LazyWeb Theory.
[ Posted by Dan on January 09, 2003 | 4 Comments ]

I had my doubts about the signal to noise ratio that LazyWeb might produce, and Clay Shirky had a few opinions he wanted to share with me (seemingly in advance of this article at O'Reilly). I want to share all of that with you (thanks to Clay for permission to reprint) in its original form...

From: Clay Shirky
Date: Fri Jan 3, 2003  9:43:43  AM US/Eastern
To: Daniel Kapusta
Subject: LazyWeb

It's unlikely that the LazyWeb.org pings will be numerous and random,
because it raises a threshold of actually using the Trackback URL, and even
tiny thresholds have a huge filtering effect.

And LazyWeb is only random if you think of it as a site -- its real
usefulness is as an RSS feed, so that third-parties can, say, subscribe only
to those posts that say "Chat" or "Wiki" in the title, thus pulling
something useful out of the general feed.

-clay




------------------------------------------------




From: Daniel Kapusta 
Date: Fri Jan 3, 2003  10:06:12  AM US/Eastern
To: Clay Shirky
Subject: Re: LazyWeb


On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 09:43  AM, Clay Shirky wrote:

> It's unlikely that the LazyWeb.org pings will be numerous and random,
> because it raises a threshold of actually using the Trackback URL, and 
> even
> tiny thresholds have a huge filtering effect.


I suppose you are right about the threshold part, but a general 
resource will be more general. The only threshold that exists is 'those 
who can send trackback pings and are motivated to do that.' That 
threshold does little in terms off content likeness since bloggers are 
in general motivated, and there are many MT based blogs. Within the 
scope of the interests of the trackback pinging public, randomness 
indeed exists.

But, if I were successful at getting 10 or 20 other like minded 
bloggers to ping my site on a regular basi, would that threshold be any 
more valuable? I think so. But maybe not, and there's only one way to 
figure that out.



> And LazyWeb is only random if you think of it as a site -- its real
> usefulness is as an RSS feed, so that third-parties can, say, 
> subscribe only
> to those posts that say "Chat" or "Wiki" in the title, thus pulling
> something useful out of the general feed.


I don't think that is necessarily true. I could post a note on my site 
saying that I had a chat with my mom about her visit to my home this 
weekend and ping lazyweb. That's useless to the blogosphere, but I 
wasn't prevented/filtered from shoving my minutia in front of the 
blogeratti who are interested in 'chat.'

Don't get me wrong though, I like the lazyweb idea enough to have come 
up with it on my own. It's already better than the weblogs.com recently 
updated list (which really is useless imho).

Dan

ps, do mind if I post this as a comment to my post? It's useful 
discussion.




------------------------------------------------




From: Clay Shirky
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2003  9:10:18  PM US/Eastern
To: Daniel Kapusta 
Subject: Re: LazyWeb

> I suppose you are right about the threshold part, but a general
> resource will be more general. The only threshold that exists is 'those
> who can send trackback pings and are motivated to do that.' That
> threshold does little in terms off content likeness since bloggers are
> in general motivated, and there are many MT based blogs. Within the
> scope of the interests of the trackback pinging public, randomness
> indeed exists.

Sure, but the randomness is constrained by payback. The karmic value 
of pinging something is low, unless there is some response. Of course, 
if LW takes off, then there will be spam problems, where free riders 
identify a high-quality message stream and attempt to steal its 
reputation, but that’s a problem of success, not failure.

> But, if I were successful at getting 10 or 20 other like minded
> bloggers to ping my site on a regular basi, would that threshold be any
> more valuable? I think so. But maybe not, and there's only one way to
> figure that out.

IN many cases, it will be more valuable, because in general you 
will characterize problems of interest to your readers.

But you don't have to give that value up to use the LW as well. The 
two questions are "Is the additional value of pinging the LazyWeb 
non-zero?" and "is the additional value high enough to be worth the 
time it takes you to add the trackback URL?" My guess at the answers 
right now are "Probably, and It depends."

> ps, do mind if I post this as a comment to my post? It's useful
> discussion.

Not at all, post away.

-clay




------------------------------------------------




From: Daniel Kapusta 
Date: Tue Jan 7, 2003  9:51:59  AM US/Eastern
To: Clay Shirky
Subject: Re: LazyWeb


On Monday, January 6, 2003, at 09:10  PM, Clay Shirky wrote:

>> But, if I were successful at getting 10 or 20 other like minded
>> bloggers to ping my site on a regular basi, would that threshold be 
>> any
>> more valuable? I think so. But maybe not, and there's only one way to
>> figure that out.
>
> IN many cases, it will be more valuable, because in general you will
> characterize problems of interest to your readers.
>
> But you don't have to give that value up to use the LW as well. The two
> questions are "Is the additional value of pinging the LazyWeb 
> non-zero?" and
> "is the additional value high enough to be worth the time it takes you 
> to
> add the trackback URL?" My guess at the answers right now are 
> "Probably, and
> It depends."


I would guess 'yes and yes' due to the ultra low cost of a 
cut-and-paste. That leads me to believe many people will ping LW (if 
they are aware of it, which is another filter of sorts) leading to a 
higher noise ratio. Part of the basis for the idea is that LW doesn't 
have a well defined semantic basis (imho). It's new. It's open to 
anyone for any reason, at any time.

I suppose I'd like to see Dublin Core metadata sent as part of the TB 
ping, and then be able to scrape the LW rdf feed for things I am 
interested in, but I read the site every day now anyway.

Cheers

Dan

 

		If someone were interested in receiving as many visitors as possible, perhaps they would recode their submit story page so that all stories automatically submitted to multiple sites? And in time, perhaps the developers, seeing this discussed, would code it in to the administrative configuration "check here to send each post to LazyWeb," "check here to send each post to InMyExperience," etc. Just a thought. -Posted by JC on January 9, 2003 09:12 AM

		Heh, well, if the Trott's decided to name this site in a future rev of MT, I'd be for it :) But there's no telling how long this site might be around, so some sort of 'ping these urls on every post' functionality might do well. They already have similar functionality in the blog config for sending 'recently updated' pings to weblogs.com, etc. Also, in the Category configs, you can enter a TB ping url to be hit everytime you post something in that category. The callenge for me will be motivating people to enter my public TB url in their configs. We'll see. -Posted by Dan on January 9, 2003 09:25 AM

		Wow. I guess that I missed it when you originally mentioned the idea, but essientally what you're doing, is giving the regular readers of your site the ability to see when the other regulars have updated their page. That would actually be useful, because seemingly all of your readers have similar interests, hence more often than not the pings listed will be of interest. Very nice idea. :) -Posted by milbertus on January 9, 2003 05:27 PM

		Bingo! -Posted by Dan on January 9, 2003 07:49 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).