“Conferences suck…” is Jeff‘s opening slide at his opening keynote at Syndicate. He’s going to let us talk about what we want to talk about. But for this we have to figure out what we mean by “syndication.” He gives us three choices. Syndication is about: 1. Media; 2. Media; 3. 3. Technology. We choose money and syndication as our topic.

Jeff kicks it off. RSS is a great way of distributing stuff, he says. To monetize RSS, we need metrics: How many views, how many users, etc. Bittorrent has put a wrapper on torrents so they can be sold. Can we put a similar wrapper on feeds, Jeff asks. He also talks about an open source ad marketplace for blogs that he wrote about in AdAge last week. Advertisers want to advertise through blogs. For this we need metrics and a marketplace. Next he wonders whether there’s a place for paid, subscription-based feeds. Finally, he raises the issue of DRM.

Person: People steal my feed. they put it on their sites. So I put ads in my feed.

Person: If you have an open source ad marketplace and open source metadata, then how about open source algorithms for filtering what we get?

BlogPulse: What kind of data about bloggers do you need? Content? Keywords? Traffic? etc.

Eric Norlin: Marketers don’t know what they want because their model is that they capture something about the users and then blast something to them when they don’t want it.

Jeff: We could look at who initiates conversations. The demographics of the authors matter…

Doc: You can’t measure everything that matters.

Me: The static maps of links that establish “authority” miss the flow of ideas and conversation that may start on low-ranked sites, flow across, up and back. The static maps overemphasize that type of authority.

Jeff: Flickr’s “interestingness” works without dealing with popularity (because the nudies would always be the most popular). Instead Flickr looks at the social relationships — especially when people look at photos outside of their social group. Not the wisdom of the crowd but the taste of the crowd.

Scott Abel: We should be selective about what we syndicate. I want to make people come to my site where the ads are. I’ll syndicate some little things.

Most people in the room provide full text. The guy from USA Today only provides headlines. People in the audience don’t like this. USA Today is looking at how to provide full text with ads.

Jeff: We want to be able to subscribe to a tag within a blog. jeff talks about Edgeio which lets you tag an item for sale, or a job posting, etc., so you can have a decentralized marketplace. Likewise, we should be able to find restaurant reviews by looking for items tagged “restaurant,” “mexico” and “nyc.” [How structured does this metadata need to be? Microformats? Semantic Web?]

Person: More metadata on feeds?

Person: Is there info about how many people read feeds only in their aggregator.

Feedburner1: There’s no material difference in clickthroughs for full and partial feeds. [Surprising!]

Feedburner2: We provide data on subscribers, views, clicks and a measure of reads.

Jeff: I wish my aggregator would tell me which ones I’m not reading. Also, I’d like temporary feeds: A World Cup feed that dies.

Jeff: I use tags for internal navigation. Others use them to indicate for others what a post is about. I want both. And then I’ll be over-tagged like I’m over-bookmarked.

Person: Technorati tags suck. They don’t show up.

Dave Sifry (technorati): Sorry! We’re not perfect. I’m sorry we missed your tags. Talk with me later…

Person: Why are the same blogs featured on Technorati all the time?

Sifry: If you claim your blog and put in your photo, you should be featured…And about tag spam: Spam only becomes a problem when it has no accountability. One person’s Spam is another person’s dinner. The key question is whether it’s accountable. [No, the question is whether it shows up when I don’t want to see it.]

Jeff: How about the machine-generated spam blogs?

Sifry: That’s solvable. We’ll talk…

Person: There’s not enough metadata. Dave Winer doesn’t even put titles on his posts, so why do you think people will put tags on their posts?

Person: Technorati doesn’t fit in with Delicious, etc…

Me: We need an open source tag namespace innstead of having to use the Technorati url…

Sifry: You are wrong, sir! You can use any namespace you want. [Yay!]

[That is: Instead of <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/sampletag” rel=”tag”> sampletag</a> You can use whatever url you want, e.g., <a href=”http://www.somewhere.com/sampletag” rel=”tag”> sampletag</a>]

Person: Technorati didn’t pick up any of my tags…

Sifry: I’ll be right there…

[Tags: syndicate jeff_jarvis tags technorati]

Categories: Uncategorized dw