Published on June 6, 2011
in Ideas.
Today there are several things I’d purchase. For example, I’d buy an RWS air gun at the right price. I’m also looking for a natural gas barbecue. Preferably the small Weber Sumit, but others will do. I’m also looking for a built-in 36 inch counter depth refrigerator and an electric washer and dryer. I’d also buy a golf club cover that fit my driver, a blendtec blender, a pizza stone, two front car tires and a trip to Hawaii to relax after we get through Google Panda.
To find the physical goods, and since I’m very price sensitive, I use Craigslist RSS feeds (buying used saves a ton of money) that perform searches for the items I want. To have this work well, you have to know the brand at a minimum and it helps to have more details. When an item becomes available, it shows up in my RSS reader. The problem is I know that there are multiple brands of washers and dryers that I’d be happy with, but I just don’t know what they are, so I have one RSS search looking for Whirlpool Duet. I’d really like a Craigslist service that works like a massive retailer where you can do all the product research, but instead of buying it, you click notify me when one is for sale. That would make it easy to find multiple brands that I’d be happy with and save me the time. Until then, I’ll shop on Amazon and when I find an item I like, I’ll make the RSS feed on Craigslist and add it to my reader.
Published on June 3, 2011
in Ideas.
Over the last several years I’ve thought quite a bit about the signals a person makes online and how that relates to their online reputation. The way we think about reputation management is at the author level. HubPages uses HubScore that is on a 1 - 100 scale. 100 is the most trusted and 1 is untrusted. The higher the HubScore, the more internal promotion an author gets on HubPages.
We do it at the author level because it’s too difficult to determine the trust of any single document. I suspect Google Panda isn’t able to operate at the single document level either.
There are two main aspects to the HubPages author reputation system. One is related to the content that author creates. The other is related to how that author interacts with other people and documents. Think of it as a community score. These two scores flow back and forth and work very well as a directional guide.
+1 may be Google’s way into collecting data beyond the content that an author creates. This creates the basis for their community score. They’ll be able to develop trust signals based on who you +1 and who +1s your work. Before you +1 something it’s a good idea to be aware of how it may impact you. You probably don’t want to be giving out +1s for the hell of it, but instead giving really high quality content +1s only. If you do it this way, it could increase the value of your +1s.
I think it’s interesting to think about all the pieces of a person’s online reputation that can be calculated today. Facebook and Twitter certainly have some interesting data. Think about how Twitter might calculate reputation. Do you follow people on Twitter that you are genuinely interested in following, do you retweet information from other high quality users, do high quality users follow you. Conversely, do you follow people indiscriminately, are your followers low quality. These are key indicators.
Author reputation is already a big piece of the social space, I suspect it will be critical to SEO in the future as well. Use your +1s wisely.
