish Scott well on his new venture.

Steven M. Cohen
scohen [at] pubsub [dot] com

Salim Ismail was interviewed this week by Craig Peterson for his syndicated radio show.  The show should air within the next few weeks.  We’ll update the Sandbox with the time and date (and audio) from the show as soon as we are aware of it. 

If you want to know what the highlight of the conference is, take a look at Memeorandum. In case you read this after the fact, see the screenshot below. Thanks for all the mentions.

BROAD NEW INITIATIVE TO SUPPORT STRUCTURED BLOGGING ANNOUNCED

MORE THAN 30 COMPANIES AGREE TO STANDARDIZE HOW WEB DATA IS CREATED AND ORGANIZED TO DEVELOP BENEFICIAL CONSUMER APPLICATIONS

SAN FRANCISCO – December 13, 2005 – Leading Web search, blog and development companies including PubSub, Bloglines, Feedster, Meetup, Sxip, CommerceNet, Broadband Mechanics and others today announced the start of an initiative to keep burgeoning structured content standards in sync at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco.

“A new era in blogging is upon us. We’re expanding the ways we create, share and syndicate content – and we want to make sure that all the emerging standards are interoperable.” said Salim Ismail, Co-Founder of PubSub Concepts, a leader of the initiative.

“The code we’re submitting is for peer review,” said Marc Canter, CEO of Broadband Mechanics. “We’re making sure that all appropriate existing standards are being supported in this plugin ‘compatibility box’”.

This initiative is being launched with the release of plugins for WordPress and Moveable Type platforms. The plugins will provide bloggers the ability to create Events, Reviews, People and Group Showcases, audio and video media posts and Lists. These structured blog posts can then be routed to any destination.

Companies involved in the Structured Blogging Initiative include:
Attensa, Bloglines, Bloqx, Blogg.de, Bryght, CommerceNet, Cordance, Edgeio, etribes, Feedster, 5ive, FreeRange, GoingOn, Indeed.com, IntelliCal, iUpload, iVillage, Meetup, NetVibes, Newsgator, OpenBC, Pluck, PubSub Concepts, Qumana, ReadSpeaker, Reger.com, relevantNOISE, Rojo, Sphere, Sxip, Tribe Networks and Yiibu.

The Structured Blogging Initiative uses microformats and other similar open standards to freely move and share structured content between different vendors’ products and services on the web, as well as in the off-line world.

The new software has been created so that any publisher, from the individual blogger to institutions, can make content more intrinsically searchable and self definable on the Web without giving up ownership of that content. This means that search tools can easily access this content and new, exciting consumer-based web services can be created.

“With Structured Blogging, millions of blogs or web sites can post structured items like job offers or offers to sell and have those recognized, indexed, and searched on any number of search sites, just like HTML pages are today,” said Pubsub’s Ismail.

“RSS, Aggregators, and the blogosphere show that we can all work together – united for common standards. This collaborative effort takes blogging to the next phase by enabling end-users to create structured content”, said Canter.

Others involved with this initiative said the following:

- “Imagine someone publishes an offer to sell Ping golf clubs for $300. When they press ‘submit’, it’s published on their blog and the offer is syndicated out into the FeedMesh. Five golf portals are aggregating similar offers and their users quickly find the new clubs. Someone else has ‘subscribed’ to Ping clubs for $400 or less and is instantly notified about the offer. – Salim Ismail, PubSub.

- “My favorite example of an end-user benefit is the notion of a shared XML repository – say a “San Francisco restaurant review server. Folks could contribute to the server from their blogs, cam phones, kiosks or other web services. Mobile carriers could then build ‘Reviews’ into cell phones. – Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics.

- “CommerceNet believes strongly in the vision of bootstrapping a more intelligent Web by embedding semi-structured information with easy-to-author techniques like microformats. Through our own research in developing tools for finding, sharing, indexing, and broadcasting microformatted data, we appreciate the challenges these companies have overcome to offer tools that will interoperate as widely as possible. We applaud their recent decision to support the microformats.org community in all of the core areas where commonly accepted schemas already exist, such as calendar entries, contact information, and reviews.” – Rohit Khare, CommerceNet.

- “Both writers and publishers will benefit from easy to use plugins, but, even more importantly, publishers and indexers of data will be able to share information based on the use of interoperable tools. This has the potential to be amazingly useful.” - Susan Mernit, 5ive.

With the advent of semi-structured information in blog posts and syndication feeds, users can expect new and useful web services and applications based on the data embedded within their posts. For example, a blogger reviewing a product with these plugins would create enough information in the post for a browser plugin to do a comparison shopping search. New kinds of aggregators could add friends’ calendar entries into your personal calendar or new Web services could track feeds from everyone attending the same conference.

GoingOn Networks also contributed to the Structured Blogging effort by contributing the user interface (in conjunction with Broadband Mechanics.) GoingOn will include full Structured Blogging compatibility in its platform when it ships by the end of Q1 2006.

Further development will be supported by the entire community—with open standards and common microformats.

To learn more about Structured Blogging and to download the plugins, go to http://structuredblogging.org/. For information about joining the initiative contact: info@structuredblogging.org.

About PubSub Concepts, Inc.:
PubSub Concepts, Inc. is a New York-based company founded in 2002. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 18 million blogs and syndicated Web sites, over 50,000 newsgroups, all SEC Edgar Filings, press releases from major wire services, earthquake data from the US Geological Survey, and FAA airport delay information to instantly alert users whenever material events occur. PubSub’s prospective search provides a real-time notification service made possible by PubSub’s proprietary “matching engine” which, each day, performs hundreds of billions of matches between subscriber requests and newly-published items. Visit http://www.pubsub.com for more information.

About Broadband Mechanics
Broadband Mechanics is a SF based developer of ‘digital lifestyle aggregators’ which helps to create and promulgate open standards such as ‘ourmedia.org’. BBM is providing strategic consulting and is building systems for Avid, AOL, EMI, GoingOn Networks, Visual Media, Laszlo systems and Ruckus Networks. The company was founded by Marc Canter – who previously started a company called MacroMind – which became Macromedia (which recently merged with Adobe.) Marc helped develop the world’s first multiple player, cross-platform authoring systems and multimedia authoring tools.

Our very own Salim Ismail was interviewed twice by Tom Raftery. You can read the blog posts and grab the podcasts here and and here.

Salim talks about the Pubsub service, structured blogging, and much more. Enjoy.

PubSub will be very active at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco next week. We hope to see you there. Please stop by our booth and make sure you attend the two panels that we’re on:

1) Salim Ismail will be part of a panel titled “Compound Feeds, Micro-content and the Future of Syndication.”

2) Bob Wyman will take part in “Keeping Your Ear to the Ground: New Ways to Track Reputation and Campaign ROI Online.”

We hope to see old faces (well, not “old”, but people that we have met before, but you knew what I meant) and, more importantly, new ones. If you’re going to be at the show, come up and say hello. If you can’t make it, the team will be blogging it ferociously.

We are honored that Larry Chase has chosen PubSub Linkranks for one of his top sites for marketers for 2005. Here is what he has to say:

“This year, Internet marketers finally realized the impact of link popularity on search engine optimization. What this site can do is update you on a daily basis of new sites that have started linking to you. LinkRanks is PubSub’s method of measuring the strength, persistence and vitality of links appearing in the sources that PubSub monitors. It can tell you how influential a particular site is on a particular day and over time. With LinkRanks, users can estimate the reach and influence of a website based on the sites that link to it, which enables one to measure the effectiveness and impact of a link popularity campaign. In essence, if you score a link to your site from CNN.com or thousands of other major sources, PubSub will tell you what it’s worth. For example, at the time of writing three new sites were pointing to WDFM today; looking back over the past 30 days, our home page had a high of new daily links numbering 10. Not only that, LinkRanks tells you who they are. Thereafter, you can examine how important they are by seeing who links to them. Check out the home page to see who the winners and losers are in terms of daily incoming links.”

Thanks Larry.

The initial launch of our community lists was a success. The pages have been increasingly accessed over the past 3 weeks, which has resulted in lots of discussion around our version of list making and blog ranking. However, there have been few comments from various users, one of which I will address here:

1) Why do the linkrank numbers fluctuate so much? - This is the nature of the “blog beast.” Linkranks are, for the most part, based on inlinks, or the amount of links to your blog. Given the size of the blogosphere, it’s only natural that your daily linkrank will fluctuate as much as it does. While it may seem odd that your linkrank jumps over 20,000 spots because of one inlink, it really isn’t. Think of all the blogs that do not get linked to everyday.

That said, we aim to please at PubSub headquarters. In order to not make the numbers jump as much as they do, we can incorporate a 30 day average of linkranks for the community lists, similar to what we do on PubStats. See below:

As you can see, the 30 day rankings do not fluctuate as much as the daily numbers and can be seen by some as a better indicator of influence. Thus, I’d like to pose a question. Which would you rather see on the community lists pages:

1) The daily linkranks, which shows influence on a daily basis.
2) The 30 day linkranks, which shows an average of linkrank over time.
3) Both the daily and 30 day linkranks, similar to the sitestats page.
4) Something else.

Please comment on this blog post with your thoughts or send your comments to feedback@pubsub.com.

On a related note, we are in the process of looking at the number of suggestions for more community lists. If you have sent us a note that you want to be the editor of a list, please be patient. Your call is very important to us…

Steven M. Cohen
Senior Librarian
scohen [at] pubsub [dot] com