The folksonification of the web is creating new methods for sensemaking. Tag clouds are everywhere now. They originated as a categorization identifier or label. Now the tag cloud method is being used for full text analysis — where every word becomes a tag.

For instance, the image below shows Chirag Mehta’s method for parsing presidential addresses using tag clouds.

I played with this a few weeks ago. While it’s very creative I can’t parallel process it — meaning there are no remnants of the data when you scroll across the timeline. To be very useful at comparisons I need to be able to compare across the timeline beyond what ghosts in my mind’s eye as I scroll through. Regardless, it’s a very creative and clever way to use the tag cloud method.

I applaud the New York Times, whose graphics I often critique, continually pump out new ways to interact with “the news” and information. Below is a more artistic rather than analytic approach to looking at Bush’s State of the Union history:

When you allow users or consumers to add, change, create, delete, rate, and interact with your site, product, service, content, etc, you open the door to a host of new questions.

How much participation is enough?
Is there a spectrum/scale of the value of participation? Is it linear?
What are participant roles? Who is best suited for those roles? How do we support them?
How does participation correlate with profit? Is there proof of causal links?

This is just a start. The point is that the participatory nature of digitial communication will increasingly demand new valuation metrics. This is an undeveloped thought — but worthy to mull over. A very old post (Khoi Vinh’s interesting link archive system directed me there) from Bradley Horowitz sparked this line of questions.

Lots of interesting noise around the “size” of Second Life. And it’s bizzare that there is so much noise when the actual signals can be published at any time. The debate steams from the Shirky camp that believes Second Life doesn’t rate all the press it’s getting (due to the overinflated population/usage numbers) and the reaction of anyone who has a vested interest in Second Life defending its value (where value can diverge beyond the topic of size/usage).

I came across this from GigaGamez:

Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%— a percentage so low, it shocked me. (“[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.”) When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)— “12-15% and has remained steady over the last year… we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly changing content that people do come back to see. ”

The stats above are going to be the crux of some back of the napkin calculations I’ll throw out later (need to verify some data sources first). But there’s probably an easier quick litmus test on the hype factor — the concurrency data. How many people are online at a single time. Let’s assume the following are generally accurate (sourced from Linden’s feed once a minute) — (see graphs). Eyeballing it, it looks like 10-12k concurrent users is the average — with spikes up to 20,000 or so during peaks. If we go back to Shirky’s statements about marketers and press not asking the hard questions to parse out “cool story” versus “does it matter”, it seems to me that in terms of scale, this is a non-story. Especially when you look at this:

So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC! American Apparel! Adidas and Toyota!, etc.) count as news, since it’s not clear if this is just a gimmick, or if they’re actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars.

But even in the Gigagamez post, Wagner James Au admits that measured on scale alone, this isn’t so newsworthy.

So here’s my take:
Second Life, in itself, is never going to reach the mass adoption or generate the impact MySpace and YouTube have. The wild assumptions on Second Life adoption and growth will never materialize without dramatic changes — incremental improvement won’t do it.

However, Second Life is worth looking at, watching, and playing in. Even if you are a marketer. I think it’s definitely a Faint Signal on the Fringe — what is happening in terms of:

Design for user-generated content
Design for user-generated commerce
Community Design
Rights of digital content and creation
Rapid prototyping and immersive design
Government regulation of global virtual property and content
3D social application design
Etc

There are lots of newsworthy elements of Second Life… but in typical hype fashion, money, size, and sex sell.

Joel Greenberg is progressing towards something worth looking at. At first, I balked at the idea of looking at site traffic as a metric to define success of a marketing site versus a community site. I still do. I think the size of a community is a very small piece of its overall success. I also am still not convinced about the relability and validity of Alexa and other traffic measures (but that’s for another post). Finally, I think it’s an apple and oranges comparison between online communties and online marketing promotions.

Too many times marketers claim building a community is the goal of their marketing… especially recently in the online space. It’s a valid desire — to have a self-sustaining or growing community of brand advocates that constantly revitalize the sense of value of the products / services. Community is a lot like the hot button word “relationship” in marketing though. What the marketer wants out of the community and relationship is usually disconnected, or even at odds, with what the customer wants. I’m being shaped by Minksy’s aversion to “suitcase” words, and community and relationship are just that, especially in the marketing sense. Everyone says they want it… but no one is really sure what that means. And if you don’t know what it means, you can’t measure it (what it do you measure?) and you can’t design for it.

However, there are some interesting pieces here and no matter the limitations in the data used to derive the theories, they are interesting topics to think about. Greenberg basically compares site traffic over time to marketing sites and community sites and looks at the patterns. It started with a post about Second Life (and my chart reading is much more negative regarding it than his — not sure it’s just the holidays) that didn’t convice me. Then in his follow up post he starts to lay out more interesting examples. On one level, this isn’t much different then television exposure and wearout analysis. But it’s interesting when applied to the web.

Let’s assume these traffic patterns are correct. Now lets try to take the leap to ascribing value to them. Assume each “hit” is worth some dollar value to the marketer and are equal across the sites — a wild assumption, but bear with me. In the case of Subservient Chicken, there is a huge initial pulse of value (according to our assumptions) and then it fades away. In MySpace, it just keeps on building value — increasing returns.

There are many implications to this type of thinking. I’ll start with this one. Even with the assumptions above, you can’t compare Subservient Chicken to MySpace. Why? What is the unit of analysis? If we are at the community level, then Subservient Chicken is too discrete. You have to go higher up. What is a proxy for the community level of Burger King? Bk.com doesn’t cut if for me. I think this is the issue for marketers. Where are their communities? Is it a corporate web site? Do they create a community? Do they co-opt a space in Second Life or MySpace? I say it depends. What are you in the business of? If Burger King and other restaurants have a sense of community, it lives in the store first. So the fair unit of analysis between MySpace and Subservient Chicken really should be MySpace user traffic versus Burger King store traffic…

Just some a stream of thoughts here. But this line of thinking is worth delving into more.

Depends on what you mean by web and success… and who you ask. I’ll start to collect links here (and via del.icio.us), and host a roundup on the topic when I get enough meat to add something new to the discussion. Godin offered up the two below. They both talk about metrics changing because of the underlying technology or construction of online information. And oddly enough, the discussion orients around ad-buying terminology of impressions, inventory, etc. I say oddly, because there is so much room to change the model. I know it will take more time for the industry to change, but there is a chance for those on the front of the bow to really break some ice on the whole business of digital advertising…

From Jeff Jarvis:

I say the change we’re facing is much bigger than just the obsolescence of the pageview, much more fundamental: Size doesn’t matter. Relevance, credibility, and attraction do.

Theoretically, I’m in total agreement. But pageview is easy to understand… and though becoming harder to measure, how would one measure relevance, credibility, and attraction? The closer you get to actually measuring value, the harder it becomes to define the elements of that value. In my day job this is what I do. It’s not easy… and most of the time you end up constructing new ways of parsing and processing the information because there is a chasm between the standard metrics and real value.

From Fred Wilson:

But there are changes afoot in the Internet measurement business. Everyone is recognizing that pageviews matter less now. Ajax and other more modern web technologies allow for new ads to be displayed without a page reload. Ad views can grow even as page views decline.

More to come on this theme. Everything is related here… advertising as a product or service means you need different metrics. When you change from exposure to value-creation, most of the old language, processes, research, and measurement tools are no longer relevant.

The New York Times is highlighting an interactive graphic… however, it’s actually thin and gratuitous. The journalistic value can be called into question.

However, this interactive graphic (the above is just a static screen grab–please click through), in the same section, could be very powerful. I’m qualifying it because the variables that are tied to the timeline are rather consistent in relationship. This, of course, says something. It isn’t a limitiation of the design of the graphic however. I think it is a powerful sensemaking tool — it just may be better applied to a different set of data.

Part of me resists using an interactive graphic with this subject matter as a critique of information design — but another part of me says there are very few things more important to make sense of than life and death. So I’ll critique as objectively as possible based on power of the interactive to help make sense of the situation, rather than to editorialize or evangelize beliefs about the war.

Some thoughts on how to make it better:
1. Allow filtering the data through variables. I’m not sure there are enough meaningful variables to do so. Race and age, while important, don’t really help make sense of the what is happening. They are driven by the composition of the force rather than anything else. It is an all-volunteer military… which doesn’t experience the same demographic skews caused by a draft (where conventional wisdom says lower socio-economic groups are disproportionately represented). There is an interesting Army/Marine Corps composition split (which teeters from Army towards Marine Corps and then back) which may hint at deployment timings — but also, when taken in context of the size of force, the Marine Corps probably over-indexed heavily at those peaks. However, on the whole, even with the filtering option I recommend, if no new variables are added, the explanatory power of the graphic doesn’t go up much.

2. Allow for density views rather than just scale. As above, just looking at raw numbers doesn’t tell the whole story. Information density must be considered when mapping populations/geographic distributions. The Anbar province has the largest magnitude of deaths over time, shifting moreso in the recent past. However, what would the circles look like if they represented deaths per population (of the province) or deaths per size (of the province)? What is the relative risk of the area?

3. Provide the complementary data. What is missing from this graphic are the insurgent and civilian data. I’m pretty sure the Times could get their hands on estimates of that data as well. Those variables add more information, more signal, and actually less noise. The data now, since there are so few “views” and “slices”, over emphasize confounders… persuading the casual viewer to form an innaccurate assessment of the situation.

Just a few quick thoughts. I have enjoyed some of the Times interactive news items in the past. The burden for them now, and in the future, however, is to resist USA Todaying into entertaino-graphics or editorializing graphics. The best they can do is objectively help make sense of the information — and this is the hardest type of design — eliminating your self from everything and shaping sense, but not dictating it.

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