Content Wise

Follow the Stanford Web Workshop Online

For the next few days we'll be in sunny Monterey, teaching workshops and directing the Web site critiques at Stanford's Publishing on the Web conference.

If you're there too, we looking forward to meeting and working with you. If not, we invite you to tune in to some of the action online:

• Read the combined stream of Twitter messages from conference-goers who are participating in our "team reporting" exercise. As they attend sessions, they'll post micro-messages that highlight useful factoids, surprising insights, and quotable quotes from conference speakers. If you have a Twitter account, you can add your own comments to the stream by including the label "#pow08" at the beginning or end of your "tweets."
• Follow the conference's official Twitter (both during and after the event) for announcements, updates, etc. If you have your own Twitter account, click "follow" while on the workshop's Twitter page; that will automatically add all official postings from the conference to the updates appearing on your own Twitter page.
• Check out the Web workshop's social network.
• Get a vicarious version of the killer view here by clicking on the image at right. It will take you to a Web cam run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And start making plans to attend this conference next year.

Crowdsourcing the Presidential Vote With Twitter

Among the coverage of yesterday's remarkable presidential election is yet another remarkable application of the microblogging platform Twitter: a sort of nationwide team-based journalism exercise to report on potential problems at polling places.

The Twitter Vote Report project enlisted a slice of that very large crowd of folks who cast their ballots on Tuesday to monitor moods, wait times, irregularities, and many other indicators of how the voting process went.

Volunteers sent in field reports via their Twitter feeds or by texting on cellphones and other mobile applications. Vote Report invented a few "hash tags" for the occasion to facilitate the concise updates: "#votereport" to tag the message as an official field report, "#good" for no problems, "#wait" to report delays in getting into a booth, "#machine" to signal trouble with voting machines, and so on. (For more details on the hash tags, see Vote Report's explanation of how to participate.)

Various Web-based tools, some pre-existing and some created just for this project, enabled viewers to tune in to and follow the ups and downs all over the country. It was pretty amazing to watch the national flood of "tweets" in real time.

At a more local level, here, at right, is what a query for our neighborhood zip code turned up on Twitter Search. (How'd we miss the bake sale?)

Sporadic peeks at Twitter Vote Report yesterday suggested that despite isolated missteps, for the most part the voting went smoothly. We may hear more as folks pore over the streams.

But regardless of what the effort turned up, it's how the project tackled this reporting job that should interest Web publishers. Once again, social media and crowdsourcing point in some tantalizing directions.

What can your crowd help you report on?

Podcasting Explained, in Plain English

Need to explain podcasting to your mother? Or maybe just get a better grip on the concept yourself? Check out this entertaining little video.

It's from our favorite demystify-ers of Web technologies, the folks at Common Craft. Lee and Sachi LeFever, we thank you.

Keep Tabs on Cool Tech: CoolSW

It's nearly impossible for mere editors and publishers to keep up with the never-ending flow of new sites and services on the Web. One solution: Let the crowd point the way.

Intel just unveiled a Digg-style site that lists the most promising new tools and startups, based on the voting of its tech-savvy audience. It's called CoolSW (for "cool software").

CoolSW had been an internal site that Intel employees used to track and rank emerging technologies, according to the full story at Wired Tech Biz. Glad they decided to share.

A Search Box Just For You

Today we're adding a new tool to this blog--see the top of the right side bar. It's a "Swicki," a particularly interesting example of the new breed of customizable search engines, which we wrote about last week here.

We've customized this search engine to zero in on publishing-related sites that we consider particularly useful and on topics in the field that we believe are hot. That makes it especially suited to you, the audience that reads this blog.

But this is a collaborative search engine, which is why it sounds like "wiki". As you use it, you will be "training" it to serve you better. Part of the training is passive: The Swicki pays attention to which search results you click on. But you also can actively register your likes and dislikes by clicking on the various icons that appear to the right of each result.

And this search engine has a "buzz cloud" showing the most popular terms searched by the community of our blog readers. Click on the bigger labels to see results of the more popular searches. We're tapping the wisdom of our specialized crowd here; it doesn't get more Web 2.0 than that.

We hope you find this specialized Swicki so useful that it brings you back to our blog on a regular basis. And we hope that it prompts you to create one to serve your own audience.

Let's Get Vertical (using custom search)

This is a "Swicki."

What's a Swicki? It's an intriguing new variation on the idea of customizable search engines. Before we get to the special wrinkle in Swickis, a word about why publishers should care about customizable search.

Nearly every publisher operates in a narrow niche--covering wine, for example, or travel, or investing, or even dental plans. Publishers have insider knowledge about what topics interest their particular audiences and which Web-based sources are the most authoritative and interesting in their fields. If you could tailor a search engine to comb through only those sites that you specify, you would have a powerful tool to serve the specialized needs of your audience.

Well, there are search engines that you can tailor to your niche in this way. They're free, as long as you can live with some sponsored text ads on the results page. And you can build them right into your site.

One of the simplest versions of these tools is Rollyo ("roll your own" search engine). Yahoo this week unveiled a slightly more tweak-able tool at its Search Builder sub-site. Their motto: "Build a search engine that your customers can't find anywhere else."

Swickis (from San Francisco-based Eurekster.com) up the ante in the custom search engine arms race by adding features that tap the "wisdom of the crowd" and take advantage of other Web 2.0-ish techniques. Users of a Swicki can tag results with their own labels. This enables the Swicki to assemble an archive of categorized searches and to generate a "buzz cloud" of popular results accessible to the entire "crowd."

Swickis also "learn," refining their search strategies in reaction to both active directions from the engine’s creator and passive directions based on user behavior. As the Swicki site puts it, "Swickis harness the collective power of your community."

That's a critical point for publishers--this is your crowd. Unlike the mass audience of the Web at large, your users have real expertise in your niche. So knowing what is popular among their peers is of great value to individual members of your audience. (The generic search engines and the people who run them just don't know your "vertical space" the way you and your users do.)

Any one of these tools offers a relatively easy way to add a branded, "sticky" element to your site. Beyond search, though, smart publishers should think about applying this local customization strategy wherever possible. In other words, identify techniques that work well on the Web at large and adapt them vertically to capitalize on your unique niche.