6 ms·

Introducing BackType Alerts

33 points by omakase 18y ago

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
fallentimes 18y ago
I'm already a google alerts fiend, so I've been looking forward to these for a while. Great work guys.
- dmix 18y ago
  I had some Google alerts set up to keep track of an industry I am entering but they cluttered up my RSS reader and became a chore. I'm thinking about using something like Rivalmap instead. Backtype alerts would be good for comments which is almost as important as blog posts.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    I don't use RSS...I just have Google Alerts email me a summary depending on the importance (i.e. as it happens for important stuff, daily/weekly for not so important stuff).
LukeG 18y ago
Nicely done...I still prefer my RSS tracking to Google Alerts, but this is definitely going in the arsenal.
prakash 18y ago
how is this different from google alerts?
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Google alerts doesn't pick up comments. At least it never does for me.
  - omakase 18y ago
    Exactly! We will be publishing a blog post soon that shows the difference between BackType search results and other services. I think businesses should be using every tool that is available to them to track their brand. That includes BackType Alerts, Google Alerts, Twitter/Summize search, Technorati search, FriendFeed search, etc.
    - briansmith 18y ago
      What is your position on the copyright of comments? I've tried to contact your company to get you to stop re-publishing my comments on your website and you didn't even respond to my message. What can copyright holders do to ensure that you do not re-publish their content?
      - konsl 18y ago
        Hi Brian, We try to respond to every single e-mail we get; not sure how yours was missed. I apologize. We've talked about our policy on re-publishing comments in a few places: - http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withbacktype-co-founder-chris-golda/#more-3814 http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withb... - http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/ http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/ - etc In summary: what BackType is doing is very similar to other search engines. We make every effort to provide content publishers with familiar methods to restrict BackType from indexing their site's content: http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14 http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14 We're trying to be as transparent as possible. We attribute comments to their authors so they can be rewarded for the thoughts and insights they share in comments across the web. Additionally, BackType is already becoming a recognized source of traffic for publishers and we want that to continue.
        briansmith 18y ago
        Please see the post on Plagiarism Today that was linked to from one of the pages you mentioned above: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republishing-comments/ http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republish... When I comment on TechCrunch or 37signals, I don't give them the copyright to my comment. I (implicitly) give them a license to republish the comment on their own website. However, I've never given Backtype a license to republish my comments on its website. Even if TechCrunch or 37signals chooses not to opt out of your system, you still don't have any legal rights to republish the comments. From the commenter's standpoint, does it make sense to let you republish my content? I think the answer is emphatically "no." If I republish my own comments myself then I can also monetize them myself. If I build a WordPress plug-in to assist others in doing this, and/or if I build an OpenID extension or robots.txt extension for making comment streams more discoverable, then I can help form a user expectation of "If I want to see all the comments by John Doe, I can find them on John Doe's website." Then all the John Does can decide on their own how they monetize their own content on their own website (e.g. AdSense). Consequently, really you are in direct competition with the people whose content you are re-publishing. AFAICT, you are saying "we're going to profit from your content without compensating you, regardless of the copyright, and there's no way that you can opt out except by refusing to publish new content." That sucks. In the posts you linked to, you are comparing yourself to search engines like Google. The difference between your company and Google is that your company republishes the content in full, but Google provides just a small clip of the content. Google has a fair claim that what they are doing is fair use. Their limited excerpting of content is also what allows them to use an opt-out model instead of an opt-in model. That is also what makes it is easy for content creators to profit from Google's indexing of their content--Google users have to click through to the original site to see the content. You are just re-publishing the content in aggregate form. I'm also curious about whether you think the DCMA safe harbor provisions apply to you when you are republishing others' content. As far as I can tell, they cannot, since you've really just built an automated plagiarism system. That is, there is no user-submitted content on your site; all the content published on your site is published by you yourself. Anyway, if you really didn't get the message I sent your company, it boils down to this: Please remove everything I've written from your website, or come up with a means of fairly compensating me. Thank you.
rantfoil 18y ago
Another essential tool in the arsenal of a startup founder... monitoring and responding directly to feedback is critical.
- omakase 18y ago
  I think a lot of people forget the responding part. Sometimes it's hard to know when to respond and when to let things go -- but it's amazing how quickly a pissed off user turns into a loyal one if you take the time to communicate with them.
  - Mrinal 18y ago
    I so agree to that - we respond to the smallest of small bloggers for a good or bad post. No discrimination! Experiencing Backtype with this too.....
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
anotherjesse 18y ago
The twitter integration doesn't seem to work. I was talking to a friend about creating a "daily tweet" a daily summary of tweets of a search term. If they get this working then I don't have to build it.
- konsl 18y ago
  We haven't done any Twitter integration yet. We are going to add a button to tweet a comment, but we aren't doing digests. If you want to push a digest to twitter, you can link your comments feed from BackType to: http://twitterfeed.com/ http://twitterfeed.com/ We'll be releasing an API soon so that the apps/tools/etc we don't build can still be built.
  - anotherjesse 18y ago
    Ahh, I read too quickly: "Following comments by a particular author a la Twitter was a core feature when we launched" I thought you guys used search.twitter.com and included tweets with my alert term. Please do add twitter as a source of comments for the alerts :)
sanj 18y ago
what is really unfortunate here is that by being obstinate and combative with briansmith and plagiarismtoday, konsi is missing a solid business opportunity here. As far as I can tell the mechanism to identify users is based on name and URL which is probably the best you can do. What this does create is a centralized ID for blog commentators. By registring as a blog commentator with backtype, commentators could have a mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out. At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being monetizable. Every opportunity starts out looking like a snake.
- jamesbritt 18y ago
  " By registring as a blog commentator with backtype, commentators could have a mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out. At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being monetizable." So the burden of opt-out falls on the those writing comments, while backtype gets the monetizable data so provided? No thanks. What could be interesting is if bloggers arranged their software so that every posted comment included a copyright notice declaring that the comment was copyrighted by the commenter and that it may not be reproduced in full, only excerpted (for example). I would hate, though, for people to start thinking that, absent such explicit claim on content , it's fair game for poaching.
  - sanj 18y ago
    microformats to the rescue! Or perhaps a commentator.txt file on ID urls. My larger point is that this is an opportunity.
- briansmith 18y ago
  I agree that there is some opportunity there. However, it really depends on the ToS. And, they have to provide people a way of opting out without accepting the ToS because the people own the content they are distributing. In fact, I already tried to sign up for a BackType account to see what controls there are, but I stopped once I read the ToS. Since I first heard of BackType, I've been thinking about a way to solve this problem that isn't based on mass copyright infringement. I think I have a pretty good idea on how to do it. When I have something concrete I will bring it up as a new topic on news.yc.
ig1 18y ago
It's pretty confusing, it looks like a service I might use so I went to the home page and set up an alert for "fizzbuzz", I then got a prompt asking my to register (do I have to register for the alert to work ? is it optional ?). After registering I ended up at a page which confused the hell out of me. "we haven't found any of your comments yet" left me thinking - have they not found any comments that match my search term or does it mean something else. The options given were: # Claim Comments – help us find your comments # Edit Account – review your account details # Edit Profile – so people can find you # Search – for people to follow The "Search" option kinda sounds like what I want to do, but the "for people to follow" makes me think it isn't. It's completely unclear what I need to do in order to track some keywords.
- konsl 18y ago
  Sorry -- Alerts require you to be a registered user so we can deliver them to a verified e-mail address. If you don't want to sign-up, you can perform searches and subscribe to results via RSS. We thought it would be cool if we carried an alert through the sign-up process and added it afterwards. I guess we didn't realize how confusing it would be when the registration was complete. We'll be making this a lot more clear; thanks for the feedback. The page you're viewing (the Dashboard) allows you to: - View comments by people you're following (/home) - View alerts you've subscribed to (/home/alerts) - View comments shared by people you're following (/home/shared) We're going to revisit that welcome msg; for now, you should visit http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to find your alert and subscribe to more. Alternatively, you can perform searches on http://www.backtype.com/comments http://www.backtype.com/comments and subscribe to them from the results page. Thanks again.
Tichy 18y ago
"conversations that may require our participation" Nobody shall be wrong on the internet ever again!!!
lemonysnicket 18y ago
backtype = searchyc.com re-incarnated as a start-up (rather than a completed side project)?

33 points by omakase 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

fallentimes 18y ago

I'm already a google alerts fiend, so I've been looking forward to these for a while. Great work guys.

dmix 18y ago
I had some Google alerts set up to keep track of an industry I am entering but they cluttered up my RSS reader and became a chore. I'm thinking about using something like Rivalmap instead. Backtype alerts would be good for comments which is almost as important as blog posts.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  I don't use RSS...I just have Google Alerts email me a summary depending on the importance (i.e. as it happens for important stuff, daily/weekly for not so important stuff).

LukeG 18y ago

Nicely done...I still prefer my RSS tracking to Google Alerts, but this is definitely going in the arsenal.

prakash 18y ago

how is this different from google alerts?

fallentimes 18y ago
Google alerts doesn't pick up comments. At least it never does for me.
- omakase 18y ago
  Exactly! We will be publishing a blog post soon that shows the difference between BackType search results and other services. I think businesses should be using every tool that is available to them to track their brand. That includes BackType Alerts, Google Alerts, Twitter/Summize search, Technorati search, FriendFeed search, etc.
  - briansmith 18y ago
    What is your position on the copyright of comments? I've tried to contact your company to get you to stop re-publishing my comments on your website and you didn't even respond to my message. What can copyright holders do to ensure that you do not re-publish their content?
    - konsl 18y ago
      Hi Brian, We try to respond to every single e-mail we get; not sure how yours was missed. I apologize. We've talked about our policy on re-publishing comments in a few places: - http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withbacktype-co-founder-chris-golda/#more-3814 http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withb... - http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/ http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/ - etc In summary: what BackType is doing is very similar to other search engines. We make every effort to provide content publishers with familiar methods to restrict BackType from indexing their site's content: http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14 http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14 We're trying to be as transparent as possible. We attribute comments to their authors so they can be rewarded for the thoughts and insights they share in comments across the web. Additionally, BackType is already becoming a recognized source of traffic for publishers and we want that to continue.
      - briansmith 18y ago
        Please see the post on Plagiarism Today that was linked to from one of the pages you mentioned above: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republishing-comments/ http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republish... When I comment on TechCrunch or 37signals, I don't give them the copyright to my comment. I (implicitly) give them a license to republish the comment on their own website. However, I've never given Backtype a license to republish my comments on its website. Even if TechCrunch or 37signals chooses not to opt out of your system, you still don't have any legal rights to republish the comments. From the commenter's standpoint, does it make sense to let you republish my content? I think the answer is emphatically "no." If I republish my own comments myself then I can also monetize them myself. If I build a WordPress plug-in to assist others in doing this, and/or if I build an OpenID extension or robots.txt extension for making comment streams more discoverable, then I can help form a user expectation of "If I want to see all the comments by John Doe, I can find them on John Doe's website." Then all the John Does can decide on their own how they monetize their own content on their own website (e.g. AdSense). Consequently, really you are in direct competition with the people whose content you are re-publishing. AFAICT, you are saying "we're going to profit from your content without compensating you, regardless of the copyright, and there's no way that you can opt out except by refusing to publish new content." That sucks. In the posts you linked to, you are comparing yourself to search engines like Google. The difference between your company and Google is that your company republishes the content in full, but Google provides just a small clip of the content. Google has a fair claim that what they are doing is fair use. Their limited excerpting of content is also what allows them to use an opt-out model instead of an opt-in model. That is also what makes it is easy for content creators to profit from Google's indexing of their content--Google users have to click through to the original site to see the content. You are just re-publishing the content in aggregate form. I'm also curious about whether you think the DCMA safe harbor provisions apply to you when you are republishing others' content. As far as I can tell, they cannot, since you've really just built an automated plagiarism system. That is, there is no user-submitted content on your site; all the content published on your site is published by you yourself. Anyway, if you really didn't get the message I sent your company, it boils down to this: Please remove everything I've written from your website, or come up with a means of fairly compensating me. Thank you.

rantfoil 18y ago

Another essential tool in the arsenal of a startup founder... monitoring and responding directly to feedback is critical.

omakase 18y ago
I think a lot of people forget the responding part. Sometimes it's hard to know when to respond and when to let things go -- but it's amazing how quickly a pissed off user turns into a loyal one if you take the time to communicate with them.
- Mrinal 18y ago
  I so agree to that - we respond to the smallest of small bloggers for a good or bad post. No discrimination! Experiencing Backtype with this too.....

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

anotherjesse 18y ago

The twitter integration doesn't seem to work. I was talking to a friend about creating a "daily tweet" a daily summary of tweets of a search term. If they get this working then I don't have to build it.

konsl 18y ago
We haven't done any Twitter integration yet. We are going to add a button to tweet a comment, but we aren't doing digests. If you want to push a digest to twitter, you can link your comments feed from BackType to: http://twitterfeed.com/ http://twitterfeed.com/ We'll be releasing an API soon so that the apps/tools/etc we don't build can still be built.
- anotherjesse 18y ago
  Ahh, I read too quickly: "Following comments by a particular author a la Twitter was a core feature when we launched" I thought you guys used search.twitter.com and included tweets with my alert term. Please do add twitter as a source of comments for the alerts :)

sanj 18y ago

what is really unfortunate here is that by being obstinate and combative with briansmith and plagiarismtoday, konsi is missing a solid business opportunity here. As far as I can tell the mechanism to identify users is based on name and URL which is probably the best you can do. What this does create is a centralized ID for blog commentators. By registring as a blog commentator with backtype, commentators could have a mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out. At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being monetizable. Every opportunity starts out looking like a snake.

jamesbritt 18y ago
" By registring as a blog commentator with backtype, commentators could have a mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out. At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being monetizable." So the burden of opt-out falls on the those writing comments, while backtype gets the monetizable data so provided? No thanks. What could be interesting is if bloggers arranged their software so that every posted comment included a copyright notice declaring that the comment was copyrighted by the commenter and that it may not be reproduced in full, only excerpted (for example). I would hate, though, for people to start thinking that, absent such explicit claim on content , it's fair game for poaching.
- sanj 18y ago
  microformats to the rescue! Or perhaps a commentator.txt file on ID urls. My larger point is that this is an opportunity.
briansmith 18y ago
I agree that there is some opportunity there. However, it really depends on the ToS. And, they have to provide people a way of opting out without accepting the ToS because the people own the content they are distributing. In fact, I already tried to sign up for a BackType account to see what controls there are, but I stopped once I read the ToS. Since I first heard of BackType, I've been thinking about a way to solve this problem that isn't based on mass copyright infringement. I think I have a pretty good idea on how to do it. When I have something concrete I will bring it up as a new topic on news.yc.

ig1 18y ago

It's pretty confusing, it looks like a service I might use so I went to the home page and set up an alert for "fizzbuzz", I then got a prompt asking my to register (do I have to register for the alert to work ? is it optional ?). After registering I ended up at a page which confused the hell out of me. "we haven't found any of your comments yet" left me thinking - have they not found any comments that match my search term or does it mean something else. The options given were: # Claim Comments – help us find your comments # Edit Account – review your account details # Edit Profile – so people can find you # Search – for people to follow The "Search" option kinda sounds like what I want to do, but the "for people to follow" makes me think it isn't. It's completely unclear what I need to do in order to track some keywords.

konsl 18y ago
Sorry -- Alerts require you to be a registered user so we can deliver them to a verified e-mail address. If you don't want to sign-up, you can perform searches and subscribe to results via RSS. We thought it would be cool if we carried an alert through the sign-up process and added it afterwards. I guess we didn't realize how confusing it would be when the registration was complete. We'll be making this a lot more clear; thanks for the feedback. The page you're viewing (the Dashboard) allows you to: - View comments by people you're following (/home) - View alerts you've subscribed to (/home/alerts) - View comments shared by people you're following (/home/shared) We're going to revisit that welcome msg; for now, you should visit http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to find your alert and subscribe to more. Alternatively, you can perform searches on http://www.backtype.com/comments http://www.backtype.com/comments and subscribe to them from the results page. Thanks again.

Tichy 18y ago

"conversations that may require our participation" Nobody shall be wrong on the internet ever again!!!

lemonysnicket 18y ago

backtype = searchyc.com re-incarnated as a start-up (rather than a completed side project)?