wanderingstan

The timing of Fred’s post couldn’t have been better. I choose to participate.

Lijit got it’s first negative review this morning.

Todd put it best when he said “Ouch”. But I see that Steve didn’t fully appreciate what Lijit really is. So what we have is a failure on our part to communicate what we are and what we can do. That’s better than if he had grokked the whole thing and still panned us.

It’s ironic that Steve Rubel works for Edelman, who published a report backing up the central thesis of Lijt:

“Global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me,” which has risen dramatically to surpass doctors and academic experts for the first time, according to the seventh annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey of nearly 2,000 opinion leaders in 11 countries. In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.”

People don’t want their top news stories picked votes from random nameless internet surfers who are mostly nerds (Digg, Reddit), they don’t want their search overlays to show mere statistical average ratings (StumpleUpon, WOT), they don’t want their ecommerce sites rated by opaque large corporations (Trust-e). They want to be connected to the friends and sources that they trust. Lijit must become that connection.

Here’s the reply that I posted on Steve’s blog.

Hi Steve! Lijit is based on my masters thesis (getoutfoxed.com), so I’ll try to explain a bit.

Most importantly, Lijit is *not* invite-only. Quite the opposite in fact! Any RSS or OPML feed can be an informer in your network. We’re more in like a newsreader than a walled-garden social networking site.

Secondly, you seem to have missed the “search and surf” features of Lijit: Your network isn’t there just to point out cool new stuff, but also there when you are searching or surfing. E.g. when I search for “art dolls” in Google, I instantly see that Brad Feld has tagged a relevant page in delicious, plus I see additional results, but all from the perspective of my network. See the screenshot: http://wanderingstan.com/googbrad.png

And lastly, the twist that Lijit puts on discovery (Digg, Reddit, etc…) is not the negative ratings, but rather the social network aspect. In Lijit, not every “vote” is created equal. Votes from people closer to you in your network hold more weight than others. This allows each users Lijit List to morph into a personalized Digg. For example, there will never be a front page Digg article about knitting. But in Lijit, if some of your friends (or a lot of friends-of-friends) are knitters, then you’ll get some knitting articles. Same goes for any topics that wouldn’t be of interest to Digg’s center-of-mass. I think this is a much more powerful approach than a one-size-fits-all Digg or Reddit.

We just launched a month ago, so we have a lot of rough edges to work through. It’s clear we need to communicate our value better. But I hope you’ll give Lijit a deeper look, and please feel free to contact me. Lijit (and its previous incarnation, Outfoxed) have been been the center of my studies and my work for the last two years, so I’m always happy to talk about it. (And some of my friends wish I’d shut up about it…

-stan

I’ve emailed Steve and I hope he’ll accept my offer to talk a little more about Lijit.

The Official Lijit Blog(TM) was launched today, and Todd kicks things off with a fantistic post. And I’m not just saying that because of the nice things he said about me.

The blog lives at www.lijit.com/blog. Give it a read, add it to your feed.

The local Boulder paper published a nice article about Lijit today. (Front page of the business section, no less!) My thanks to Alicia Wallace of the Daily Camera for the nice writeup.

All in all, a pretty nice gift for my birthday today.

This post is coming to you live from the first session of Denver BarCamp. In preparation for my demo at 2pm, this post contains a small use of the Vote-Links microformat. (More about microformats)

It’s really simple.

For example, when I linked to the Denver BarCamp site above, I just added an additional param saying rev="vote-for". So the link looks like this:

<a rev="vote-for" href="http://barcamp.org/BarCampDenver">Denver BarCamp</a>

So if all goes well (demo-itus is very real...), the Lijit crawler should pick up these opinions of mine and share them with anyone who trusts me. I'll let you know how it goes.

(And to make the demo complete, I'll demonstrate the vote-against capability by pointing out that PayPal still has $1200 of mine which they refuse to give back...)