Entries in 'Kaplak on the web' ↓

Thought I’d share a few notes on the things we test in the Kaplak Labs these days. Kaplak Labs is simply a WordPress based site in our WordPress MU powered setup, on which we test themes and plugins before we employ them on other sites. Right now I’m preoccupied with setting up a filtering process for Kaplak Stream. This filtering process aims to sanitize feed items and add some stuff to each item, which improves it’s chances for survival in the stream :

• Retrieve all tags/categories from posts and create new tags/categories if they don’t exist.
• Semi-automatically tag/categorize all feed items. Sometimes feed publishers don’t tag/categorize posts very well, and even a well-tagged/categorized item may have new meaning in a different context. We use the Calais Autotagging plugins for WordPress to do this, for the time being.
• Convert all categories and tags to categories only, to keep things clean and simple. We actually treat categories as tags, though. Because WP categories is the more widely used functionality of WordPress of the two, we’ve decided to go with categories over tags.
• Add link to the item source directly in the feed item content, to make sure (sort of) that it stays with the unaltered post when it is fetched and possibly re-published from the Kaplak Stream.
• Cache all images locally to improve performance and avoid traffic spikes on source sites, when subsequent sites fetches images all way back from the source. Kaplak Stream hosts all images (for which we will probably be using Amazon S3) to ensure their availability for all sites which fetch items from the stream.
• It should also filter out spam and duplicate items. We still have to sort out however, what happens if an improved version of a post gets fed back into the Stream. Ultimately, we’d like users to be able to tag and categorize items according to the contexts they use them in, and be able to retrieve these back into posts in the stream.

In the process of setting this up I discovered Yahoo Pipes, which looks like a very useful tool taking in an amount of data (in a feed format), manipulate it and spit out a new feed. Experimented a bit with it, and found it a bit tricky to actually create something useful, but will no doubt give it some further attention. We may be able to use it for something.

Sometimes I prefer to visualize an idea using nothing else but notepad – or preferably just pen and paper, whatever I have in front of me. The ‘back of the napkin‘ philosophy fits well with me. In fact when I tidy up old stacks of paper once in a while, I always find sketched down ideas on the back of envelopes and in impossible places such as the backside of letters from the tax office. Do I archive it under that particular idea and project – or does it go into the tax papers stack?

The Kaplak Stream napkin model

Here’s an updated napkin model for Kaplak Stream which I recently created in Notepad :

This model shows the very basic idea of Kaplak Stream. The Arts and History websites are different sites, but have some tags or categories in common, such as ‘knights’ and ‘romantic’. But each site has no way of knowing about this; they may not even be aware of the other site’s existance. They’re separate systems, islands of information. A visitor clicking on a tag on the Arts site won’t see the items tagged the same on the History site. Now, when the feeds of both sites are fed into the Kaplak Stream, it allows new types of long tail sites to be created.

By pooling our feeds, we allow new contexts to be created. This can happen when feeds are extracted from the stream for particular tags or categories. When feeds are pooled, even tags and categories that are not used a lot on an individual website, may spawn new rich web contexts, which are capable of sending traffic back to the original publishers, but, what is more important, enable the distribution of products (via affiliate models) which are otherwise hard to sell in a mainstream context.

In this case a Knights site and a Romantic site can be easily created. Neither of these new sites could exist within the History or the Arts sites, but because we pool and channel the information from a wider range of sources, they can now.

Here’s the expanded version of the above model (which is also an improvement over the model, I previously posted on Kaplak Blog) :

As this model shows, linking back to feed publishers for increased visibility of their sites and contexts is a key feature of the network. Submit your feed and gain greater visibility, because more sites “on the way” will link back to your site. This is key for publishers to actually want in and be part of what we’re doing. However, this is just the short-term benefits.

Connecting the disconnected

When feeds are extracted from Kaplak Stream and into other niche contexts, publishers will connect more easily with these contexts and communities, empowering both publishers and communities, who would otherwise not know each other. Anything may arise from these new connections : meetups, exchange of ideas, products, etc. It is in this new context, that the sales of niche products are more easily arranged, probably most likely and easily via the use of affiliate programs.

As we have previously learned, attributing value to the context of finding information, rather than to any particular piece of information, is the more effective route to Kaplak’s goal, in an environment such as the web which literally explodes with new information every day. Creating very finely segmented sites will enable passionate users to more easily reference interesting niche material, i.e. create recommendations socially for interesting information items as well as products sold in these niche domains. Simply because there are now rich niche domains and contexts, which will be worthwhile the link, contrary to the situation before the aggregation and filtering, where the niche items were spread out all over the web – and very difficult and timeconsuming to find using search, bookmarking services, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon or Digg-type sites.

With time, some of these new niche sites and contexts may connect otherwise disconnected communities with each other and possibly even grow their own small communities, which will enrich those contexts even further with valuable context. The value of these new contexts do not depend on the short-term Google juice of linking back to sources I mentioned earlier. Instead, it thrives and builds on the social connections and recommendations, which now can rest on increasingly more bonified points of reference – and (probably with time) even greater tools for sharing than what we have right now.

What’s important for this project to succeed is to tag/categorize incoming items conveniently and precisely. We’ll continue to work and experiment with autotagging, but the best bet is (with time) to make tagging a social proces which can take place for each item all the way of it’s ‘journey’. For the time being however, we rely heavily on feed items being richly tagged by their source publishers. This is one challenge, we face right now.

Any ideas?

Because it’s so critical to what we do to thoroughly understand what’s at stake, it’s also vital that we invite input every step of the way. If nothing else we want to give you the opportunity to read, think and absorb our ideas, and go out and implement your own tools and architectures – for every step of our way. And when you’ve done that – come back and tell us about it. We’d love to learn more.

We have yet to setup proper forms for receiving feed submissions, but we’ve begun to receive them anyway. For the time being, please submit your feeds to The Kaplak Team or directly to me via Twitter or Identi.ca. Remember to give us a few keywords on the contents of your feed (just the most important ones).

The Kaplak Mailing List was an important part of the first website of ours at Kaplak.com. However it didn’t come to play the envisioned role in our business strategy; as a direct communications channel and method of communicating directly with our potential customers. As you may be aware, we have focused instead on building a somewhat active blog.

The blog offers a number of RSS feeds for your convenience, which can be read using any feed reader you prefer, and thus offer greater choice and ultimately convenience for most readers. It is not confined to people who have first signed up for our list, and it can be easily shared with others. It also means that every communications effort we make, be it here on the blog or in the wiki or via social messaging tools, help create transparency. The greater transparency and the more widely we can make our particular pool of information accessible, the less work for us, now and in the long run.

To clarify this change in strategy, in a operation of tidying up some of our loose ends today (and the mailing list is a big loose end), I wrote this email to all our mailing list signups :

Dear Kaplak Mailing List Subscriber,

You belong to a select group of people who once managed to locate our Mailing List at http://kaplak.com/ and find what we had to say there sufficiently interesting to sign up your email address for the list.

For a number of reasons, the Kaplak Mailing List didn’t come to play the envisioned role in our business strategy, as a communications channel. Instead we have focused on building a blog (now located at http://blog.kaplak.net/), which offers a number of RSS feeds for your convenience, which can be read using any feed reader you prefer.

As part of rebuilding our site structure, we’ve now taken all email adresses from the mailing list and grouped them in our GMail setup. We’ll maintain and add to this group to keep track of a larger group of people interested in Kaplak, including potential customers, investors, advisors, associates, developers and others generally interested. If you want to stay on this private list, you don’t have to do anything further. We’ll use this list only rarely, to direct attention to high points of interest. Among these, we’ll be sure to notify you when we launch our first product, the Kaplak Stream.

If you still want to keep up to speed with Kaplak, please follow our main Kaplak Blog feed here : http://blog.kaplak.net/feed/

Here’s a list of recent popular posts :

• Important Stuff | Tim O’Reilly : Work On Stuff That Matters
• Filtering The Web | The Big Questions
• The Tools We Use | Aggregation Tools For WordPress: The Pros And Cons of FeedWordPress and WP-o-Matic
• Internet Ecology | The Anthropology of YouTube
• Filtering The Web, Kaplak | The Structure of Kaplak Stream : Our Goal
• Filtering The Web | Everybody is an Aggregator

We also use Twitter, Facebook, Identi.ca and a host of other online services. Find a non-exhaustive list on this page : http://kaplak.com/contact/ and feel free to connect with us any time on any of the online services we use, which are convenient for you.

On the other hand, if you want out of the mailing list, have become disinterested with Kaplak and don’t want to have more to do with us, please do mail us back and we’ll remove you from the list right away. We really don’t want to waste your time. We’d also really like if you said a few words about why you want to be removed from the list, if you care to share that with us.

Thank you for your attention and perseverance!

Yours Sincerely,
The Kaplak Team

–
Kaplak has chartered unknown waters and reached strange shores :
http://kaplak.com – http://blog.kaplak.net

One of the reasons hinted at in the email is simply financial. Our early customer meetings and experiences revealed to us that we had a very difficult time processing the knowhow gained into our system, at the speed we were generating it. We simply didn’t generate any income from our activities and had trouble financing our time.

Therefore, it became critical to us sometime in the spring of 2008 to focus on planning and executing a re-build of Kaplak’s root site and connected sites, in a way which makes it economically feasible for us to intake large amounts of information, and be able to apply this information to our business. The cornerstones of this re-build are the Kaplak Blog and the Kaplak Wiki, and what we call Kaplak Stream (working title). Kaplak Stream will be our first product and our first dash at connecting the dots and making niche producers more visible to their interested target markets.

I’m in the process of setting up Kaplak Stream (working title), a project we (part) deliberately have been pretty silent about – at least in it’s deeper ramifications, even though we did touch upon the wider picture of feeds and aggregators recently, when I discussed Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody in a recent post.

Kaplak Stream is a network of websites, in fact, it is a network of Planet-like websites, each dedicated to a particular niche. Using automatically and semi-automatically fed RSS feeds as our vehicle, Kaplak Stream consiste of an ever-growing pile of niche websites, which all are part of our new WordPress MU install. These sites can be homegrown and consist of from just one to several articles, or they can be houses of RSS feeds, fed from our customers’ own sites and preferred services and related web sites of interest, which offer publicly accessible feeds.

The feeds from each subsite are then fed back into the main channel (the great “planet” site), as well as all the external sites, which tap whatever is interesting to them. We’ll also tap into the greater Kaplak Stream from the Kaplak Wiki, where pages will be fed relevant items based on categories and tags used.

Here’s an illustration of the feed traffic and link love created by Kaplak Stream :

What’s important is this network of niche sites help build context for the niche products offered by our customers. We aim to create very low-maintenance sites, which will help sell some of the “slim end of the long tail” products, we mean to help our customers sell.

These marginal products only sell the occasional copy, so each site cannot cost too much to maintain. This is where syndication comes into the picture. With syndicated sites, we can maintain rich contexts easily and we don’t need lots and lots of traffic for each site individually to pay the bills.

How does this help me sell my product?

So how do you sell with Kaplak Stream? You opt in for a site in the stream, free of charge, with a subject and RSS content of your own choosing. For now, your product must use an external affiliate program and a shopping cart provided by third party services. Products/widgets must also support a revenue sharing model, which shares revenue with publishers.

Each site is focused on one product or few related products only. The widgets for these can be placed at site-level in the sidebar. In this case, Kaplak will be an affiliate publisher of your product.

Alternatively, products may be sold at post-level, i.e. from widgets included in posts in a feed. For these sales, you (or anyone else responsible for the feed) will be the publisher. If unused, the sidebar will be utilized to sell another related product in the Kaplak household, if applicable, or house our usual ads and other stuff circulated among the sites. It’s also in this space we’ll begin to introduce our URLsale widgets when we get that far.

Once the site has been created, you can nurse it and cultivate it – or simply leave it alone and forget about it. Until it makes the occasional sale. A site can be a silent sleeper for years, until someone re-discovers it’s existance and makes a purchase. In Kaplak Stream, this is not a problem.

Only when your product makes a sale, do you earn a dime, which in turn is shared with the publisher. Making the sale is not the only benefit of using Kaplak Stream however. The greatest benefit may be the improved targeted visibility created by the linking activity in the stream. Feeds from Kaplak’s niche sites may easily be pulled back into niche sites everywhere, which adds context and value to these sites, to the advantage of their owners and communities. The links across the network and pingbacks in WordPress MU makes it easier to connect the dots between “separated” islands of niche contexts. Kaplak Stream could be the first step in our ‘making the world’s ends meet’.

As with everything we do, this project may be subject to change – any time. Much in the setup depends on further testing and development, particularly of the plugins we use.

Preparing a battle plan for integrating Wordpress µ (or MU) with our network of sites. I will commence the execution of this plan at a non-disclosed time sometime in the near future. The Kaplak Blog and Kaplak Wiki will remain online but the site in our root will be completely removed and therefore unreachable. This in effect terminates the old Kaplak site in favour of a complete Wordpress µ install. We will work from there to rebuild the root site with new texts and the subsite network reachable from subdomains to kaplak.com, which will be known as the Kaplak Stream.

I’ve never done an install of WP µ before. I’ve performed lots of installs of web software before, but I have no prior experience with µ. Installing web packages I’ve usually taken the backups I felt were necessry but otherwise simply plunged ahead and learnt from my mistakes. I’ve always learned to prepare mentally for a one way process of steep learning dotted with the occasional tumble, which makes me spend days beforehand searching for other users’ experiences. A little planning and knowing the road ahead doesn’t hurt. So I’ve spent a lot of time these past days reading up on other people’s experiences and problems, to get an idea about what to expect. Unfortunately, what we’re doing with µ doesn’t seem to be the usual thing – so we will no doubt learn things the hard way, either way.

Here’s what the general plan looks like right now :

1. Install WP µ package in our root
2. Create the pages we need to make the root site functionable
3. Create the initial round of subsites we need for archival purposes. Every external service we use will be set up to feed a site of it’s own. I.e. all of our bookmarks will be archived from delicious, all our tweets will be archived from Twitter, and so on.
4. Install and make sure WP-o-matic (or another appropriate automatic RSS feeder) is acting up to speed. WP-o-matic should be fully compatible with WP µ.
5. Feed our archived streams back into one major subsite channel, which will be the Kaplak Stream, as well as to other subsites to which they are of interest.

This completes our first setup and the site is functional. It only starts getting interesting, though. Next, we generate any subsite we wish at a particular time by feeding it the appropriate RSS lumps of interest. For this work we will use Google Reader to begin with, with it’s built-in tagging option, which makes it easy to generate new feeds from existing RSS feeds. Each subsite aims to sell preferably one product only, or a very limited range of products. To begin with, these will be products made available via affiliate programs such as (but not limited to) Amazon Associates, eJunkie and RedAntenna, depending on the product. These sites need not be popular, nor updated or visited frequently, but will seek to stay highly focused on their subject of interest, in order to offer as rich a context as possible when they are visited, commented upon or linked to. This makes it easy and valuable for related sites and communities to tap into these streams, as they build up lasting value.

This early sketch illustrates how a product/widget from a niche producer is made visible in a niche context somewhere else on the web :

A web user and niche producer (A) encounters a Kaplak widget on a website, he knows and trusts (B). The producer finds Kaplak can be used to distribute a product of his own. He decides to sign up, and subsequently uploads a product and submits basic product information.

The Kaplak interface (C) spits out a widget a.k.a. a “kaplaklink” for the product. The widget is also published to the Kaplak market network, from where it may be fed via RSS or other means, to subscribers within particular channels or categories.

A website-owner (D) run what we may term a “filtersite” (E). D feeds or filters widgets from the Kaplak network from a range of categories or tags, in order to capitalize on sales, i.e. earn a share of kaplak from each sale made on E. His motive is primarily of commercial character. Among the widgets filtered is the widget for A’s new product.

In order to avoid what we term the mainstream problem, i.e. that just a handful of “hits” are prominently displayed and amplified, Kaplak depends on filtering sites of all kinds, i.e. index websites which seek to filter Kaplak’s feeds according to particular specialized interests or criteria. We have a lot of this kind of websites in the online landscape today, many of which are financed by advertising. Kaplak will offer one more type of income for index type sites, and one which may allow a sharper edge in filtering, because the size of income streams may not always be proportional with the amount of traffic generated by a site. A large site may suffer from greater problems in making the “slim end of the long tail” presentable, than a smaller and more well-defined niche-friendly site will. Both may be filtering sites, though, basically performing the same task of feeding and filtering.

The widget from A on D’s site is now discovered by (F), who puts the link into her blog, because she finds that the product is interesting and relevant to the article she’s about to publish. F’s blog is visited by a much more select crowd than D’s site, who rely mainly on search as a source of traffic. F gains a lot of attention through a social networking site popular within her field of expertise (G). Motives here weighs more heavily towards the professional, contextual, idealist side than the money side. F earns a fair share from her Kaplak widgets though, as her choice in widgets is much more finetuned to her readers, than the bulk filtering of D, which earns from a few sales of a lot of products (the “pure” Chris Anderson model).

Finally, a friend from G alerts another friend, who happens to be the owner of a nichesite (H), which deals particularly with A’s subject and finds the new product intensely interesting. The regulars of H knows the deal and can instantly see the value of A’s product. A’s product finds a potential market here, he otherwise wouldn’t have found.

None of H’s users would have discovered A’s product without Kaplak, even if it was accessible via Google or filesharing networks. First, none of them would know about the project. Had one of them actively searched for the product, she would have had to pick very delicate keywords, endure the timeconsuming process of browsing search results to page 7 or 8, only to discover a dead link to a torrent, which may have been alive and kicking, but of which there are no seeders.

The owner of website H publishes A’s widget from both professional and financial motives. The professional, interested motives weighs in the heaviest, but since the site engages A’s target group, the collective sales pays off decently in kaplak, which contribute to financing the site. H’s traffic may be slight – if the group of “regulars” is sufficiently interested and the price right, then H need not care greatly about the amount of traffic.

The producer A expands his market with H’s users and anyone who made a transaction along the widget’s “route”, who wouldn’t otherwise know about the product. The process repeats itself, this time with one of H’s users in the role as producer A, who discovers she may use Kaplak to distribute one of her own products. This process happens across Kaplak’s entire global network, with the intensity dependant on the demand for the products offered by users, and on the ease or difficulty by which a product/widget can gain an entrance into the niche environments and markets “in the other end”.

The sketch illustrates what Kaplak’s primary product is. As we’re on the web, all sites and actors in the above diagram are accessible to everyone all the time, from anywhere they may be situated in the world. The problem is knowing the product exists and next, to find where it is. Search engines such as Google and others offer one model, filesharing index sites such as The Pirate Bay and others offer another. Both however, are primarily based on active search for information, from the buyer’s end.

Kaplak offers a third model, which brings the product to the target group, through the web services and communities the target group uses every day. When Kaplak works, web users will find interesting links/widgets on sites and services they regularly visit and trust, before they even know they want the particular product – and long before anyone even thought of using Google or something else to go look for it. Finally, the Kaplak model can be fully financed by the market, which is opened up, rather than rely on upfront payments from our niche producer, before he or she knows if there is a market.

Over the next handful of articles I’m going to dive into what Kaplak is and how it works, as far as I can at the present time. This first article is a slightly modified re-run of the background article from our old main site :

Background

Originally, kaplak is an old maritime judicial term of Dutch origin. For bringing a shipment of stores safely to port, a skipper could be paid a bonus, i.e. káplak, calculated as a percentage of the shipment’s value. This served as financial compensation for the risks taken and hazards overcome at sea. Káplak literally means ‘fabric for a cap’, with a reference to the incentive it provided to stay on deck even in bad weather.

The internet is like an ocean, travelled by data packages. It is happening all the time, everywhere, at the same time. It is a global network of instant communication, of conversations, information and knowledge. Of human experience, artworks and products in all kinds and forms. As long as it can be digitized, i.e. made understandable and transportable by computers and cables, it can be made accessible on the internet.

In a global world of ‘unlimited shelf space’, as Chris Anderson coined it, there’s a market even for products on the very slim end of the long tail. If you can approach your market precisely enough, using the internet, you’ll be able to reach the unknown destinations, which will make your product meet it’s niche customers. This is one of the great promises of the internet, but it doesn’t come without problems.

Your problem

How do you get noticed? – and more importantly, noticed by your target audience, on an internet which grows by millions of new websites alone every month?

How do you get paid? How do you get safe and fast transfers of your digital goods and digital money, which will allow you to keep doing what you do best, without the hazzle of setting up and running your own ebusiness and marketing networks?

Visibility

The World Wide Web alone grew by a staggering 4.4 million websites from april to may 2007, and this number is increasing. Paradoxically, while all this information is made available and accessible all the time, to everyone, at the same time, it also makes it difficult to find a particular piece of information, if you don’t know where to look. We come to depend on recommendations, from people and companies we trust, to find what we’re looking for. Search engines deliver such recommendations. Your friends, colleagues and social networks provide others.

One method of communicating our preferences and recommendations is to create hyperlinks on the World Wide Web, which points others to interesting files, information and communities. As the amount of hyperlinks on the internet increase, however, we also need methods to filter the hyperlinks; to select certain criteria for collecting, ordering and presenting them.

At Kaplak, we don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel. Search engines and web indexes are doing great jobs at filtering information, answering queries and creating visibility on the World Wide Web. But we recognize a few significant problems with search as the only method of filtering and finding information.

In order to search for something, you need to know what you’re looking for, at least generally. You need to be motivated enough to take your time to use a search engine, type in your query and sort your results according to your preferences. For some queries and products, this process can take hours, as the most interesting results (typically niche-oriented results) remain buried deep down the results pages. And of course, you can’t search for information or products you don’t know about.

Even peer-to-peer filesharing technologies such as bittorrent, which otherwise holds great promises, has difficulty tackling files with less-than-mainstream interest. One has to be something of a hero to keep one’s bittorrent client open all night, in order to seed one’s work for the lone leecher which stumbles upon it by chance.

A large amount of information and products remains unseen by their potential customers and markets. You come to depend on marketing agencies and banner advertisements in order to be seen. Most marketing schemes however, are not precise enough to reach very delicate groups and environments. And you need to have established your business model, in order to use them.

Making your ends meet

Cheaper hardware, internet connections and free software make it economically feasible today for almost anyone to create a business model using the internet. This has so far led to a tremendous growth of thriving webbased businesses, whose economical and social ramifications have possibly not yet been fully understood or recognized.

Business models on the web, however, have mostly been thought in terms of luring customers away from whatever they were otherwise doing on the web, into ‘visiting’ a specific website. This website typically offers particular ‘webshop’ software, handling inventory presentation and customer monetary transactions. Alternatively, the website offers all its contents for free, relying instead on income from advertisments, of which some of the least intrusive are the popular text ads from Google and others.

In either case, if you want to sell something using the web, you’ve also been left with the task of maintaining a website and administrating online transactions, taking time from what you do best; creating new products. If you’re successful, you soon face the choice of hiring help to administrate your growing online business, or cut back on the hours spent creating products. This makes you a manager, which is great, if this is what you want, but not so great, if you want to focus on creating and working within your field of expertise.

If you sell very little or receive only slight traffic, none of this is feasible. Your time will be spent optimizing your website, and your traffic will be too insignificant to bring you any income from your advertisements. Perhaps you will be tempted to make your products more ‘mainstream’ to attract more customers, in order to make an income from your ads. If you receive great amounts of traffic, but still sell very little or otherwise fail to monetize your traffic, you will be hit with bandwidth and bottleneck problems too.

So, apart from tools which help your products ‘be seen’ by your target customers, as a niche producer you also need tools, which gives you an income, but without the time consumption needed to necessarily run your own webshop. At the same time, it can’t hurt if your product can help others finance their websites and internet businesses.

Kaplak’s offering

We’re cultural niche producers ourselves. We know what it means to make a living on the slim end of the long tail. Kaplak was launched, when we realized, that no other market or non-market actors today on the internet seemed to offer distribution tools, which could help us meet our present challenges. Sure, there are distribution tools if you want to give away your work for free, but none which solves your problem at the core : making money while doing what you do best.

As niche producers, our products have often targeted audiences and markets, which are so slim, that setting up and running a website and ebusiness, along with ads or other methods required to market and sell, is impractical and often deemed inefficient and unprofitable from the very beginning.

Kaplak is a tool which will seek to remedy these problems for our customers. What Kaplak is about, is creating economically sound distribution methods and tools for these kinds of products, which may not sell much, but still do find their markets.

How it works

Using Kaplak can be boiled down to these three steps :

1. Provide your product (or a link to it) and a few details of information.
2. Pick your price.
3. Determine how much of your earnings you’re willing to part with in Kaplak.

Kaplak will then spit out a widget, i.e. a small piece of code, which can easily be inserted on a website. You can use the widget yourself, on your own website, and you can distribute it to others. You can even just leave it on the Kaplak network for others to find it and redistribute it, if and when, your product is in demand.

Your product is made visible and sold by local “skippers” (i.e. website owners, admins, forum visitors etc.) on the niche websites and networks your potential customers use. They help bring your product safely to harbour, across the oceans of the internet, and in turn earn their share of Kaplak. Your product helps them finance their work,
while you sell your product in a place, you wouldn’t otherwise have reached.

You don’t need ads for your product sprinkled all over the internet or on mainstream media websites, visited by masses of people, who could care less about your not-so-mainstream product. What you need is well-placed and precise recommendations in those niche environments and web communities, your customers visit.

Company and financing

Kaplak is owned and developed by Morten Blaabjerg. A number of partners have acquired warrants for b-shares in Kaplak, including our hosting partner MC Solutions.

Kaplak’s first goals are :

1. To present a public online platform, which presents the project and invites initial customers and collaborators.
2. To create a company capable of building a first, early version of our service and sell this to our first customers.
3. To document this process and generate income streams to finance further development.
4. To create a publicly accessible workspace in the form of a wiki. The Kaplak Wiki will host our growing information base and invite participation from all interested in developing Kaplak.
5. To present a thorough second edition of the Kaplak business plan aimed at venture capital, and spend at least 10% of our time to actively develop and sustain durable investor relations.

Sounds interesting?

Please sign up, if you may be interested in Kaplak as a future user and customer, or simply would like to know more, follow our demos and our online events. We will be happy for your support. It helps us, that we can tell our investors, that we have interested customers waiting. We’d also like to ask you to take our online surveys, when we get around to that. We believe we can create a product, which is most useful to you as a niche producer or consumer, by inviting your input and participation to the process, at a very early stage.

We also welcome you to follow our blog, which is also available via RSS. Our RSS feed makes it possible for you to post the latest Kaplak headlines on your own website, blog or online profile, to tell others about this project, or simply enjoy our latest articles with your favourite RSS reader.

Investors

Kaplak issues warrants for shares in Kaplak to interested parties. Please contact us for further information, if you are interested in joining Kaplak as an investor. We’ll be happy to help you with further details.

I’ve sometimes experienced people who won’t accept invitations to connect with me on social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Sometimes because they don’t know me or believe they don’t know me. “Knowing someone” is an extremely relative concept with the advent of the internet, though I can also see the grounds on which LinkedIn would want to hold on to this concept.

In other cases, people are afraid they may get spammed or get tricked into spending lots and lots of precious time on meaningless online jabbering and “click this to see who’s on your page” kind of stuff. Others, like my friend the science fiction writer Palle Juul Holm, simply hates what he calls the “americanized categories” of LinkedIn which doesn’t even allow “retired” or “literature” as categories.

To tell you the truth, I hate this too. I hate and dislike fixed categories, because they shape people’s minds in bad ways. In fact, I hate social networks. Social relations there are rarely true and meaningful relations, and I don’t want to waste my time installing useless applications which waste other people’s time. I hate to waste my time on useless crap. I like quality and I like meaningful conversations.

Yet I am a member of more than a handful social networks, and will add a lot more as we go along in Kaplak. Why? I’ll tell you why in a minute.

I have and have always had great contempt for people, institutions or societies which seek to enslave people. Be it slaves to certain kings or rulers, or slaves to certain ideas or modes of thought. The worst idea is probably the habit of believing that one can do no difference in one’s life, which one grows into, when one is not free. “The slave is not free, as long as he considers himself a slave”, to paraphrase one of my heroes, the German philosopher Max Stirner.

I believe people grow, create and live their lives best as free, empowered individuals, and that the world will be a greater place to be when as many people can be and can do so. I believe people who are free, and free to seek and find information, will be wiser people.

One of my greatest passions is tools and services, which empower individuals to create their own online architectures. Because using and building our own tools (i.e. free software) is what makes us free, knowledgeable and capable of change. With free software, i.e. software which can be freely distributed and tinkered with, we can modify the online as well as the offline digital architectures we use ourselves.

This is why I love wikis, why I love decentralized structures and p2p-based architectures, which empower individual members to exercise their influence, bandwidth, harddrive spaces and every bit and byte of their communicative and hacking capabilities to mold what they use so that it fits their needs.

The antithesis to this, of course is any “system”, which create architectures, that cannot be changed by it’s individual users. Systems which are the fruits of what Richard Stallman (visit Stallman’s personal website here) with disdain and contempt in his voice calls “proprietary software”. Facebook and LinkedIn are prime cases of such enormous systems, which are based on fixed categories and variables, which cannot be modified by users. Within this system, of course, there are lots of things which can be modified, but only after you accept the premises of say Facebook’s view of the world, which is “users”, “friends”, “pages”, “groups”, “walls”, “applications” and so on. One cannot break up and shape the architecture itself.

These systems are clearly bad, IMO, for our freedoms and capabilities of building our own architectures.

Why do I support and encourage the use of these systems then? Why do I invite others to take part in services such as these? One very important reason is that we can’t do anything, unless we’re connected. And as long as any platform gives me the opportunity to reach out and connect with others – most importantly those I want to know and who wants to know me, but don’t know about me – I will use it, as long as it’s free and doesn’t give me headaches. As long as it gives others an opportunity to reach out and communicate back, it’s a tool we may be able to use in our broader scope of things to come. It’s a tool for connecting, so that we may share and shape those much deeper and meaningful conversations – which will form more durable relations, which are beneficial to us in the long term. Which may help us break down the walls and empower more people to create their own architectures.

If we can, for instance, use the Facebook platform to promote Kaplak’s widgets and allow our users to sell products there, we’ll do it with this perspective in mind. We have a focus beyond the categories of “knowing someone” or being someone’s “friend” on social networks, which is crucial to what we do in Kaplak. It is not just about “selling things” and making money, when we try to expand on social networks. We do not dislike money or earning them, but as a company we want to add real value. Our primary capital for doing this is durable connections and ressourceful people, not money or “friends” on Facebook.

If this post resonates with you, we’d like to invite you to join our new Kaplak group on Linkedin, or alternatively, to ‘become a fan’ or group member of our Facebook group. Not just as a number in our friend count, but as someone capable of speaking back, here, there or in other contexts or platforms of your preference and choosing. As always, you’ll find us on Twitter and del.icio.us, among other places :-)

This video is a few words about our online method and work ethos, which is greatly inspired by what has been coined “the wiki way”, by our friends at About Us, among others (and yet others).

I’ve previously written about Kaplak’s multi-platform strategy and compared our business aspirations to the world of grafitti painting in our local neighbourhood. We want to create a company, which is capable of inviting “tags” and “shouts”, i.e. inputs from outside our company, so that we may, in the process and with time, learn how to do a great “piece”, so to speak. Inviting outside input is more difficult, than one would imagine, as everything in the business world as is, is built around keeping closed circles closed and creating stiff hierarchies, which are detrimental to the very kind of open, global process, we mean to help kick off and participate in. By all means, we want to steer clear of the corporate thickness, which quickly creeps into a company and prevents it from doing bold things.

Thus, we mean the “wiki way” in broader terms, than for just the work of building a wiki. We consider it a way of doing business and a mindset, which we need, in order to maintain a broad online presence over a number of different platforms and web architectures, without being overencumbered by the sheer vastness of what we’re doing – “making the world’s ends meet”, as we say, i.e. making financially viable connections between niche products and global niche markets.

Building and writing a blog sometimes can be like working against the clock. Posts are time-stamped and articles read and digested in the order they are published.

Not so with wikis. They evolve slowly over time, as additions to the wiki accumulate, from vastly different and otherwise territorially and contextually dispersed contributors. A wiki is built from time to time, when there’s something to add. A page can be an inactive dead end for months or even years, and it can see a sudden outburst of activity from one moment to the other, when it finds it’s use in a new context.

We understand and implement our online strategy much in this way. We use web tools and services, when they are useful to us, and we try to add bits and pieces to our network, when we need to. We don’t write blog posts every day, just for the sake of it or just to draw in traffic. However, we do work systematically to find explicit ways to add information or new contacts to our network. Precisely where the activity occurs – whether it happens on Twitter or Friendfeed, or somewhere else – is less important, as long as our pieces and nitbits are closely interlinked, and as long as we can feed stuff from one platform to another. The last thing is a high priority, which is why RSS and widgets are important. But what is even more important, is that in most contexts, not just in our wiki, we invite replies, comments, reactions, input, if just for the rare case, when someone in some unexpected context stumbles upon one of the bits and pieces, which help he or she activate that page and connect with us.

I’ve previously written about the merits of attributing value to the context of finding information, rather than on any particular piece of information. This makes sense in an environment which literally explodes with new information, and shows no signs it’s gonna stop in any foreseeable future.

Google seems to think so too. After all, this is what Google do, and do really well. But it’s true no less of a somewhat overlooked product of Google’s. I’m talking about Google’s Custom Search. This service allows anyone to composit their own search engine, and place it on their own website. More accurately, your custom search engine filters Google’s index of webpages. Say you want a search engine on your site about your niche subject only to return results which relates to your site. It’s simple : type in your site name, and allow Google to show results from your site as well as all the sites your site links to. Or you can be even more specific, or list a range of sites you want results to be taken from. Or you’d like Google to still show results from the web, but emphasize results from your own site – this is also easily doable.

The only problem so far with Google’s Custom Search has been on the one hand that Google’s crawlers don’t seem to index every website too tightly and too frequently, and on the other, that results are still based on PageRank. Say you want your users to find a great piece on your blog about a particular subject, when they search for that subject, but that piece isn’t greatly linked to by other sites or articles. Chances are, that Custom Search will show a largely irrelevant, but greatly linked to article from another site, or simply not show that post at all, if it hasn’t been properly indexed. Your built-in blog search, such as WordPress’ search, will find that article very fast, because it searches your database directly. For smaller sites, local search as we know it, is still much more effective.

However, as sites grow and we as internet users and bloggers spread our activities over many sites and platforms, platform-specific search is too limited. We begin to look for more tailormade solutions. Google’s Custom Search is one, but there are others who want a piece of the action.

New kid on the block

Lijit is an internet startup based in Boulder, Colorado, which offers a promising version of “local” or “contextualized search”, which searches one’s blog, “content” (on sites such as YouTube, Flickr and many others) and the network of sites and “friends” your online activities connect you to. We’ve already created a Kaplak search engine powered by Lijit, and the Lijit widget is featured in the outer right column on this blog. I think Lijit could potentially be a very useful addition to the Kaplak toolbox. I plan to expand this search engine with further feeds and sites as our network and activities grow.

When I first tried Lijit, I wasn’t satisfied with the search results. I searched for a direct title in one of our blog posts, and it didn’t come up. As the impatient web customer I am, not hesitant to make a fuss about my problems with a free online service – on another free online service, I posted my quibbles on Twitter. It turns out, Lijit is on Twitter too, and so is Micah Baldwin, who works for Lijit and took time out to answer my quibbles.

It turned out Lijit based their first version on Google’s Custom Search, while developing their own web crawler. Switching Kaplak’s search to Lijit’s own crawler was a huge improvement from Google’s occasional crawl, and made me look much more enthusiastically at what this small team of extremely talented people are doing. I take my hat off for a company which acts so swiftly in response to “customer” sentiments, and make it a priority to help their users along with such friendliness. There are a lot of companies who could learn so much from Lijit. Micah and Lijit gives the expression “listening to the groundswell” a whole new meaning.

I like the freshness of Lijit and I like the results after being switched to their own crawler. I have only a few quibbles with it now. It’s got what I’d call some weaknesses in the versatility department, because I can’t control and finetune texts, messages and included sites/webpages as much as I’d like to and was quickly getting accustomed to in my short period of experience using Google’s Custom Search. For instance, I found all of my del.icio.us network automatically included in the search engine, where I’d like the opportunity to handpick whose links got to be included. Lijit’s search engine also wants to categorize results very neatly into “my blog” (even though the Kaplak Blog is not precisely “mine” – it’s the company blog and maintained by me, but not “mine”), “my content” and “my network”. What if we (which we’re probably going to) put the widget on our wiki? – that’s not exactly “mine” either. Our Kaplak universe is not so neatly organized, and while I do like the “Lijit picks” category, I prefer being able to scrap all categorization schemes altogether, get our own adsense stuff on the search results and just get on with finetuning and putting in more sites and feeds to give our visitors the best possible experience.

Lijit can potentially be a great key to tying together the many different platforms we operate on in Kaplak – and one we’d even pay for, if they included premium options we needed. As a company, we still do need search, and if Lijit could potentially even crawl user and product profile pages on our later-upcoming Kaplak Marketplace, we’d have something here, which we’d probably like to pay good human money for.

Conversational search

You can find most of my conversation with Micah via Summize, an online service which has built a search engine on top of Twitter, searching conversations on Twitter in realtime.

Imagine a service which have taken upon itself the daunting task of searching all things on Twitter instantly and is capable of threading and translating posts to and from numerous languages – globally. Then you have Summize.

Using Twitter a lot these last few months, I’ve found Summize indispensible to keep track of tweets, users and subjects. I’ve also used it for market research, i.e. “listening” to what other users are twittering. I find this stuff utterly incredible. There’s a lot of things happening in the search business these days.

I’m sure this is only the beginning.

[EDIT : Twitter's acquisition of Summize has broken the above link to the Summize search with my conversation with Micah. Here's a similar search on the new http://search.twitter.com which supposedly replaces Summize...]