conversational search Archive

When Pownce announced their "all sales final" closing sale, I wondered if the service would have fared better if Internet celebrity co-founder Kevin Rose had pushed the service instead of pushing everyone into their competitor, Twitter. Today I have the same question about LeWeb organizer and Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur.

I interviewed Loic back in September and since then he’s fired a bunch of the Seesmic staff. I think there have been a lot of questions about how Seesmic will generate real revenue and growth past their loyal users, like Freida, who clearly make up the majority of the videos on Seesmic.

LeWeb is a major tech conference currently going on in Paris, France. The conference costs 1500 Euros for the two-days of discussions and startup presentations. You can check out the instant conversations about LeWeb via Twitter Search (leweb and leweb08).

My beef is that Loic selected Ustream to run live coverage of the conference. There is absolutely no reason that this conference needed to be broadcast live. First, if I paid $2,000 to attend, I’d be pissed that my sister could sit at home and watch it for free. Second and even more importantly, Loic runs a video platform! These two days could have provided an amazing opportunity for Seesmic to gain trial users, awareness, and general system usage.

Loic could have easily recorded each session, uploaded it to Seesmic and generated a masive amount of video discussion inside his platform — instead he "left the money on the table" by allowing the conversation to take place on Twitter. Certainly there would be conversation on Twitter anyway, but Seesmic could have offered a way for people to interact via video about the conference from anywhere in the world. Speakers could have been required to participate in the video conversation via Seesmic stations setup at LeWeb. Had he used Seesmic, the videos would have been available minutes after each session concluded. I understand that there are logistics issues to deal with regarding bandwidth and connections on Seesmic but there was plenty of time to handle these issues.

Loic missed a golden opportunity to introduce thousands of people (both in Paris and watching from home) to his video platform Seesmic. From what I can tell, there’s been nearly no conversation about LeWeb on Seesmic. Bottom line: If you don’t use your own system, it’s hard to get others to do so.

Search engine provider Viewzi has announced the public launch of their site search product today. Viewzi uses an interesting results page by providing the results in a layer on top of the current page.

Viewzi supports blog posts, videos via YouTube and Viddler and photos. They have different "views" based on the different content and the user’s selection. There’s a timeline view which is pretty neat and looks like the way Plurk works. I found that the views took a while to load – I’d suggest they work on reducing the load times.

Site search seems to be pretty hot these days with a variety of companies in the space including Quintura, Lijit and Google. We currently use Google on our sites and have found it to provide more traffic and better results than the internal Drupal search engine. Viewzi appears to be injecting Google ads into the results on the video view — I wonder if that’s their entire monetization strategy.

Ali has a good overview of the site search feature as well.

Tomorrow at the Conversational Marketing Summit in NYC, ad network Federated Media (FM) will make two announcements: the launch of the Conversational Measurement Toolbox and that they will now represent hardware reviews and forums network AnandTech. Federated Media describes the toolbox as, "a suite of campaign measurement, planning and reporting tools offering marketers greater control and insight into their conversational marketing efforts." The company claims that this is a first-of-its-kind offering.

The system will suck data out of the analytics tools used by FM publishers and then aggregate the data back to the advertisers with a focus on conversational metrics. There’s also an API for developers to use who want to leverage the analytics that FM is collecting. No specific analytical categories have been provided yet. Once I get access to the system, I will provide a more in depth review.

Federated Media CEO John Battelle is also a board member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and will now sit on the social media measurement taskforce to ensure that the Conversational Measurement Toolbox work follows whatever the IAB pushes in terms of standards and guidelines.

Perhaps the development of this new measurement toolbox is where some of the new $50 million in VC funding has gone.

In other news, ultra popular, been around forever, hardware news, reviews and community forum site AnandTech has joined the FM publisher network. AnandTech reports 8 million monthly users with over 55 million pageviews. I guess this is a good replacement for Ars Technica which has left FM after being acquired by Conde Nast.

Summize presented a demo of their conversational search engine last night at the NY Tech Meetup. They also announced the launch of local search. The local search allows you to select a location (i.e. New York, Berlin, etc.) and a distance (i.e. 10 miles) and Summize will present only the conversations related to your search in that location.

The conversational search works with Twitter and can also provide an on-the-fly translation service so you can check out the latest conversations in other countries (like the China earthquake).

One note, the majority of conversations between friends still occurs on private services including AIM, Google Chat, Skype, etc. These services are not indexed by Summize.

Lastly, Summize offers an API which many of the most popular Twitter applications are using.