Irreverent Thinking

And no, I’m not talking about funky coffee machines or Apple’s venerable portable juke-box I’m talking about the collection of sites, communities, blogs and forums that I derive the vast majority of my information from. I’ve coined/nicked the term from it’s common use to define a social group of cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins, etc.). As we trust traditional marketing less and less we are turning not just to anywhere on the web but places that we trust. So “who do you trust?” becomes the question and for me that’s an odd mix of well-known places (Wikipedia, sort of. Google, comprehensive. BBC, news…..etc). I recently changed my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K800) and wanted something more featured and useful for work so I was heading down the PDA route and decided to ask on the Internet and where did I ask….a Lotus forum of all places! They are pretty geeky and gadget-focussed on there and only have a high percentage of computer people so it seemed to me to be the natural place to ask. I also knew them and many of them I trust so why not ask there? I could have gone to a mobile phone forum but I would have had to learn about the people, the politics and the background and this decision was, put simply, not such a big deal. If I was going to have Laser Eye Surgery then I would spend ages getting to know the forums and researching but a phone is a phone is a phone.

So this got me to thinking about the places I go and I called *it* my pod - my home - my buddies. It’s the place I go first when I want to find something out. I like my pod and I’m eager to spread the word about it, I make recommendations to friends about stuff I learn in it and it also fulfils a certain community need. If I had to write down what i wanted in my pod then I would find the following:

1. Somewhere to the learn stuff about my interests, the things I am an expert in
2. A place to go to ask my idiot questions
3. An authoritative information repository
4. A place to rant, rave and generally let off steam
5. A safe place for my work ideas, separate from the places above
6. Where I prefer to buy stuff

No doubt there are many others but if I looked at the vast majority of my web activity using the Pareto principle then I would find a remarkably small number of web-sites and people. My real pod is actually quite small.

The New Media world finally shows that it has lost the plot by the great and mighty Nielsen deciding somewhat belatedly that page views are now not the way to measure sites and the way to measure them is by time spent on the site. What is going on?

I think, aside from the obvious mistakes that time-based measurement causes we need to realise that the web is used for different things by different people. Comparing Google’s page-view/time connected metric against, say, Facebook is just plain wrong - it’s like comparing time spent in your car versus time spent in the office - it is completely unrelated.

What it did make me think about was the (sort of) obvious next step of putting a Google search onto Facebook. No ones really goes to Google with the aim of staying there, it is a transit place and in fact the better the answer means the quicker the journey starts (so a huge poke in the eye to Nielsen!).

Many of us now certain forums, communities and other such places as regular drop-in centres and it would be so convenient to integrate these together. I know some people would argue that the Google toolbar means you don’t need to do this but it would be a great chance for Facebook (and Google) to start to tailor the results to the search request based on what they (jointly?) know.