Spooky Cult of Celebrity Gets a Boost From News Aggregator EchoFactor
MONSTER CHILLER HORROR COLUMN
by Andrew "Count Floyd" Goodman, October 31, 2000

Warning: This article is laced with gratuitous Hallowe'en-themed references. Proceed with caution.

Ever feel like you're being watched? If you're even moderately famous, someone may have even started a fan site about you. Scary stuff. And now, these highly specific topical enthusiast webmasters have another tool in their arsenal: a highly specific news feed service called EchoFactor (Factor... Factor.... Factor.....).

Content - specifically, news headlines - is one of the most vital features for keeping a web site current. The old way - scouring the web for relevant stories and then posting the links periodically - is rapidly becoming obsolete, even for the tiniest of publishers.

Hobby webmasters' desire to take the drudgery out of providing online news updates for highly specific topics is what inspired EchoFactor, a Philadelphia-based startup.

Content Providers on the Ropes?

EchoFactor's co-founders, Chief Technologist Andrea Michalek and Chief Marketer Joel Gehman, developed the company's strategy on the strength of a wealth of background research about the needs of companies in the "content business." Simply put, content companies have a problem distributing their content and finding an appropriate audience. Sites like Salon.com and their many smaller brethren aren't making money. They need a way to ensure repeat visitors without having to continually "reacquire" them with costly marketing.

An analysis of publicly-traded pure content sites' financials, says Gehman, recently showed that between 38% and 58% of these sites' costs goes to buying traffic. What was thought to be a matter of up-front costs for "audience acquisition" has turned out to be a never-ending drain on resources.

Another problem facing the smaller content providers is, well, their size. In the total universe of web page views, 50% of the traffic is received by a handful of top sites. But this leaves 7.5 million active web sites getting the other half of the Internet's traffic. Due to their obscurity, this latter group only makes 10% of the advertising dollars being spent online, in spite of the fact that smaller sites' offerings may be more targeted, and users more loyal. It's this universe of smaller content sites which EchoFactor says it can help, by allowing them to find loyal readers of their content without incurring big marketing expenses. As they find an audience for their content, they'll be able to garner a higher proportion of the advertising pie.

Small Webmasters Need to Lighten Their Workload

Gehman also cites some impressive problems facing those seeking to obtain outside content for a niche site. Small webmasters today spend more than half their time producing or acquiring content for their sites. Since many sites are more like labors of love or "second jobs," many of their operators are looking for a way to lessen the load. EchoFactor thinks it has the answer.

The straight-up description of what EchoFactor does is that it helps the webmasters of highly topic-specific web sites put regularly-updating news feeds on the site. Companies like Moreover and iSyndicate also do this. For those who eschew "click-away news," news syndication service Screaming Media facilitates the exchange of full-text content. (You'd think that Screaming would win the award for "scariest company name in this story," but I would personally give iSyndicate my vote. Are you going to mess with a company called iSyndicate?)

EchoFactor's Feeds Are More Granular than Moreover's

EchoFactor's key difference is that its news feed categories are much more specific than the usual categories set up by news services. When Moreover first came down the pipe, we were amazed to see so many industry-relevant feeds. The fact that you can go to Moreover (or one of their partner sites) and get up-to-date search engine news, for example, is pretty impressive and a huge advance over what had heretofore been available.

But EchoFactor's feeds take this kind of granularity to the next level. If you want news just about one particular celebrity, these feeds can focus just on that. For the topically-inclined webmaster trying to maintain several sites at once and hold down a full-time job or school schedule on top of that, these news feeds can keep people returning to your site by making it look like, as Gehman puts it, "you're not asleep at the wheel." The EchoFactor slogan "steal this EchoFeed" will no doubt appeal to the do-it-on-the-cheap crowd. (It should be pointed out that the project is still in beta. The coverage of particular people, cities, colleges, etc., is not as comprehensive as it could be at this stage.)

Clearly, EchoFactor's challenge will be to make these feeds compelling from a relevance standpoint. After all, I could just go and type "Will Smith" into a search engine, or the news tracking options provided at portals like Yahoo, iWon, or Excite. Or I could just go to Moreover.com and type "Will Smith." EchoFactor's technology for aggregating highly granular news is going to have to be better than these options. Chief Technologist Michalek stresses that, like any search engine company, EchoFactor "is constantly striving to improve relevancy... so far we've put a lot of engineering muscle into solving the most common problems that come up."

Existing News Aggregators Have Shortcomings

It should be pointed out that EchoFactor's chances of making a significant difference here are sharply enhanced by the shortcomings of existing news aggregators. The others have done pioneering work, but in the end a lot of solutions will probably do well, because different people have different ideas of relevance. Moreover, for example, seems to use a combination of an editorial staff and a filtering technology. EchoFactor, by contrast, cannot hope to use editors to keep track of so many highly specialized subjects. Sure, it might be possible to find editors who would theoretically "focus on" every celebrity in existence (that might have been a dream of the founders of the Open Directory Project), but this still wouldn't produce a steady flow of news items - only a reasonable number of resource links.

By being forced to lean so heavily on technology, EchoFactor will be forced to push the technological envelope in terms of the ability to produce a steady flow of highly granular news items. This is a daunting challenge, but in many such cases it is not as much of a challenge as market acceptance of your model. As Gehman put it, "we feel there is a real chance for us to become a market-maker in the distribution of highly topical content."

So Is it Useful? The Wycheck Test Says "Yes"

The acid test (aaaaaggghh!!! acid!!!!), of course, is does it help the end user - the typical "topic enthusiast" - find a useful news item? It passed my "hey, neat" test. Depending on what you're looking for, it looks as if EchoFactor can help you find recent news better than any other news-sniffing technology available. They've made a great choice in targeting celebrities, in my opinion.

Just one application is for the fantasy sports nut. Due to the ready availability of information from Internet sources, the playing field has leveled for the hyper-competitive gang of fantasy football aficionados. It used to be that the few who knew about that one really great web site got a big edge on those who were relying on outdated information found elsewhere. Now, there is so much free info available (there is even a TV show on Fox called Fantasy Football Weekly), that there are hardly any "out of the loop" participants left. Thus search for that elusive edge has almost become a challenge in itself, as with chess grandmasters whose major chances for an advantage come rarely in the form of tiny nuances missed by the other side.

For those who just have to win at all costs, EchoFactor provides a cool way to sniff out rumblings about a particular player. In fantasy sport circles, it's dishonorable to knowingly trade "damaged goods" just because you saw an injury report cross the newswires a few minutes earlier than someone else. However, nothing is stopping you from keeping tabs on the local newspapers, players' own web sites, relevant but possibly little-known mentions in nationally syndicated columns, etc., to determine whether a player is feeling woozy, is dealing with a personal situation, has made irrational comments, etc. (I did warn you this would get creepy, didn't I?)

In any case, I typed some of my favorite football players' names into the search box at EchoFactor, and found myself learning quite a bit more about the buzz surrounding teams and players - and in a much shorter time - than I would have trying to surf around to various sports news sites and local fan sites. The bottom line was that for highly granular information on a person, EchoFactor provided a greater number of recent, relevant items than was found at a similar search on Moreover, which brought up a few mentions but spaced out over a considerably longer time period. If something falls within Moreover's category, it will cover it like a blanket - yesterday's buyout of About.com saturated the "Online Content News" category, crowding out just about every other story. But Moreover has no ongoing coverage of Frank Wycheck, the Tennessee Titans' able pass-catching tight end. (Frank probably prefers it this way.)

Fantasy sports is just a frivolous example of the hundreds of potential applications for this technology. It's obviously the kind of thing that can be expanded almost limitlessly. A special feed could be made for news about every type of programming language. You could have a feed for every daily Leo horoscope. If you are trying to solve a problem like "should I buy a Subaru wagon or a Volvo wagon?" (if only all problems were this tough!), you could track a news feed that would only follow reviews of Subaru vehicles, and a similar one for Volvo.

And on and on.

Meta-Search Will Never Stop Evolving

This is really a gigantic new space in the management of knowledge. The web's most exciting developments continue to be in the field of content aggregation. The first big revelations in this area were (1) the plain old aggregation (and customization) of news headlines like you can get at Yahoo!; and (2) the emergence of various metasearch options like Metacrawler and Ixquick. The excitement about metasearch has not fully died down, because there is so much more to be done with it. Meta-news is still a wide open frontier, because of the challenges of finding relevant, highly granular items in real time. The day that the field will truly have come of age will be when we can pick that one challenge - such as "keep bringing me all reviews about Subaru and Volvo autos, instead of me having to hunt around for them" - and it would be easily solvable with a custom news sniffer. Such things exist at present, but they currently don't work well because they are still stuck with trying to determine relevance from a keyword search. The promise of XML is that even subtle distinctions amongst different types of content (product reviews vs. editorials vs. news items, for example) will become easier to sniff out. But this is a few years away, it would seem.

What it comes down to is that money talks, and you know the rest. Today, anyone can set up their life so that they are paged when a stock in their portfolio drops 10% or one on their watch list comes into buy range. It can't be long before I can be paged the second one of my players in the football pool has his ACL snap like piano wire. I'll pay! I'll pay!

Remember the Photocopier?

Although EchoFactor is trying to make its solution ubiquitous by appealing to thousands of affiliate webmasters, the general phenomenon is one of an increasing sophistication - and automation - of news clipping services. Companies and government departments worldwide have long relied on professional clipping services for competitive intelligence, executive briefings, etc. But the old world of the 1970's, where a government official could stay up to date with a monthly collection of a dozen or so photocopied newspaper stories about their particular subject matter, seems to have been surpassed. At the very least, there are now better ways to track down and digest the information than hiring people to scan, clip, and photocopy from a handful of newspapers and trade publications! Yet it seems as if we're decades away from the point where institutions and companies take full advantage of the new technology.

It could be useful for many journalists and students, as well. Finding recent news articles about an author or politician you want to profile is going to be an excellent advance on what is currently available. I say "going to be" because companies like EchoFactor are clearly still in ramp-up mode.

Things that Go "Click" in the Night, or, Does Information Facilitate Surveillance?

As with the "biography engine" technology being developed by Project Napa, there are clearly some sinister implications which accompany the development of more sophisticated means of keeping tabs on news about a particular person. Stalkers and intelligence agencies alike will no doubt have a field day with them. With information comes surveillance, and with that may come the increasing use of strategies by high-profile people to reap the benefits of publicity while simultaneously protecting themselves from unwanted intrusions. That aspect of life has gotten pretty sticky as the cult of celebrity has grown over the past couple of decades, and it isn't going to be getting any less sticky anytime soon.

Partial adoption of ODP taxonomy

I asked Gehman about the company's decision to adopt the taxonomy of the Open Directory Project for some of its categories, such as athletes and celebrities. As it turns out, EchoFactor has chosen to use whatever directory category structure seems the most comprehensive and well organized. In instances where the ODP doesn't have its act together - as with cities - EchoFactor will seek another logical taxonomy, and use that. If the ontology fits, wear it.

Heeeere's Johnny!

The key for EchoFactor, and for the webmasters and publishers who will find it a useful way of distributing and acquiring content, is its highly granular focus, and its decision to zero in on a limited range of subject types for topic-specific news. This is not intended to be a global database of every possible news item searchable by keyword. In other words, EchoFactor is suitable for webmasters, topic enthusiasts, and various stalkers, creeps, wackos, freaks, geeks, black cats, ghosts, paparazzi, bored people, and unbalanced characters played by Jack Nicholson, as opposed to sensible librarians or serious researchers. In other words, it could be just what you're looking for.

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