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The power of communities

As some of you may know, our team at Advizo is furiously working on a new service that lets people get advice from the best community out there. In this post I wanted to provide a little of the context for why we started on this project.

Often times, people don't want a Wikipedia page or some other static content that describes a solution. They really want advice that they can personalize and interact with. In other words, people want other people to empathize and support them. It ranges from finding a community of T-Bone Burnett fans to discuss his latest productions or to finding medical community of fellow disease sufferers that helps you understand your medical condition better. Information is not enough - we get bombarded by it by the nanosecond. What we need is some way to humanize it so we can relate to it and make it ours.

Here's a great personal example of this: we were perusing AskMeHelpDesk.com (which by the way I manage), and came across a question posted by someone looking for good food ideas for someone on a low budget. However, looking at this discussion about good recipes to help this individual, we came across a post that had a mole recipe. Within the context of this discussion, this recipe stood out so we decided to try it later in the week (tasty recipe!). Now, we have several cookbooks at home, some of them with mole recipes but neither my wife nor I have ever made mole. Why did we suddenly get the inspiration? Here's my theory: while having the authoritative recipe books are great, getting it in context from a fellow human makes the same recipe suddenly more meaningful, accessible and real. This is the true power of communities - a place where information is transformed into personalized knowledge and advice by virtue of the connecting that knowledge with the person delivering it.

Yes, maybe the messenger is as important as the message.

Dealing with the Google change

The great thing about this Google change is that it's making us clean up a lot of stuff on our side that we simply got complacent about.  Well, thanks to Google, we are engaging in some major spring cleaning.  Here's what we are doing:
1) Revisiting our page structure and making sure it reads well from a crawler perspective.
2) Removing any weird and unused html (mostly focused on links) that might be distracting the crawler
3) Removing old threads that don't have any purpose
4) Making sure each page has good link structure - links point to meaningful things rather than just linking because it might provide the nth possible way for a user to access the same content in the nth manner
5) Cleaning up any meta-tag information that might be redundant or otherwise low-value

Our todo-list is evolving but this is what we are starting with.  There is a great article written by Vanessa Fox (former Googler) that talks about the Panda Update (aka Google Algo Change).
http://searchengineland.com/your-sites-traffic-has-plummeted-since-googles-farmerpanda-update-now-what-66769.  Check it out.

Curiosity - a necessary condition for hiring

With all the debate about education, I thought there should be some understanding of what we as employers expect from that endeavor.  I believe our current definition of education is bogged down by our relentless focus on testing and "accountability."  But what about the education that teaches you to break new ground and explore areas that do not have clearly marked goals and boundaries?  When do we expose our students to find problems that don't already exist and attempt to solve them.  They say that necessity is the mother and we simply are not creating the need or desire on our students for them to invent, innovate and explore.

And while I am fortunate to have a great team of explorers and innovators that I continuously learn from, the pain to assemble this team was more than I had imagined.  So I end this note with a word of caution and advice to fellow entrepreneurs who are building their teams - hire not by looking at grades and good schools.  Hire instead for the candidates curiosity and their faith in themselves that they can satisfy that thirst.  Curiosity creates need which then drives inventions. 

A candidate can demonstrate their curiosity can be found in extra-curricular activities, breadth of knowledge or awareness, and, yes, academic achievement.  I am not suggesting we forgo academic achievers for hobbyists, but I think academic excellence is not a sufficient enough condition in an entrepreneurial setting.

So what's the fuss?

Since this mess with Google algo change, I have been aggressively reaching out to anyone that might be interested in understanding how this change has impacted the Internet.  It isn't just about Google improving their algorithm for the benefit of users.  I believe there is something much more at play here.  Something that I believe Jessica Guynn (LA Times) gets based on my conversation with her. Counter that with a response from David Card (GigaOm Research) with the response that Google continually changes their search algorithms and therefore there is nothing new here - his advice: just move on...

What am I upset about?  That Google is venturing into the business of deciding content based on whether it has authoritative value.  Here is a direct quote from the interview by Wired.com of Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts:

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?

Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

Since when does Google become a magazine publisher or the design reviewer?  I understand that market pressures will dictate whether users really want this or not.  And I think Google themselves will realize that they have gone a little too far on this one.  But in the meantime, the collateral damage is disconcerting.

And more importantly, I sincerely want Google to succeed!   I believe they do a darn good job of search and I will continue to use them despite my belief that this particular change was wrong.  

It simply boils down to the belief that no company the size of Google should have such unassailable control of content on the Internet.  Google provides an essential service to people and needs to behave in such a manner.  It is akin to saying that the government will stop welfare programs overnight because there is a problem with the welfare program.

So, how do I think Google could have done better?   Do this incrementally - slowly providing a managed and safe system to transition to this new and improved way.  I expect such a dramatic change to be done over the course of weeks - not overnight.  Furthermore, I would ask Google to question Singhal and Cutts's assumption that Google should be in the content editing business.  I understand that there is an implicit editorializing that is necessary when determining which results to present and in which order.  However, that form of editorializing was based on relevancy - not content quality - a very different metric.  Relevancy can be determined by algorithms, but quality needs to be determined by the users.  If we as users continue to offload our ability to judge quality, that's a problem we as individual Internet consumers must live with. 

But, please, let's not let Google or some other entity have full authority on telling us what to think and believe.  Yes, I think this borders on free speech issues, but I better get off the soapbox before I do myself in.

Making ideas happen

I've been reading Scott Belsky's book "Making Ideas Happen" and while I find it easy to read, there are many things in there that require a lot of work!  If only the act of reading a book can translate directly into the actions described therein... 

Some key points that I've come across that I like a lot - making everything a project - small or big.  That's really an interesting concept and does sound similar to something I heard when I went to Franklin Covey seminar (yes, I did do this in full earnestness).  There the idea was to put the task down with a deadline.  Not exactly the same, I understand, but really similar to philosophy.

Making things happen requires making them real, tangible and doable.  By describing ideas and concepts into projects, and thereby making them discrete tasks has the psychological effect of making these ideas doable.

Interestingly enough this concept has parallels in software engineering.  Make your code small and reusable and discrete.  The concepts of making things discrete seems to be a theme that runs across multiple domains! 

Google Oh Google

Google has in many ways the best of intentions and often does right by its users.  I value their leadership in so many respects. But their recent algorithm change has gotten some folks (myself included, and I believe Google themselves) into some murky waters.  While the precept of increasing quality should be a mandate for any self-respecting search engine, I believe the objective of picking winners and losers in terms of accuracy seems a little overreaching.  Will Google be the editor and reviewer of accuracy from now on?  We accept and appreciate that Google gives us search results that provide the most relevant links to what users are looking for.  They use a combination of algorithms and statistical tools to extrapolate what the user wants.  That is fine and good and what we love about them.  With this new change, they seem to think that "what users want" is someone else (namely Google) to tell them what is correct information.  If we are to live up to the premise of net neutrality and democratization, Google as the leader in the search space, cannot play favorites and pick winners.  Effectively this devalues user-generated content and places greater value to authoritative and editorialized content.  Their choice to pick eHow.com over Answerbag.com (both Demand Media sites) shows that they are more concerned about giving users "authoritative" information than user generated information - and yes, UGC is prone to be wrong and sometimes low quality.  But, is that what, we as search consumers, want? 

I understand that I am biased - I manage a Q&A site (askmehelpdesk.com) that has 99% user generated content and has and will continue to occasionally fail in terms of content quality.  But does it help a lot of users in a variety of topics (plumbing, relationships, taxes, cars & trucks, etc.).  Our experts and active members care about their fellow members and take the time and effort to give the best answer possible.  But yes, once in a while (I estimate < 20%) we have a "low quality" question with a "low quality" answer.  Heck - the site is a community site and some of the community members don't take the time to spell or grammar check.  In addition, there is a opinion and conjecture.  But that's what we do - we are not trying to be the encyclopedia.  And Google just dinged us in a bad way.  We think its unfair because we do not engage in plagiarism or any manner of content farming.  So I have to believe that our primary sin is enabling and fostering user content and trying to make money from Adsense.  This is fundamentally wrong and unfair to our community.  And on behalf of fellow Q&A sites and communities, I implore Google to do a better job and get itself out of the correctness game!!

And, oh dear Google, you might want to fix this - See the 5th result on this page....you can try:
http://www.google.com/search?q=turbotax+login&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Welcome

One of my resolutions for this year was to get serious about writing a blog.  There is a lot going on and things that I'm involved in that I'm finally in need of a place to talk about them.  In some blogs I'm almost helping myself get organized and  at other times it will serve as documentation.  While I will most often be writing about Advizo and my work there, I will occasionally pull in things outside of that realm.  So, I hope, dear Reader, that you will get a smidgen of value in the form of an insight, a new perspective or just a different opinion.