In just over a year, our
Search Engine Land
group on LinkedIn has grown to nearly 3,600 members. Despite new features
being added for group management, I still feel like I’m banging my head against
the wall in hoping the groups become more usable. So, a short wish list
including the ability to message members directly rather than exporting email
addresses and block competitive ads:

• Allow For Moderated Discussions: We recently switched on
  discussions, and it’s pretty amazing how the community within our group is
  already interacting. But I’m still wary of someone starting a "discussion"
  only to use it for self-promotional purposes. Let the group owner see proposed
  discussions and allow them to go public if they meet with the owner’s
  approval.
   
• Allow For Block & Kill On Discussions: It’s nice that if someone
  submits an inappropriate news story, I can kill the story and block the user.
  Let me do the same for discussions.
   
• Email Or Feed Of Discussion Activity: Sure, I can see a digest of
  what discussions have been started in the group. However, unless I’ve missed
  it, there’s no way to see the actual comments (and there are plenty of them)
  in the discussion without going to the site. That would be nice.
   
• Customized Group Home Page: I don’t want discussion to be the top
  item on the page. I want news to be there. But I can’t alter this. Nor can I
  put up a welcoming message or any type of reminder that discussions and news
  articles shouldn’t be self-promotional. Give me some options here.
   
• Featured Discussion: No problem here! I just love that you have
  this feature allowing me to put a discussion at the top of the discussion
  list, if I so choose. Thanks!
   
• Auto-Submit News: Our group is tied to our news web site, so I’d
  like to auto-submit our news items. No can do, as best I can tell. Let me
  submit a feed or feed as the list owner of items I think the entire group
  should see.
   
• Allow For Moderated News Submission: As with discussions, as the
  list owner, I’d like to see and approve news items that are submitted, to make
  sure they’re not self-promotional.
   
• Message All Members/Members Newsletter: This is crazy. If I want to
  message everyone in my group, my only option is to start a discussion or
  export their names for use with a mailing list program. I don’t want to export
  names. We run double opt-in for our mailing list software. When I export from
  LinkedIn to contact members, I have to explain that we’ve taken there names
  from the LinkedIn list and that if they don’t want future mailings, they need
  to unsubscribe from the group. And whenever we do a new mailing (which is
  pretty rare, maybe three or four times per year), we have to pull a fresh list
  of members. This should all run from within LinkedIn, so that members can
  directly control their communication preferences.
   
• Block Competitive Ads: Seriously, my chief competitor gets to run
  ads for their conference targeting my group? Yeah, I’m not happy about that.
  Yeah, I know you need to make money. Still, let me block those ads — you can
  get ads from other people. Think I’m just whining? Go ask Google about
  backlash when anti-Proposition 8 web sites found that pro-Proposition 8 groups
  were running ads on their site. I should be able to block. And if I can’t
  block, then I might have to take my thriving community away from LinkedIn.

My wife, Lorna Harris, has been busy the past few months with a project she launched in beta last week: Boudica.com, a social news site for women.

Years and years ago, when we were both doing internet marketing, we got the Boudica.com name thinking it might be good for building a Yahoo-like directory of sites for women. Boudica was the queen of the Iceni tribe that fought the Romans when they came into England. She didn’t win that fight, but she has remained a woman icon over the centuries.

We never got that directory going — and as things have changed on the web, Lorna thought a social news site would be fun to try. It’s been great to watch her pull it all together on her own — finding the developer, working out the design and so on. Check out the site!

FYI, Boudica.com is the second of two “queen” domain names that we own. The first is Calafia.com, the name of the consulting company I started just before I left California back in 1996.

California takes its name from the heroine of a Spanish novel from the 1500s, Queen Calafia, who ruled over the mythical island of California. When Cortez discovered the Baja California peninsula, he apparently thought he’d found the “real” island of California.

Anyway, knowing I was leaving California, I figured naming my company after the state’s namesake was a way to take it with me (plus, the domain was available!). One more coincidence — former Google chef Charlie Ayers has a great love of California as well, so he’s also named his forthcoming restaurant after Calafia, too.

I’ve been reading

Theodore Rex — the biography of President Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund
Morris — and came to a fascinating part where Roosevelt got behind a
"simplified spelling" campaign to drop superfluous letters in words. Looking at
the spellings, I realized that Teddy Roosevelt would have loved the Web 2.0 era.

It’s a long standing joke how Web 2.0 names drop letters in words.
Flickr, Zooomr,
Moviemappr that I talked about on
yesterday’s Daily
SearchCast podcast are some examples. Compare them to some of the simplified
spellings Roosevelt was pushing for:

• clipt rather than clipped
• dasht rather than dashed
• dript rather than dripped
• fixt rather than fixed
• lapt rather than lapped
• ript rather than ripped
• winkt rather than winked

You’ll find some background on Roosevelt’s campaign
here, along with his list
here. Scanning through it, I
can’t see that there were actually any words where an e was dropped before an
ending r. So maybe he wasn’t so Web 2.0 after all.

Then again, looking through resource like Ludwig Gatzke’s

collage of Web 2.0 logos, there actually don’t seem to be that many
companies with missing letters after all. Still, perhaps some of Roosevelt’s
proposed spellings might inspire new companies while the venture capital well is
still spewing out Web 2.0 money.

By the way,

Four Concentric Circles of a Web 2.0 Name is a nice rundown on Web 2.0 names
classified into different groups.
Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character? is a new classic quiz that you must take.
And Web 2.0 and The
Letter “e”: The Interview is a must read interview that will make you
chuckle. From the opening:

The darling of the dot-com bubble — the letter “e” — is conspicuously
missing and has decided to take a wait and see attitude this time around.

In an exclusive e-mail exchange with our editors, the reclusive vowel talks
about what he’s been doing since the year 2000, his investment strategy, and
his thoughts on whether we’ve entered a new technology bubble.