Most of us use iPhones, Android devices or Blackberries. Maybe a few odd people have a Palm Pré. We are mobile. We do email, stay in contact with friends and lovers via text message, Twitter, Facebook, and get driving directions via Google Maps. We find restaurants, bars, shopping and bus stops – all from our mobile devices. We play games, leverage the “nose down in the phone” as a “get away from me” messaging tool.

We use our phones for everything, don’t we?

Relatedly, I don’t even like to watch TV in real time. My shows are consumed via the web, and have sometimes been viewed on my phone.

Gone are the days of the traditional approach to media and findability. In an information now era, it’s important to have ambient findability… the ability to discover exactly what I want, at exactly the right time and on the right device. This is not a new concept either. Peter Morville wrote about it in his book Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become (O’Reilly, 2005). He defines ambient findability as:

• The quality of being locatable or navigable.
• The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.
• The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval.

This morning, I commented about how I wish the Black Keys, one of my new favorite bands, were coming to Austin. Of course, my omnipresent Twitter following were sure to inform me that the Keys were just at ACL Festival and had done off-ACL shows.

I would have known that had I Googled, but I didn’t.

Here’s the problem: With ambient findability, I should not have to proactively find out when my favorite bands are in town. This information should be delivered to me via text, email, or other notification. I should not have to remember to pick up the Austin Chronicle to find out where these shows may or may not be.

In a different world, if I’m walking around in downtown Baltimore, for instance, it would be awesome if I recieved some sort of notification when I’m in proximity of something that may be of interest to me. Foursquare recently announced some new initiatives that notify a user when they are in proximity of something on their to-do list. This is an excellent step in the direction of ambient findability.

These are the premises of findability that need to be included in every consumer-facing product and startup. It is the next generation of the web.

Photo Credit: Paul Veugen

The Rooney Rule

The Rooney rule in the NFL is a rule that requires an NFL team to interview at least one minority candidate for an NFL coaching position before it can be filled. The principle is clear… there are not enough opportunities for minority coaching candidates so the NFL mandates the requirement.

The problem is, it does no good. It has become a thing of bureaucratic obstacles and a checklist item for franchises. Take the case of the Washington Redskins who are likely to fire head coach Jim Zorn in the next week after yet another abysmal performance.

During the preliminary process of hiring a new coach, the Redskins interviewed Skins Secondary coach Jerry Gray. Cool, cool. Except that it seems to have been done to fill a quota (yes, I used the Q word). Gray is not likely to get the job and probably never was likely to get the job but it was required that the Redskins interview a minority. Even the front page teaser of the article on NFL.com suggests the process is a quota-based process with the phrase, “Skins Interview Gray, Satisfy Rooney Rule”. Duh?

Search Neutrality

Search Neutrality is the bastard half-child of Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality, for context, is the Internet policy argument that states that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should not be able to offer preferential treatment to higher paying customers. First let me go on record to say that I don’t necessarily support net neutrality, though there should be some regulation around Internet service provisions because it affects more that just carriers pissing among themselves.

Though I am not a fan of unfettered capitalism (thus my support for some regulation around net neutrality), two or more companies trying to make money should be able to create incentives to customers that would provide better services (or preferred service, if you will) to better (or more high paying) customers. This has existed forever. You have Airline frequent flier miles. You have Premium accounts over basic accounts. You have different versions of operating systems offering better features. Etc. Etc. Etc. The Internet is not a Constitutionally protected right and is subject to the laws of competition and capitalism.

Which brings me back to search neutrality. There is some buzz around the idea that there should be regulation around search engines that would prevent search providers (Google, Bing, etc) from having editorial policy (read: search algorithms) that provide more favorable treatment to some publishers over others. Or would prevent search providers from supplying paid placement opportunities to publishers in an agnostic fashion.

This, on its face, is wrong. Yet don’t underestimate some guy who has no idea how to organically grow search result placements (SERPs) to try to rally support from the ignorant to punish the evil empires of Microsoft and Google for exercising capitalistic rights and sound business opportunities. Let me be clear, any kind of neutrality buzzword derives from the inability of some to compete on merit in a marketplace. Can’t get SERPs… smack Google with a search neutrality policy that makes everyone, everywhere completely equal while we eat fruit from trees while riding our unicorns. It doesn’t happen this way, people. Competition is created by innovation and capitalism. Survival of the fittest.

Google has not significantly adjusted how they determine the importance of an article, site or keyword in some time, tho they claim some 70+ algorithmic tweaks last year. And that’s fine. Google’s index is Google’s index. It has trained us how to search and what we expect when we search. It has taught us silently and we compare all other results to the Google results, despite the fact that Google results are in themselves arbitrary and based on their own determination via algorithm.

But I digress.

It’s interesting when new search engines or tools come out. It’s interesting to see the innovation as it takes place. One such tool that I discovered, almost by accident, does a good great job of building an index around links and pages passed around Twitter. This tool is Topsy, which combines Twitter Search with Google like results (in other words, the results are not tweets themselves).

For those of you not occupying your every waking moment on Twitter, it is by most objective measures, the new information aggregator – like RSS readers were supposed to be or portal sites try to be.

The currency of influence on Twitter can be summarized in two letters: RT (short for Retweet). Many bloggers are including the ability for stories to be “retweeted”, or redistributed on Twitter, and that is precisely what Topsy is measuring. (An example of retweeting capability on a blog can be seen on this blog – see that Retweet button at the end of the article?)

Much like Google set the currency of relevance based on links, an assumption that was valid at the time and still carries some level of validity today, Topsy has recognized that more influence is being distributed via Twitter and thus, a relevancy algorithm around this currency must be built.

I don’t know if Topsy is a “Google killer” or even if they strive to be one. My guess is, it will never supplant Google in our lives. However, an ambitious approach to this new distribution of influence is an important, and enjoyable, thing to watch.

My session was about Search and Findability. There seemed to be a lot of misunderstandings about what the session would be about. Findability is not SEO. SEO is an aspect of Findability. SEO makes a blog findable for search engines.

Really, Findability is all about the right data being available to the reader, whether that reader is human or a machine (search engines). To that end, theme structure is a major area of concerns. Theme developers can setup their themes to have related posts or popular posts functionality, as well as attention to search implementation. I suggested theme authors should provide search results in full format, and not simply excerpts.

Secondly, findability is all about metadata and descriptive data. Microformats provide a human semantic understanding to machine-oriented descriptive data. Examples are

,

as well as WordPress built in XFN. Human understanding of machine data.

Multimedia content should take advantage of descriptive content. This means image tagging, show notes for podcasts and caption text for videos. Of course, and understanding of tags and categories is helpful.

Thirdly, I touched briefly on Ambient Findability, a concept introduced by Peter Morville in the O’Reilly publication with the same name. Ambient Findability suggests that no matter what, where or how, content should be easily findable. At b5media the mantra was “the right content, at the right time, to the right person on the right device”. Morville asks three questions:

1. Can people find your blog?
2. Can people find their way around your blog?
3. Can people find your content, products and services despite your blog?

Finally, I suggested four plugins/features that can enhance the findability of a site:

1. Possibly Related Posts – Only available for WordPress.com users.
2. Search Everything – makes all areas of WordPress content available for the default search
3. Microformats plugins – adds additional Microformats support to WordPress: Micro Anywhere, Blog Summary and Save Microformats
4. Lijit for WordPress – our new plugin that allows registration and configuration from inside of the WordPress admin. Also, it makes it possible to hijack the theme search form.

The slide deck from the session is available below. It is Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial licensed. In other words, use the idea, use the concepts, use the deck in it’s entirety as long as you attrbiute me. I’m Aaaron Brazell from Technosailor.com in case you didn’t know. Oh, and if you make money, I expect a cut. ;-)

• 1. RSSmeme

RSSmeme te muestra las noticias recientes más populares, de acuerdo a cuanta gente las comparte via Google Reader. Puedes filtrar las noticias por idioma, frescura y popularidad. También puedes ver estadísticas sobre los artículos más compartidos. RSSmeme es una buena idea para ver que esta sonando en internet.

• 2. ReadBurner

ReadBurner es muy similar a RSSmeme, pero con más colores y un panel donde integra al Google Reader, para que tengas todo en la misma página. ReadBurner además incluye filtros para categorías como Web, Desktop, Mobile y Apple. Al igual que RSSmeme, incluye estadísticas y la opción de agregar tu feed de artículos compartidos de Google Reader.

• 3. Lijit

Lijit es un buscador para tu blog que permite a los usuarios de tu blog realizar búsquedas a través de todo tu contenido web (blog, videos, bookmarks, fotos, etc). Lijit también te ofrece un reporte de búsquedas realizadas y varios widgets para poner en tu blog. Una opción interesante es “re-search” que ofrece a los visitantes de tu blog que vienen de hacer una búsqueda en Google, una lista de resultados relevantes, pero limitados a tus blogs y demás propiedades web que hayas registrado en Lijit.

• 4. LinkRiver

LinkRiver le hace seguimiento a un gran número de usuario de Internet y publica los links que ellos comparten en sus blogs, wikis, twitter, etc. Otra forma interesante, aunque más limitada, de enterarse de lo que está pasando.

• 5. Surchur

Surchur es un buscador inteligente que crea una página estilo popurls o NotiLat alrededor de los resultados de tu búsqueda. Incluye las siguientes fuentes: Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Newsvine, Google News, Yahoo News, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

• 6. Addict-o-matic

Addict-o-matic es similar a Surchur en cuanto crea un portal personalizado a partir de tu búsqueda, pero con algunos componentes tipo PageFlakes o Netvibes que te permiten eliminar algunos resultados de tu búsqueda o reorganizarlos. Incluye resultados de Technorati, Live.com, Google Blogs, Ask.com, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, Bloglines, Delicious, Topix, Summize, Newsview y otros.

• 7. NotiLat

[ Nota: NotiLat es obra del autor de este post ] NotiLat es un agregador de noticias para latinoamérica que combina todas las fuentes de cada país en una sola página. Se actualiza cada diez minutos e incluye noticias de muchísimos websites que no ofrecen un feed RSS y también ofrece actualizaciones de blogs y usuarios de Twitter. Inspirada en Alltop.com como una alternativa para los usuarios que desean estar enterados del mayor número de noticias en el menor tiempo posible sin tener que entrar al mundo de los lectores RSS.

Technorati Tags:
agentes-de-búsqueda, breaking-news, content-curators, curadores, curadores-de-contenido, curators, information-overload, networks-sociales, news, noticias, redes sociales, redes+sociales, rss, search-agents, social-networks, socnets

The essence of Redlasso for bloggers is that it indexes and makes searchable broadcast media. By making it searchable, it’s a wonderful way to find content that has aired over broadcast media. Taking it to the next level, they make it clippable so that you can capture exactly what you want and get unique embed codes for that clip.

For content owners, their content generally becomes unmonetizable after it airs. Redlasso seeks to provide a means for content owners to monetize their content, while providing content producers/syndicators, such as bloggers, a way to utilize content that otherwise is difficult to integrate without a lot of work.

Though Redlasso is still private, it’s been really quite nice to see the product develop from a prototype to a useful tool. As recently as this morning, I spoke with Jim and he is promising new functionality being rolled in.

As an example, I searched the Redlasso site for Blog World Expo specific to Fox News (I know they did a segment a few days ago), and I clipped it for display here:

There are still some problems. For one, search results only go back two weeks. This is a bit limiting. Also, the search does not seem to pull up very relevant searches. For instance, typical phrase searches requires quotes around the phrase (e.g. “Blog World Expo” in Google will pull up results containing Blog World Expo while simply searching for Blog World Expo will pull up search results containing blog or world or expo). This functionality does not seem to exist yet in Redlasso making the location of relevant clips difficult at best. Also, there seems to be lag between voice and lips moving. That’s distracting.

The player, while a vast improvement over the Windows Media only player in the prototype still is difficult to use. For instance, the clipping mechanism is small and should be easier to use. Screenshot included.

Finally, they need to open this up and get it out of private beta. More eyes need to be on this thing and while the concept and technology is fantastic (gotta love phoenetic search!), additional eyes will give it more traction and leg room.

Follow @redlasso on Twitter for updates and… request an invite. ;)