Yahoo research on Twitter: Who’s Talking, Who’s Listening?

Yahoo! Research just published a lengthy study about Who Says What to Whom on Twitter. They used Twitter Lists to find what they called elite users, and based their conclusions on that data set.

The results of the research are available in a hard-to-read PDF file with some interesting charts and graphs. Here’s the summary information. I’ve added some paragraph breaks to make it easier to read.

First, we find that although audience attention has indeed fragmented among a wider pool of content producers than classical models of mass media, attention remains highly concentrated, where roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all attention. Within the population of elite users, moreover, attention is highly homophilous, with celebrities following celebrities, media following media, and bloggers following bloggers.

Second, we find considerable support for the two-step flow of information — almost half the information that originates from the media passes to the masses indirectly via a diff use intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classi fied as ordinary users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers.

Third, we find that although all categories devote a roughly similar fraction of their attention to di fferent categories of news (World, U.S., Business, etc), there are some differences — organizations, for example, devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.

We also find that diff erent types of content exhibit very di fferent lifespans. In particular, media-originated URLs are disproportionately represented among short-lived URLs while those originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs.

Finally, we nd that the longest-lived URLs are dominated by content such as videos and music, which are continually being rediscovered by Twitter users and appear to persist indefinitely.

I thought the statement that long-lived URLs were those originated by bloggers was significant. Bloggers are indeed becoming an important force in the media landscape. Who are the top 5 bloggers they studied? Mashable, ProBlogger, Kibe Loco and Nao Salvo (both Brazilian blogs) and dooce.

Another of the statements — that attention is highly ‘homophilous’ (a word my dictionary does not contain, but I presume they intend to mean an interest in people who are similar to us) — just makes common sense. Of course Twitter users follow people who share their interests. With all the noise on Twitter, you have to narrow it down somehow. Is it surprising that I’d be more interested in what Zeldman is talking about than in what Justin Bieber is talking about?

Blogger gets a makeover

[Ed.: This article was cross-posted at BlogHer.]

At SXSW Interactive this week, Google announced a refresh of the interface for its popular Blogger blogging platform. The software hasn’t been updated in years, although it remains one of the most popular blogging tools on the Web.

Blogger Product Manager Chang Kim calls the refresh “our next-generation user interface.” The changes will roll out over 2011 in stages, so don’t expect to open up your Blogger blog and find it completely different in one big step. The user interface is the big news, but there are several improvements, among them new mobile themes and something Blogger is calling a ‘content discovery engine’ that “that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading.”

On the geekier side, the new changes will incorporate the Google Web Toolkit. This may not matter much to you if you’re using a blogspot URL, but if you hosting a Blogger blog on your own server, this will mean you have more control over the features you can manipulate.

For everyday use, the interface will change to a sleeker and more up-to-date look. Here you see a new blog post screen showing the familiar older interface at the top, with the new look in front near the bottom.

blogger Interface

The Dashboard will change as well. Here’s the new Dashboard.

Blogger's new dashboard

At Free Technology for Teachers, the comment was made,

The new editor looks a lot like the Google Docs document editor.

Anna Leach at Shiny Shiny said,

They are smartening up the back-end of the site – making it easier to see what you’re doing, and giving users a more intuitive preview of their work.

Google released a promotional video about Blogger.

Sarah Gooding at WPMU very helpfully listed the new features mentioned in the video.

  • The ability to easily customize templates without any CSS knowledge
  • Access to real-time stats
  • Improved spam filtering
  • Continued stability (The Blogger service has had zero downtime, according to Pingdom)
  • Inclusion of web fonts
  • A sleek mobile experience of the platform
  • Smart content discovery
  • Integration of the Google Web Toolkit

In an era when sites we’ve come to depend on (like Flickr) are being neglected or abandoned by their owners, it’s great that Google is stepping up to keep Blogger competitive and on the cutting edge.

How to Turn off the Admin Bar in WordPress 3.1 – Updated

I just upgraded to WordPress 3.1. I was dismayed to discover an admin bar taking up space at the top of my blog when I was signed in.

wordpress admin bar

Maybe you love the admin bar. I don’t happen to want it there.

How do you get rid of it, if you are like me and don’t want it? Go to Users in your dashboard. Select a user and edit the profile.

User Profile in WordPress

You’ll notice that Show Admin Bar when viewing site is selected by default. Deselect. Save. You’re good to go.

UPDATE 2/27/11. If you want to disable the admin bar for a number of users all at once, instead of doing it one user at a time, here’s a solution from WordPress Support:

Need to add below code in theme’s functions.php
/* Disable the Admin Bar. */
add_filter( ‘show_admin_bar’, ‘__return_false’ );

Hat tip to Megan for bringing this solution to my attention.

AOL taking its lead from Demand Media

Business Insider hit the news with LEAKED: AOL’s Master Plan. The master plan sounds eerily like what’s going on at Demand Media. They leaked the entire master plan. Details of the plan leaked by Business Insider include:

AOL is using this document to train editors right now. It is an illuminating look into how AOL, a company with hundreds of millions in dollars in annual funding, is trying to turn itself into a 21st century media giant on the fly.

Some tidbits:

As a result of AOL’s new policy, Paul Miller decided to leave Engadget after five years as an editor there. He explained his last day at Engadget in Leaving AOL. I wrote about my almost-relationship with Demand Media in Changes at Google will Reduce Spammy Search Engine Results. AOL seems to be following in Demand Media’s footsteps in their attempts to rake in financial gain with volumes and volumes of content. Notice I didn’t say quality content.

Content Farms vs. Content Strategy

Compare that with the goings on at A List Apart, that bastion of web quality, where they are preparing to publish their third book: The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane. I suspect that Erin’s approach to what good content is and what a content strategy that will sustain a business should look like doesn’t sound exactly like AOL’s master plan. In fact, I contacted Erin and asked her what she thought about this move by AOL. Here’s her response.

AOL’s current editorial strategy seems related to their old marketing tactics from the early 90s, when they indiscriminately flooded the mail with all those install CDs. They’re competing with content factories like Demand Media and, to some extent, the Huffington Post, and they’re trying to win by cranking out reams of SEO-ed up content with no real substance.

Contrast that with the notion of giving readers and viewers content that they genuinely want and need that drives publications ranging from web pubs like A List Apart or The Awl to international print brands like The Economist. Those publications are successful because they’re producing things people can use, rather than useless fluff that will only make it harder to find content of substance.

Where this touches content strategy as it’s practiced in a UX context is the decision to publish a limited amount of useful, well written content vs. a huge volume of search-engine bait or content designed to “feed the beast” of blogging and social media. Unless you really want to join the content mills as they race toward complete crap, it’s pretty clear that focusing on user needs and editorial quality produces much better results.

Crap Overload

Part of the overload we are faced with today is an abundance of cheap crap. But the problem is, people willingly consume cheap crap. That’s why there are so many more reality shows than quality scripted dramas like Mad Men or The Good Wife. It’s cheap to produce, and people are willing to consume it. The problem isn’t just that there are content farms churning out cheap crap. There’s also the willingness of the search engines to reward sites that produce it and willingness from readers to consume that sort of content. Like reality shows, content farms make money. As long as the cheap crap brings in a profitable bottom line, we’ll see more and more of it produced.

The New York Times talked about teens leaving long form writing behind and moving to Twitter. The reason? It’s too much work to write something long. Extrapolate that into it’s too much work to read something long, or something deep, or something meaningful.

Is that it? Is it just too much effort to do quality work, or to invest quality thinking into what you’re consuming? If that’s it, I think we’re doomed.

Are you old enough to remember the days when we scoffed at anything “Made in China” as being worthless junk? Well, China has since surpassed us in many ways, including education. Is “Content Produced in the USA” going to be a joke before long?

Useful links: HTML5 questions, Smashing newsletter, WP plugins, teens

A few HTML5 questions that need answering is from Christian Heilmann.

Did you know Smashing Magazine has a newsletter? I just learned about it and think it might be pretty good. You might want to check it out, too.

A nice new WordPress plugin from doodlebee, aka @brassblogs, for those of you who set up WordPress sites for others and want to leave them some hints and reminders is Back End Instructions. Here’s some of the description of how it works.

Using WordPress’ default posting capabilities, mixed in with some custom post types and meta fields (and a little sprinkle of magic fairy dust and a lot of prayers), you can easily create and manage instructions for each page of the back-end of your client’s site. Simply create a post, associate the post with a page in the back-end, add in your content, and voilà: a small button appears at the top of the page that expands with jQuery to show a list of “instructables” (post title links) associated with that page.

Are you watching the new series The Chicago Code? This week the leading tip on solving a crime came from a tweeting teen. danah boyd talks about tweeting teens in Tweeting Teens can Handle Public Life with her usual research-based authority.

Free WordPress Themes: Who you gonna trust?

Do you use WordPress? I do. Have you ever searched Google for free WordPress themes? I have.

Is it a good way to find free themes?

No. It’s a big mistake.

Why? Because many sites that you find with a search provide free themes which include spammy links, hidden or encrypted code that does things you don’t want your blog to do, and perhaps even malicious code that opens your blog up to people you don’t even know about.

The Problem

ThemeLab provided a video about of the problem in Stop Downloading WordPress Themes from Shady Sites. It will give you a quick idea of the problem.

Theme Lab says,

These are two main types of sites you should avoid while looking for any sort of WordPress theme to use on your blog.

  • Torrent/warez sites
  • Random sites you find in Google

There’s a helpful article on the same topic at WPMU titled Why You Should Never Search for Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else. This article give you a closer view of some of the encrypted code, backlinks, and other warning signs. It names names and shows you exactly why to avoid certain sites.

You can get more information and test results of tests for spam links, encoding and malware in free WordPress themes in Only Download WordPress Themes from Trusted Sources by Chip Bennett.

Who you gonna trust?

The foremost trustworthy site is WordPress.org and its theme directory. If you need a free theme, you’d do well to start and end your search there. There are other trustworthy sites. They include,

What about your current theme?

Are you using a theme you found by searching? If you are wondering about the theme you are currently using, the articles I linked to above include tools and checkers that can help you decide if its safe to keep using what you have now. Here are some tools recommended by WPMU.

Decoders

If you are investigating a theme that you think is suspicious you might find the following decoding tools helpful:

Useful Plugins

If that seems too daunting, head over to WordPress.org for a theme you can trust.

Cross-posted in slightly different form at BlogHer.