What the FAQ: Wolfram Alpha

This is what happens when you’ve been absent from the social media-sphere for a while: you return to find everyone buzzing about something called “Wolfram Alpha”, which you assume must be the new swine flu.

After doing some actual reading, I realized that despite its ominous sounding name, Wolfram Alpha is not some sort of virus (it gets its name from its creator, Steven Wolfram). It also has nothing to do with the evil law firm, Wolfram & Hart, from the old TV show Angel. Instead, it’s a new search engine.

So what is a Wolfram Alpha and how do I get vaccinated against it?

The description on the site itself says that Wolfram Alpha is “the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.”

Now how about in English?

It’s basically like a big online encyclopedia/calculator. You enter in a date (like your birthday) and it’ll tell you the times for sunrise and sunset, what phase the moon was in, if there’s any famous people who were born that day, etc. You enter in an equation (one example is $250 + 15%) and it gives you the answer ($287.50).

So is this thing going to kick Google’s ass or what?

You know, I don’t really think so. Wolfram Alpha seems good at gathering and spitting out basic facts about certain topics, but it doesn’t give you any links to the actual information. Not unless you scroll to the bottom and click on “Source Information”, which is basically a long bibliography, and even then, you still have to figure out which information came from which source.

Plus, when I typed in “Boston restaurant week” in Wolfram Alpha, it didn’t give me any results, because it couldn’t understand what “equation” I was typing in. With Google, the search engine provided me with a list of links, the first of which was the official restaurant week web site.

Judging by some of the other articles on the topic, like this one, other people are feeling the same way. My Social Media Noviceness is telling me that in a few months, Wolfram Alpha will have become the next Cuil: a search engine that gets loads of big press during its launch, but never really gets off of the ground.

You’re wrong! Totally wrong! And 6 months from now you’re going to feel like an idiot!

Maybe. And if that happens, I’ll write a note of apology to Wolfram Alpha on this blog. Which the creators won’t read, because they don’t read this blog anyway. Eh, I don’t blame them. I’m kind of a flake.

What the FAQ: Social Media Releases

Today, Social Media Novice presents you with an FAQ about social media releases. Don’t know what that is? Well, that’s the point.

Q: What exactly is a social media release?

At its core, a social media release is a type of press release – it’s a written announcement of news about your company, product, or client. What makes it different is that a social media release incorporates social media tools to make it more interactive than a regular press release.

Q: Wait – how does it incorporate social media? And what makes it interactive? God, somebody’s loving the SAT words today.

Well, you don’t design and distribute a social media release using Microsoft Word – you put it directly on the web. And in doing so, you can also choose to add in any relevant photos, videos, or audio. Equally important is that a social media release has links built into its template that allow you to directly share it online, via Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, etc.

And for your information, I came across an old dictionary in my desk today. Booyah!

Q: Yeah, well that doesn’t matter, because this FAQ still sucks.

Thank you for politely suggesting that visual examples might be helpful for my explanation. You’re right; you really need to look at an actual social media release to understand it. Here are two examples that I found online, both from popular web sites that provide you with templates for constructing and sharing your news release with the world.

The first is from PitchEngine; the second from MarketWire. Note the photos, the YouTube video, and overall, how easy they make it for you to pass the news around. The only downside is that when using these kinds of web sites to design your social media release, you wind up having to pay money for it at some point. But if you’re web savvy enough to construct one on your own, then that’s not something  that you need to worry about.  I unfortunately, am not quite that savvy.

Q: Is this really something that I need to be aware of?

If you’re in PR or marketing, then I’d say that social media releases are probably something that you’re going to be seeing more of in the future. Otherwise, at the very least, now you’ll know why you’re seeing certain news on the web formatted the way it is.

P.S. In my last post, I said that I would talk about what I didn’t like about the new Facebook layout later on. The truth of the matter is that I started to write about it, and then realized that it all came down to one thing: I don’t like how it’s trying to be Twitter. I already have a Twitter. I don’t need two Twitters.

A friend of mine (who has his own excellent blog here) had an answer to this complaint. He suggested that maybe this was Mark Zuckerberg’s brilliant plan after all: nobody really needs two Twitters, and if you had to choose, most would probably choose this new fake Twitter over real Twitter, because fake Twitter comes with all of your Facebook friends and photos.

To which I say this: DAMN YOU, Zuckerberg. This is SABOTAGE. Viva la real Twitter!

P.P.S. That was probably too long to be a postscript. Oh well.

What the FAQ: Tumblr

Today, Social Media Novice presents with you with an FAQ meant to explain what in God’s name is the point of Tumblr.

Q: What exactly is a Tumblr?

Well, here’s what the web site says:

“Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML. Even use your own domain name.”

Q: How exactly is that different from a regular blog?

It’s not. You can post text, photos, links, music, and videos on other blogs too. And there are plug-ins that you can download that allow you to do it from your phone, email, etc.

Q: Wait, so why is this so popular?

Well, here’s the kicker. Tumblr advertises itself as a form of mixed-media micro-blogging. You can post whatever you’d like on other blogs too, but most people think of regular blog posts as essays. 

The idea behind Tumblr is that now you can have a blog, but without the hassle of having to actually write more than a paragraph. Instead, you can just post pictures, rant for three sentences, or share links to sites that are vastly more entertaining than yours.

Q: Wait, so this is just blogging for lazy people? Xanga must be pissed.

A: You know, I used to think so. And then I saw this, which may be the greatest site in the universe, and decided that maybe there is a point to Tumblr after all. 

A lot of people use Tumblr to showcase their “creative and artistic endeavors”, as Wikipedia puts it. They could do this with a regular blog too, but do so on Tumblr because it’s known as a place where you can just post random stuff sans commentary. Here’s another good example of it.

Q: Okay. But why isn’t there an ‘e’ in Tumblr?

A: I have no idea. Especially because these blogs are also called “tumblelogs”.  You have to wonder about what kind of discussion was had when the creators decided to leave off of the ‘e’.

Creator #1: No man, we shouldn’t spell the word “tumbler” wrong.

Creator #2: Fuck spelling! That’s the whole point of this blog!

If anyone can give me a definitive answer on this, please do. I’d totally write an “Origins of Tumblr” post.

What the FAQ: Technorati

Today, Social Media Novice presents you with an FAQ meant to explain the complexities of Technorati.

Q: What is Technorati?

A: Technorati is a blog search engine, like Google Blogs, except more complicated.

Q: What’s with all the crap that appears on the front page? I thought that this was a goddamn search engine.

A: Well, the “rising posts by attention” and “rising news stories by attention” show the blog posts and mainstream media stories that are getting the most attention from other bloggers right now, for different subjects (politics, sports, travel, etc.). Technorati usually updates these around three times an hour.

Q: How does Technorati decide which blog posts and stories are getting the most attention from other bloggers?

A: They have a pretty complicated system for conducting this sort of analysis, but the nuts and bolts of it are that they examine the following:

- Who’s linking to your posts

- How many links there are to your post

- The rate of the new links to your post

- The popularity of your post

And so forth. This stuff changes over time, so a blog post that was getting a lot of attention in the morning may not be getting a lot of it that evening.

Q: Okay, so I just tried searching for the term “social media”. It gave me plenty of blog posts, but why does it keep mentioning each one’s “authority”? WTF is that?

A: This comes straight from the Technorati support page, so don’t sue me if it turns out to be incorrect.

“Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the highest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Since at the lower end of the scale many blogs will have the same Technorati Authority, they will share the same Technorati Rank.”

Q: Waah! I refuse to use anything but Google Blogs! It is my true love and we are destined to run off into the sunset together!

A: Look, I like Google Blogs too, okay? No question about it, anything that Google does is awesome. But I will say this about Technorati. If you’re an aspiring PR professional like myself, the Technorati ranking system can come in pretty handy. Because not only will you find a bunch of blogs that are writing about something that’s relevant to your client, Technorati will tell you which of these blogs are actually being paid attention to. That means that instead of pitching 50 blogs, half of which are only read by the blogger’s mom and roommate, you can narrow your pitching down to 25 that are widely read.

Q: I tried looking for your blog on Technorati but couldn’t find it. Why do you suck so bad?

A: I wish I knew. Your blog can only be found on Technorati if you apply to index it there yourself, or someone who’s already indexed there links back to it. I don’t plan on indexing my blog until I have more entries up. And nobody has linked back to me because nobody likes me.