Share / SML Network Theory

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
—Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Habit 5

”Seek first to share, then to be shared.
Seek first to like, then to be liked.”
—SML Network Theory

I know a lot of people (artists in particular) who are completely dumbfounded by social media. Following the advice of their friends, they signed up on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, on Flickr, on LinkedIn, because their friends told them that if they sign onto one of these networks they will gain exposure.

Yes, you will. But you need to participate. Simply creating a Facebook account and a page and not participate in anything is much like appearing on an island in the middle of nowhere and expect travel tours to flight over as a travel destination.

If you talk about other people and be interested in other people’s work, people will be curious about your work in return. The same philosophy opined by Covey is the same in social media.

But be sincere about it — often I see companies / brands / people liking all kinds of random things in hopes of gaining followers. You won’t go far. You might be able to fool the dumb search bots in hopes of gaining linkbacks via SEO but ultimately humans are the ones who care about your content. If you want people to care, then care about others. Never follow accounts in hopes of being followed back.

That tactic is seen all over Twitter. I see it all the time—they follow you, as soon as you follow, they send you a direct message as spam and then unfollow immediately—it was so annoying that I have stopped seeing who is following me anymore. I blame that unhealthy number-game on Twitter to the promptly displayed stats. And is the number 1 reason why I suggest companies to not actively display stats visibly on people’s profile as it creates an unhealthy ecology.

In the hayday of social media analytics, the follower/following ratio is often used to calculate one’s influence and thus popularity. If being well-read is a sign of intellectual maturity, then one must question how logical that influence analytics data really is. Thus you will see that better analytics engines such as Klout calculates influence based on engagement, and I think that kind of calculation is much more accurate.

/ SML.20121230.PHIL
/ #smlphil #ccby #seeminglee #smluniverse #smlnet #smlopinions #smlanalytics
/ #network #theory #socialmedia #facebook #likes #twitter #flickr #LinkedIn #Klout #philosophy #marketing #strategy #opinions #analysis #analytics #influence #engagement
/ #HongKong #HK #China #CN

Synergy: an unfocused approach to learning about oneself

A lot of people prefer web destinations to have a very specific focus, but it appears that I am inherently an unfocused person, and therefore my web destinations also are rather unfocused.

Most Interesting SML Flickr: Synergy in data analytics: art + design + hacks + inspiration + photography / 2009-09-20 / SML Data



Available Sizes
+ Medium (500 x 465 JPEG)
+ Large (1000 x 953 JPEG)
+ Original (4974 x 4629 PNG)

Screenshots captured by SML Bio Bot on 2009-09-20
+ 500 Most Interesting SML Flickr: Page 1
+ 500 Most Interesting SML Flickr: Page 2
+ 500 Most Interesting SML Flickr: Page 3
+ 500 Most Interesting SML Flickr: Page 4
+ 500 Most Interesting SML Flickr: Page 5


In the beginning, SML Pro Blog was just the SML Blog, and it contains pretty much everything that my life contains, until I am getting some negative feedbacks from professional colleagues who wish not have their photos appear next to blog posts relating to my gay activities, which is when SML Gay Blog was born. Then some folks who got really annoyed with my massive photography output, and so SML Photo Blog was born. Then after a while I started to have so many blogs that I cannot keep track on, so I have now reconsolidated the SML Thank You and SML Notebook back into this blog, because it soon became *very* challenging to manage them all.

Conversely, I take a very-me approach when it comes to content on Flickr. I post pretty much everything onto it: my designs, my photography, my hacks, my screenshots, and source of inspiration all bundled up together. It's me, after all. By not separating these data, I gain a much better insight into which of my stuff is good and 'interesting' to folks.

I know far too many people who keep a separate Flickr profile for their "professional" life vs their "play" life but when I view the content, I can't tell the difference and reason as to why they are separate. Consolidation is good. Just filter, and tag. I think that via my very unfocused postings, I have successfully cross-marketed my designs to people who came to my stream because of my abstract photography; or that they discovered that I am much much more than a photojournalist who run around events.

Because of this content cross-pollination, I also learned based on my data that what people find to be interesting is also very all-across the board, and that is interesting to me. I made screenshots of the top 5 pages from the 500 Most Interesting Flickr (set) and bundled them together, and it provides a great sign-post as to where I should be headed next.

Related SML
+ SML Pro Blog: Philosophy
+ SML Pro Blog: Synergy
+ SML Flickr Tags: Synergy
+ SML Wiki: Flickr Analytics
+ SML Wiki: Interestingness

Google Page Rank, Domain Names, Technology Platforms and Platform Owners / SML Analytics

Recently I did a tally of Google PageRank in the SML Universe: Analyzing a single person's Web presence on different domains, the technology platform, the platform owner, and the corresponding Google PageRank data.


View large size (1024 x 903 JPG)
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What I found especially interesting is that the highest PRs concentrated on properties owned by Yahoo, namely: SML Flickr (5) and SML Pipes (5), followed immediately by Google properties (4): SML Pro Blog (4), SML Photo Blog (4), SML YouTube (4) and perhaps Google's friends: SML Twitter (4), SML Vimeo (4).

SML Amazon (5) perhaps should be expected as Amazon is a hub, but I do find it interesting that its PR is so high since it really receives no publicity nor direct URL.

SML Facebook (0) does not get anything likely because Facebook is a close-walled garden. SML Wiki (0) failed to a zero recently which I contribute to my recent Flickr Censorship saga as I pump most of the content on the wiki via the Flickr API, and failing that means failing all my content. (ouch!) which is why I'm brewing SML Data (1) right now. As historic data has shown, generally speaking, registering a domain name will pump Google PR to at least 1. If you don't even get that, you are doing something wrong and it usually means that Google has placed you on a blacklist and you should definitely watch out.

Here's my 2009-09-18 data on Google Docs for those who prefer raw text:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=t6xebhQalrxo9LpGAqo2WGg&output=html

Related SML
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Data
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Information Design
+ SML Pro Blog: Data
+ SML Pro Blog: Google
+ SML Pro Blog: Google Page Rank
+ SML Pro Blog: Information Design

TwitterFeed = Great RSS to Twitter Tool

TwitterFeed (Twitter:twfeed) is a useful service which pumps RSS feeds to your Twitter account.

I tested out the server a couple of weeks ago because I wanted a separate feed for some more focus tweets, namely, for SML BW (Flickr Group / FriendFeed / Twitter), SML Fine Art (Flickr Group / FriendFeed / Twitter) and SML Graphic Design (Flickr Group / FriendFeed / Twitter).

Another reason I'm doing this is because, oh, my friends on Twitter was complaining that I tweet too much. So now I can be tweeting without getting massive unfollows: I think that interesting things deserve to be seen and heard. There are more than enough talented people scattered around the Net that are super-talented and waiting to be discovered. So for those who don't mind the extra infos, follow @smlbw (black and white photography), @smlfineart (art), and @smlgfxdesign (graphic design) which is an accumulation of stuff I blogged as well as the super talented folks who post to the Flickr pool. Since Twitter is not inherently visual, it might be easier to follow their Friendfeeds (links above).

TwitterFeed lets you connect separate Twitter Feed with different accounts, which is uber useful because that means that I don't have to create multiple accounts to do that. Additionally it allows you to use a myriad of URL-shortener services. I use bit.ly because it reports analytics data, but you can use pretty much anything available in the market.

If you are feeding with a FeedBurner feed, it gives you additional insights into the feed clicks as well, but it does not work with Feedburner's default settings:



In order to get TwitterFeed to report traffic data, go to Publicize > Awareness API and activate it.



After activating the FeedBurner Awareness API, TwitterFeed successfully captures click data via Feedburner vs bit.ly — which is useful if you are an uber data freak like me!



Related SML
+ SML Delicious: Tools
+ SML Flickr Tags: Tools
+ SML Pro Blog: Tools
+ SML Pro Blog: Twitter

Flickr Analytics: The making of interestingness / SML Analytics

As part of an ongoing effort to document myself to better understand myself, I posted this design concept I created for Eric Roos' music business Dangeroos onto Flickr in August 2007.

The piece was designed back in 2002, and was a quick sketch or mood board for the Dangeroos Web site. The identity Dangeroos is a play on Eric's last name, so the choice for Interstate (the typeface) was obvious. Red was chosen because it suggests danger. Wave morphs, color rectangles and circular compositions dropped in to support the idea of sound.

Shortly after I started a project called Flickr Analytics to analyze Flickr's interestingness algorithm. Because of that, I become fairly aware of the individual image's ranking over time. To my surprise, this design stays consistently within the top 20 most interest images, and over the past few months, reigned as the number one most interesting image on my entire Flickr stream.

What was even more interesting to me is that the image also drives much traffic: more than 4000 views within the last 5 months, which amounts to 25+ views a day. That's a lot for an image with no human element.

So when Flickr Stats launched on 2007-12-17, it was a God send, for it enables me to analyze traffic and get a better understanding of where traffic is coming from.

How to get to Flickr Stats



To the bottom right corner, below the list of tags of an image on Flickr is what I would call the utility area of the page. This is also where you can access the Photo stats of the image in question. Clicking on the link will bring to a page similar to the one below:

Photo Stats



At this time, Flickr Stats only allows you to view detailed traffic information from the last 28 days, which is not as flexible as most site analytics tool, but is still much better than none at all.

The first time I saw this page I was stunned. Previously I had guessed that the reason why the Dangeroos design was popular had to do with that it was the first image on my 100 Most Interesting Design (set), which is why I had kept it on my Flickr homepage all these time. Data suggests otherwise. In fact, 54% of its traffic (1,041 visits) came from images.search.yahoo.com and 30% (572 visits) came from flickr.com.

Really? What were people searching for on Yahoo? I clicked on the domain name and get to the referrer detail page for the Yahoo Image Search:



Apparently, I'm getting a lot of hits from Yahoo from people search for graphic design. FlickrStats has a nice feature which allows you to click on the keywords to go directly to the search results in question. This is where I noted that apparently back in 2007-12-18, searching for graphic design on Yahoo put this piece on the first 5 results:



Image Search Algorithm

If you think about how difficult it is to develop a useful text search algorithm, you can image how challenging it must be to create a good image search algorithm. Indeed, until most recently, Google Image Search relies on the image's file name alone to feed you results.

Aside from gaining a huge user base, Yahoo's decision to buy Flickr is obvious: image tagging data.

Tagging is a voluntary act by the user: creating meta data to organize his collection fo photo much easier. To the search engine, however, tagging is free metadata association. One strategy is deciphering whether the tags are accurate can go like this: each time someone search for a search term, say graphic design, my search engine will throw 20 images associated with that tag on the search results page. An image that's more related to that search term will more likely to be clicked on by someone searching for that result.

With time and patience, it would be possible for me to figure out which tags are valid and which tags are not. People who search for the search term and then either favorited or commented on that photo would mean that image is more relevant (and thus "interesting") to that search term.

The same strategy can be applied to Flickr Groups. When you post an image to a particular group, the group usually is associated with certain keywords. When users click on an image among all others, they are functioning as bots with very advanced algorithms to do things that machine cannot yet do: identify the good images from the rest. I call humans participating in these activities BioBots.

The key in these systems is to identify the experts. Once you have collected enough data on a user and noticed, for example, that they have a degree in graphic design, working in the graphic design field, and perhaps are members of mostly graphic design groups, it may be fair to say that their opinions on graphic design matter more. You can thus put in your algorithm to give their opinions more weight for the same reason why KOL (key opinion leaders) in pharma talk has their role in medical sites.

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Users: China > US / Google Analytics: SML Gay Blog

I just looked at the Google Analytics reports for my gay blog today and I noted that it has more Chinese visitors then any other visitors:

Google Analytics: SML Gay Blog: Visitors: Map Overlay


This is quite surprising to me as I am more used to the norm of visitor distribution, such as that on this blog—predominantly U.S. audience:

Google Analytics: SML Pro Blog: Visitors: Map Overlay


I am also stunned at the numbers of users reached on that the gay blog--nearly half of that of my professional blog (the one that you are reading).

I generally don't use the map overlay feature because it's fairly useless for my blogs, as I have gotten so used to seeing the dark spot on the U.S., but the experience today really make me think about tailoring my post for my readers, and hopefully improving the quality of the content a bit over there :)

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

See-ming Lee - SML Skydive 2007.10.13 / Google Video

See-ming Lee - SML Skydive 2007.10.13 / Google Video, originally uploaded by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML.

Google Video: See-ming Lee - SML Skydive 2007.10.13 - Crazy Again!

Interesting. I had no idea that Google Video does analytics on the site!

This video is also on YouTube which has 4 times as many views but no analytics. So which one should I pick?

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Flickr / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Socialistics = Facebook + Analytics

Alex Rainert (Blog / Google / LinkedIn) sent me an interesting Facebook application called Socialistics today and it looks fairly interesting.

Essentially, it's an analytics application that visualizes the raw data from your Facebook profile as readable charts. Mashable has a write-up on this, but I felt that their illustration does not do a very good job in showing the power of this application.

I took some screenshots of the application using my Facebook data and this is what it looks like:

SML Facebook + Socialistics / 2007 / SML Analytics (Flickr Set: Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow)

Hopefully this will do better justice for this little gem!

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (Blog / Google / LinkedIn) / SML Analytics. All rights reserved.

SML on SEO

In the world of SEO (Wikipedia: Search Engine Optimization), content is king. If you write good content and thus draw enough target audience, search engines will be your friends.

If you are mainly interested in the U.S. market, then Google is your friend, because that is where this search engine has the highest market penetration. If your target audience happens to be in Asia or Europe, then you are probably better of with Yahoo!, because it has long had an international brand presence and Google just started to expand into those markets recently.

Interestingly, most Americans find it surprising that Yahoo has more netizen population than Google overall (Source: Compete.com). Since Google has more American population than any other search engine, it is natural to assume so. However, if you survey your friends outside the U.S. to see which search engines they use most, and you may be surprised with your results. In my random sampling, I have found that almost all of my friends in the UK prefers MSN Live Search.

To find out just how well you rank among all the search engines, I recommend Jux2, a meta search engines which combines and compares the results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. You may be surprised of how many results are specific to a single database. If you are trying to appeal to an international audience, you will do best to optimize your search strategies for all three primary players.

If you are an individual, can you utilize these techniques to compete with global international companies? I think so. I Googled SML (initials for See-ming Lee, my name) today, and this blog is prominently featured on page one among approximately 7,450,000 results. I am competing with global players and acronyms here. It's definitely a very 'gratifying' activity. :)

Do you have to spend a lot of money? Does it take a long time to see your ROI (Wikipedia: Return on Investment)? I don't think so. I believe that I am gaining these benefits all by writing a few poems recently. And I published pretty much all of them within the last four months.

I fell into all these mostly out of my recent interest in network theory. Based on my research, I have a hunch that Google's algorithm has largely to do with network theory (Wikipedia: Network Theory / SML Bookmarks: Social Media / SML Bookmarks: Network). This is a hunch, not a proof. Theoretically speaking, I don't think that any proofs are definite. You can, on the other hand, validate your confidence level based on statistics and analytics reports.

Copyright 2007 SML SEO = See-ming Lee + SEO. All rights reserved.

Flickr Analytics / SML Analytics

FlickrAnalytics.com

Objective.

• Analyze the Flickr Intersestingness algorithm.

Methodology

• Tagging and grouping top 20 images from the Popular-Views, Popular-Favorites and Popular-Comments pages on Flickr.


• Compare results with images from the various sets via AND / OR operators.

Preliminary Analysis

Top Views = what drives users to click;

Related tags: top-v111 / top-v333 / top-v555 / top-v777 / top-v999 / top-v1111 / top-v2222 / top-v3333 / top-v4444 / top-v5555 / views-top20

Top Faves = what drives users to buy;

Related tags: favorites / favorites-5 / favorites-10 / favorites-15 / favorites-20 / favorites-25 / favorites-30 / favorites-35 / favorites-40 / favorites-45 / favorites-50 / favorites-55 / favorites-top20

Top Comments = what drives users to blog;

Related tags: comments-top20

All three galleries combined give you the winning ingredients for market success for any advertising campaigns. These sets, as such, double-duty as quick-visual reference for your next photoshoot.

If analyzing my own photographs give me this conclusion, I can only imagine the entire collection of images hosted on Flickr can provide.

Hypothesis: Top Interesting = Algorithm (Views, Favorites, Comments)

AND(Views, Favorites, Comments) / Flickr Analytics / SML (Set)
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow

I hypothesize that Yahoo is using these data to train an AI (artifical intelligence) algorithm to predict images that will be influential. (Related: see my blog post on Theorizing aesthetics). And if they aren't, I think that they should. Google literally dominates the text-ad market by indexing every single bit of text available to them, it would be smart for Yahoo to pick a different market segment and become the expert in it.

200 Most Interesting Images / Flickr Analytics / SML (Set)
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow

200 Most Interesting People / Flickr Analytics / SML (Set)
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow

200 Most Interesting Designs / Flickr Analytics / SML (Set)
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow

Notes

(1) Top 20 ranking fluctuates. As a result, it is possible for the Top-20 sets to have more than 20 photographs.

SML

SML = See-ming Lee = Design + Technology + Marketing Strategy;

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee. All rights reserved.