Digigen & The TinMan

I have been playing around with Wowd, a new real-time search engine for a week and unfortunately find it slightly frustrating. I first found out about this search engine whilst reading MIT Technology Review and I was looking forward to getting my hands on Wowd to see if lived up to its billing. Unfortunately, at the moment its a slightly disappointing product although the potential is clearly there.
Wowd is a social real-time search engine, basing its results on what people are actually searching for right now. The most popular searches appear on the homepage, but Wowd are trying to encourage you to download an application to your desktop which will track your browsing behaviour. Given current issues in the UK about privacy, mainly cuased by companies like Phorm,  I can’t really see this application download taking off.
Two Quick fixes:

1) Firefox Extension – Stumble Upon is one of my favourites and I can see Wowd working in a similar way. It could be a really nice little tool, especially from an advertising perspective if we can see the data accumulated.

2) Visual demonstration of data – the homepage at the moment is a bit dull, not simple like Google’s. It could do with some sort of visual streaming and mapping of data.

You may or may not have seen Episode 3 of Flashforward. If you didn’t you probably won’t know what I am talking about. However, I think I saw the most powerful search engine on the planet being used and reckon it probably made Google very jealous.

The search engine in question was asked to return search results on “Crows Dying at the same time” and returned just one result, with accompanying video and text explanation. Surely this is the future of search? not twitter….

I never believed I would see the day when Google was described as archaic, old, not forward thinking enough. How times change in worldwidewebworld. However, there is a constant, ever increasing voice saying they are and they have missed the boat in “real time” search. Real time is interesting, it taps into the conciousness of the nation, the world even. It taps into what the public is talking about now, what they are really feeling, so it will be massively exciting in the run up to the World Cup and the General Elections in 2010.

Google on the other hand taps into our memory, our flow of actions that have previously happened, but which are not happening or potentially not happening right now. As such there is a certain sense of reliability with Google, which you cannot get with real-time search. We all know the negative stories about Twitter and Swine Flu, social escalation of a crisis which could have easily been quashed if you followed some of Google’s cracking Swine flu maps.

The debate rages on. I for one am going to continue to track trends and cool stuff on Twitter, whilst searching for what I really want on Google.

The truth is, there is no simple way of doing this. The tools that I have dealt with to date have been consistent in one thing, not getting the completely right answer the first time around. I don’t actually think this is a fault of the tool or the person running the tool. Apart from in one case. Its not even a fault of the brief.

The problem comes from the data revealing more possible connotations each time you run it. Another influencer, another subject we hadn’t considered, more data than before. Because conversations are happening all the time and being started all the time in known and unknown places, the data set from buzz technology consistently shifts as well.

Therefore, getting buzz monitoring right is difficult and takes alot of manual intervention. It seems to me to pay to take a step back from the data and have a think about how it pans out, analyse it for yourself, then get the client involved. What do they think? What is important to them? Are we both trying to get the same things out of it?

I think the following diagram best represents the way buzz monitoring should work, a reduced emphasis on the buzz tool’s owners, and more emphasis on client and agency. Essentially, this is a top heavy approach but one which I think gives most benefit.

Having currently been reading The Cult of The Amateur (Andrew Keen) for around two weeks now, I had started to think that writing a blog is a thoroughly unprofitable and unrewarding business. Keen points out on numerous occassions that many of the big blogs we think about being profitable are in fact not at all. His examples are Guy Kawasaki’s, gofugyourself, etc. None of which pulled in much revenue. (Thank god I have a proper job I thought!)

However, new figures released today about TechCrunch suggest that Keen has got this massively wrong. The SF Chronicle has just released figures suggesting that TechCrunch generates around $240k a month in advertising revenue. That is a serious amount of money whatever business you are in and shows really the worth of TechCrunch to those within the digital industry and perhaps those sourcing information about it. At 1.25m visitors per month the site has significant traffic and works out at a cost per visitor of $192. If for example, every visitor visits the site say 3 times…then the average cost per impression (visitors x freq of visit) is $64. This seems like a pretty expensive way of advertising to an audience who could probably be considered to be advertising adverse.

Anyway, it seems to be working for TechCrunch..they have just hired a new CEO, so good luck to them.

Matt Bamford-Bowes