Will PubSub Sink Beneath The Waves?

Or is Wyman’s blogging from a sinking ship the last hope of saving a company he’s devoted a good portion of his life to, after realizing owning nearly 40 percent of it accounted for nearly nothing in the boardroom?

Excerpts from Wyman’s emotional post:

What does PubSub CEO Salim Ismail have to say about it? It would appear he’s going on a pilgrimage. Dated the same as Wyman’s post, from Ismail’s blog:

Bloggers have been sympathetic and critical of Wyman’s revelation. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington believes Wyman was wrong to publicly take shots at Ismail, especially when looking for potential buyers.

“Regardless of who’s right, Bob was wrong today,” wrote Arrington. “A founder should never try to solve problems by publicly attacking another founder. Who’s going to step in now and fund or buy the company with all of this incredibly immature drama being thrown about?”

News of PubSub’s struggles come as a surprise to many. In January, Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny predicted the death of rival blog and rss engine Feedster, which recently announced its plan to move into Asian markets. Feedster, too, had its share of internal political drama late last year, but executives at that company were extraordinarily tight-lipped about it.

But if one were in attendance at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago last year, it was rather apparent Wyman’s passion for his company as he verbally duked it out in public with former Feedster CTO and co-founder Scott Johnson (just a week before Johnson’s own dramatic episode).

As this drama plays out, it will be educational to see if public pleas for financing coupled with attacks on high-level executives can save the sinking ship that is currently PubSub, or if this was a classic PR blunder that will become a cautionary tale.

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I usually refuse to tell them, because it is about me and my tools and my skill set. It is not about making the industry better, but about pushing myself forward as the numero uno dude.

Oh, wait, that is not how I work. Damn. Well, if it was, I would totally beat down people. Totally.

Okay, really, I work with the interns here and try to teach them the best tools that I have found on monitoring the blogosphere. Why? So they have the skills here, so I can send them work to begin, and then when they go off to their career, they will be able to use some of the tools I taught them here, and then pass on the knowledge to other PR people. It’s all about learning.

So, what do I use to find appropriate blogs? Easy: Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub. Those three are great free tools to monitor and find information on blogs. Yes, they are not perfect, but they have been perfectly good tools to do what I need to do when finding and tracking and monitoring – they get the job done, for free.

And, there are other tools that I love to use, such as Biz360 and Buzzlogic. I got a demo of Buzzlogic, and think it is a great tool for PR and marketing folks to follow the conversation thread in blogs.

Because, that is what it is about – the conversation. The conversation can start anywhere – a bike messenger board, a low-readership blog, in the real world – and it can steamroll. That is the whole point with new media – that it is the conversation that starts, and can take a full whole new life on other blogs with trackbacks, which are easily monitored.

But, that is just half the conversation. The deeper conversations are taking place in comments, and beyond the ego-fulfillment to see if someone has responded to your comment, you want to be able to monitor comments merely to see what people are saying and because now too much happens within comments. And not much works well there so far.

So last night, I met up with Assaf Arkin who founded Co.mments. We had a long discussion on everything Web 2.0, dotcom boom and bust, surviving the bubble (and surviving the next bubble burst), and Co.mments.

And that is the interesting part. He tracks the conversations through the comments submitted through his service. Instead of looking at the full ginormous blogosphere, he is able to look at the conversations that his users are finding important. Think about that: he’s getting a magnifying glass view of the blogosphere, through the comments.

But beyond ego-tracking, the tool is a necessary tool for PR people. It’s in my bag of tricks, because it is not just enough to track blogs, but you need to track conversations. Well, baby steps for PR firms and clients – first let us at least track the conversation. Then we will get to the next step on tracking the conversations within the conversations.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

Drag this PubSub It link to your bookmarks bar to create subscriptions from highlighted text on a page. This version accomplishes the same end without opening a pop-up window. Last, but not least, use this LinkRank It bookmarklet to find the current LinkRank for any domain.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

But, part of the big problem – especially for PR people – is that it is not possible to track the conversations. And, let’s be honest – that is a big part of what blogging is really about: the comments and trackbacks that add to the conversation. The best way to do this so far – and what I have had to do with certain posts that I think can be detrimental to clients, or lead to something more – is to go back again and again.

From Robert Scoble comes news of coComment. After I read the post – damn, it only had 12 comments at the time – I signed up for the beta, and actually got one. It’s pretty cool, and an interesting service. You download the bookmarklet and then add it to your Firefox toolbar, and prior to commenting, you click on coComment and … voila, your comment becomes tracked, as does any other comments on that post, and you have one page to view your comments and other comments. It’s an all-in-one stop to view comments and conversations on blogs, without the original post. Stowe Boyd has already taken the time to break down the system step-by-step.

Now, this is not the first service I have seen for tracking comments – actually, Blogger has a tool that plugs into Firefox. To quote: Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.

I have that one also installed, and I ran into two problems: first, it was overwhelming and too much. Second, it’s not centralized. While it was a great way to track comments to my blog and on other blogs – and posts on the same issue – it was too much a pain. I think coComment is a better application for PR people … but you have to comment on the post to be able to start tracking. Often – well, almost always – there is no reason for me to be commenting on a post on a client, nor should a PR person entertaining such a thought (unless it’s to correct erroneous information). In that instance, the Blogger Web Comments might be a better tool – but it’s not centralized on one page, like coComment.

So, a mashup of the two might work best for PR folks, and help track the second part of the blogging conversation – the comments.

An interesting sidenote … as most people know, I strongly dislike (read hate) moderated comments and only use them when I have no control/choice on the platform. Well, I posted a comment using coComment on another blog … and while it does not show up on the blog, it does show up on coComment. Here’s an interesting twist: a blogger can moderate all he/she wants, but on coComment it shows up immediately; it’s going to start showing out some people quite quickly who try to control the conversation flow for their own purposes.

This, in itself, is going to be dangerous and become ugly for PR: the outing of comment moderators, which includes clients’ blog. If clients have a blog and do not let through comments … well, that is now a wasted effort and perhaps more detrimental than letting through a comment and answering it. Likely, most corporations are going to opt to just turn off all comments, thinking that is the best way to control and not track elsewhere.

Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

There was even a recent San Francisco Business Times article on the growing of PR firms in the Bay Area.

Steve Rubel picks up the post by Tom Forensky (sic), and makes it about SEO PR – search engine optimization public relations. That’s all good and fine, but it does not help tell a story, but rather is about cooking the results in Google and other search engines, such as the blog ones like Blogpulse, PubSub and Technorati. It’s a great way to make yourself into a top tier blogger, but hand someone enough rope …

But, it’s not about SEO, it’s never been about SEO, and it shouldn’t be about SEO. The reason PR is growing is because it is about the expanding media universe and how to reach that universe in a smart, strategic way, while at the same time reaching the older, more established yet shrinking media universe. It’s two sides of the same coin, where PR is best suited to do the work.

But, does that mean launching a blog? No, not necessarily. For Vespa, instead of blogging, a MySpace community would have made just as much sense, if not more – a social network for a social activity. When I think Vespa, I don’t think “let’s sit behind a computer and blog” but rather “let’s find others that also love to ride Vespas and meet up and take pictures and then post them to a something similar, like, oh, a social network.”

It means being smarter, thinking smarter, doing smarter PR that takes into account all various outposts, from MySpace to Blogs to audio and video Podcasts (I prefer Audioblog because Eric Rice rocks) to newspapers to radio to television. It’s covering the whole media universe from the shrinking to the expanding.

PR is growing because companies realize they need us, and need us to maneuver the new landscape. It is time for PR to shine, to own that 100 percent and not let advertising or marketing pervert blogs.

As an aside, every interview I did for the PR Face2Face series, I would go off the record, and would talk about the dot-com boom and bust. I would ask if PR as a whole learned anything – and the answer was always no, we had not learned anything. The boom in PR firms in the Bay speaks to that, I believe.

Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

You can see a sample here on the WCBSTV web site.

The local news sites now have a feature called TrackIt, powered by PubSub. TrackIt is described as “a matching service that tracks topics that matter to you, then notifies you when new content is created that matches your topics.” On story pages throughout the affiliate news sites CBS has sprinkled recommended topics that users can start tracking with a single click. These are added to the TrackIt area at the top-left of every page. They also can be delivered via RSS.

This is very useful stuff. In New York City, where I work, a transit strike is looming. Well, thanks to this new technology, I now have a feed to alert me whenever there’s news on this subject. Even better, users don’t need to know their RSS from their, um, well you get it. (Disclaimer – PubSub at one time was a CooperKatz client.)

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

“Bite me, Bob,” fired Johnson at the “Meet the Blog and Feed Search Engines” session after Wyman gave him a little grief for Feedster taking 8 seconds to retrieve results. Wyman’s PubSub engine takes 3 seconds-a statement coupled with some other choice words that Johnson called “an overreaching statement in arrogance.”

Wyman was adding to his braggadocios claims that PubSub was the fastest search engine out there because of the engine’s real-time information collection, logging some 3000 documents per minute.

“It takes [other search engines] four weeks to get around the full web,” said Wyman. “Imagine trying to find a red mustang for sale in New York on Google. Google’s not a good tool for that.”

To save you the trouble, here are Google’s results for that. Google Base, on the other hand is lacking in this department.

Another place Google is lacking, according to Wyman and Johnson, is the engine’s seeming inability to differentiate between news sites and blogs and splogs.

“Like pornography, I know a blog when I see one,” said Johnson touting the value of tagging for combating the problem. People, in his estimation, are much more difficult to fool than a robot.

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm for tagging. At an earlier session, though acknowledging that searchers were using tags, Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan said, “I largely loathe tagging. It’s a waste of time, a backward step.” Sullivan favors automated indexing over user-generated.

But to Feedster’s credit, the engine adds crawlers and ping servers to end-user submissions collecting data form news sites, blogs, podcasts, and feeds, among others on a newly redesigned site that launched last Friday.

For Johnson, tags have a special function in the search world.

“We’re trying to make it easier for people to get back to things they know they’ve seen, but can’t find it,” he said.

Rivalries between Johnson and Wyman aside, the pair had no problem criticizing the areas in which Google is lacking.

Though Google Product Manager Nathan Stoll said Google would be integrating Google News and Blog Search soon, it didn’t stall Wyman’s mutation of Blogspot into “Splogspot.”

After an audience member inquired about more stringent authentication for blogging to combat robotic blogs, Wyman and Johnson were singing the same tune.

“You’re talking to the wrong group,” said Wyman, at which point Johnson sprang up and pointed at Stoll.

“Talk to him,” said Johnson.

Cymfony, a reservoir for media analysis and marketing intelligence, announced the agreement with search engine PubSub today. Under the agreement, PubSub will provide targeted content for Cymfony Orchestra dashboard clients while developing industry and target segment analysis products.

Under the terms of the deal, Cymfony will license PubSub’s prospective search subscription services for use in Cymfony Orchestra, a market intelligence dashboard application that automatically monitors and analyzes mainstream media and consumer generated media under one converged Web-based service platform.

Cymfony clients will receive unlimited access to blogs and other non-traditional information sources via PubSub’s prospective search engine. These clients will be instantly notified as soon as the search terms they have subscribed to are mentioned on blogs and syndicated websites, delivering matching results in real-time.

The company says access to blog and nontraditional content helps marketers to make critical business decisions. Cymfony’s dashboard is intended to proved in-depth and dynamic insight into consumer preferences, employee’s concerns, competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and emerging threats to company reputation.

“PubSub’s service is a natural complement to Cymfony’s market intelligence and media analysis solutions,” said Andrew Bernstein, CEO of Cymfony. “PubSub’s technology will provide highly specific and timely information from blogs and other forms of consumer-generated media that will allow organizations to seize opportunities, create a competitive advantage or mitigate potential damaging situations before they become crises.”

The implication is that companies need to get involved in “the conversation” happening about them and their products or services.

In the years I’ve been reading blogs, I’ve heard sentiments like that over and over. While true, they are often not practical or “actionable” in corporate-speak. I’m starting to think of these notions as “blogger’s wisdom” because so many bloggers assume that they’re true, the implications are obvious, and the path into the future is a clear one.

I’m here to tell you that despite this blogger’s wisdom, we’re nowhere close to where we ought to be. Several years into this whole blogging thing, the technology and tools designed to facilitate this global conversation all suck.

Let’s see how!

It turns out that “getting involved” (i.e., posting a comment) is the easy part. Finding and subsequent monitoring of the conversations is far from easy. This manifests itself in three phases of the process that I’ll look at here in a top down fashion.

Broad Searches

To get a global sense of what people are saying about you, you can subscribe to a search on Technorati, Google Blog Search, Feedster, PubSub, IceRocket, etc. But what keywords do you choose? You’re subscribing to specific terms, not concepts. So if you choose the wrong ones, you end up with too much irrelevant info (and overload) or you miss important posts. This is easy for “yahoo” but harder for “windows” or “iraq.”

This assumes that the services you’re using have comprehensive and fresh indexes. I don’t believe that any of them have both. And that means you have to subscribe to all of them, wade thru the duplicates and spam, and identify those that are worth of actually clicking thru to read. That’s real work. Try it sometime.

Aggregators do a poor job of making this easy. The blog search “verticals” aren’t helpful either. They suffer from any number of real or perceived problems: slow and unstable (Technorati), incomplete (Google), contain lame advertising (Feedster), or are impossible for normal people to understand (PubSub).

Subscribing to Topical Blogs

If you work at Apple Computer, you’d obviously want to subscribe to as many of the Apple related blogs that you can find-the ones that write about Apple on a regular basis. But you need to find them (see previous phase). Once you do, you need to read them regularly. You’ll probably start by bookmarking them and trying to remember to read them all on a daily basis. In doing so, you also have to remember what’s new and what’s not.

Eventually you’ll have more than 20 or 30, get yourself an aggregator, and have to figure out that clicking on that stupid orange icon doesn’t do anything useful. Luckily RSS auto-discovery seems to be far more common that it was a few years ago. But the subscription model is still fundamentally broken. If the “Add to My Yahoo!” button didn’t exist, I’m sure tens of thousands of people wouldn’t have a way to track their favorite sites.

Most aggregators make it so easy to subscribe (once you figure out how) that self-inflicted overload soon follows. You find yourself spending far too much time trying to “unbold” the folders of news on your desktop. The aggregator does little to help manage the flow of information, show you what really matters to you, and hide the stuff that’s not important.

Comment Tracking

It took me a while to figure this out, but every aggregator I’ve seen has completely fails to make it easy to stay engaged in a discussion taking place in comments on one or more blog posts. I typically comment on a blog post and never remember to go back to see if anyone else commented on what I said. That’s not much of a “conversation,” is it?

Blogginng software isn’t very helpful in this respect either. Few blogs offers RSS feeds for the comments on a given post. And even if they do, aggregators don’t make it easy to manage those subscriptions (like automatically unsubscribing from them when they conversation dies off). Some blogs offer the option of getting an email alert when someone posts a comment on a discussion you’re interested in. But they don’t handle trackback or pingback “comments” at all, so you’re not seeing the whole conversation.

So comment tracking/monitoring ends up as a very manual process full of repeat visits, which means it’s very, very hard to scale.

Summary

The promise of the blogosphere is a loosely connected global network of conversations with an incredibly low barrier to entry. The reality is that the tools are still far too immature for the current scale of this growing network. Worse yet, most aggregators are designed to mimic e-mail or usenet news clients rather than embracing the highly connected nature of blog posts and comments, not the mention the typically short “decay” periods associated with the discussion around most posts.

What should we do?

Reader Comments…

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

Monitoring 16 million daily web feeds, the LinkRanks system scores those links based on the link source, the age of the link, and the number of links created to that site, and bases the final rank on average scores over the previous month.

“Unlike other ranking systems, PubSub LinkRanks does more than just show you which sites are influential today, we also show which sites have had influence over the last 15 and 30 days. This multi-period ranking approach is something quite new and we’re very pleased with the insight it provides,” said Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub Concepts, Inc.

Bloggers are given a key to the blog city with the ability to access “virtually all” of the raw data, provided as Atom feeds, XML-based elements, and in tabular and graphical format, that PubSub collects to create its rankings. Sites are given a numeric order as well as a percentile score, i.e., “Top 1%.”

Wyman hopes the continual updating process creates a fresh and accurate view of the current Blogosphere.

“In the exceptionally dynamic world of blogging, it doesn’t make sense to have rankings that are only updated weekly, monthly, or yearly,” said Wyman. “Bloggers want to know who has the popular voice right now – not last month. This is why we’ve decided to provide fresh daily, 15-day, and 30-day LinkRanks.”

The information may be especially useful to advertisers and sponsors looking for popular, highly targeted blogs. In the future, PubSub plans to divide blogs by category, like the recently launched “Fashionable Blogs,” cataloguing the buzz among fashion bloggers.

“PubSub LinkRanks is an essential tool for people looking for an accurate way to measure how well their messages are propagating over time, or for companies looking to keep a pulse on their standing in the market,” added Wyman.

To illustrate the new system, the company also published the LinkRanks 1000 yesterday, listing the most consistently influential sites that publish feeds, based on LinkRank scores over the past 30 days.