Berteloot

Aardvark which “definitely plan to expand to other languages in the future – just trying to perfect it in English first,” according to Alison Johnston, Aardvark Community Manager, has just issued a great paper on the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web search — in which answers are found in existing online content.

Aardvark explains that in social search:

• Users can ask questions in natural language, not keywords
• Content is generated “on-demand”, tapping the huge amount of information in peoples’ heads
• The system is fueled by the goodwill of its users

Damon, Lion Tamer writes “We demonstrate that there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search. And our key finding is that whereas in the Library paradigm, users trust information depending upon the authority of its author, in the Village paradigm, trust comes from our sense of intimacy andconnection with the person we are getting an answer from.

We also provide a detailed analysis of user behavior, and include dozens of interesting statistics. For example, of the 90,361 users we had in October 2009…

• 87.7% of questions sent to Aardvark got answered (very high answer rate!)
• 75.0% of users who asked Aardvark a question also answered a question for someone else (very high participation rate!)
• 70.4% of answer feedback had a rating of ‘good’ as opposed to ‘ok’ or ‘bad’ (high quality!)

Writing a paper like this requires being more open, and sharing more information, than most small internet startups might be comfortable with. But we recognize that we have benefitted from the open culture of the scientific community, and would like to do our part. Further, we think that the opportunity presented by social search is truly significant, and we’d like to engage with the rest of the research community on the many challenges it presents. There are very interesting problems to explore around question classification, analysis of social relationships, person-to-person matching, maintaining a question/answer economy, and many other areas.”

Read more on Aardvark blog

Le 8 décembre je participais à Paris, France, à la présentation d’une étude sur l’usage de Twitter en France.

@Webentertainer a réalisé un excellent compte rendu de cette conférence:

résultats d’un sondage Ifop sur la connaissance de Twitter par les internautes français. Et voici ce qui j’ai trouvé pertinent :

60% des internautes français connaissent désormais Twitter (contre 4% pour Friendfeed). Surtout la courbe de progression de la notoriété est ultra-rapide car en juin 2009, nous n’étions que 30% à connaître Twitter. Il faut rapprocher ces chiffres du fait que Twitter est avant tout utilisé par des bloggers qui par leur usage la promotion de leur profil en font l’évangélisation !

Le profil moyen de l’internaute français qui connaît Twitter est : homme de moins de 35 ans, cadre supérieur et parisien. Cependant, le profil moyen du twitterer français : femme de moins de 34 ans, cadre supérieur et parisienne.

Et pour tweeter, 39% des utilisateurs se servent d’un client PC ou Mac et 31% un client Smartphone. Ce qui signifie que 30% des utilisateurs passent par Twitter.com : il s’agit sans aucun doute des débutants car le site n’est absolument pas adapté à l’usage de Twitter. Là encore, avec l’envol du marché des smartphones et l’utilisation très courante des social media grâce aux smartphones, on comprend la croissance très rapide des inscriptions à Twitter.

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Feedburner offers a very handy way to manage email list of your feed subscribers. You can even customize the registration window and validation email.

Time of distribution and look of the email are also fully personalized. 

But do you know that FeedBurner lets you chose to send either your full post or just a summary?

Here is how to do it: 

To activate Summary Burner in your Feedburner settings click on the Optimise tab, then Summary Burner on the left, and chose to activate or to deactivate it. Make sur you enter the number of characters you want your summary to be. 

When activated Feedburner will only output a summary of your feed with a like to your post. A great way to tease and to bring more trafic to your blog.