LinkedIn, Algoed Up

Happy Tuesday.

Yesterday was a bad tooth day. I had my first root canal since I don’t want to remember when. 

The headphones with classic rock with Pandora, some deep bone antisthetic shots to fully numb my tooth, and a steady stream of nitrous oxide made a root canal a nearly fun experience. 

Endondontists everywhere, more nitrous for all root canals.

While I was down in the endo’s chair, I learned this AM how a small ISP in Pennsylvania “tanked a big chunk of the Web” yesterday.

According to a story from Slate’s “Future Tense,” a Web outage in the Northeast affected “Verizon users and thousands of Website serviced by Cloudflare.”

Cloudflare provides security and performance services to 16 million websites and demonstrates how “one little error…can cause swaths of the Web to break with little warning.”

The outage started around 7 a.m. and affected Verizon before spreading to Amazon Web Services, web-hosting provider WP Engine, live-streaming platform Twitch, Reddit, and several others.

While we wait for the 404s to fade away, know that Axios is reporting some big time algo changes over at LinkedIn.

Axios reports the company has made the algorithm changes over the past 12-18 months to favor conversations in the LI feed that cater to “niche professional interests,” as opposed to elevating viral content. 

Specifically, Axios reports LinkedIn is focused on:

• Elevating content that users are most likely to join in conversation, which typically means people that users interact with directly in the feed through comments and reactions, or people who have shared interests with you based on your profile.
• Elevating a post from someone closer to a users’ interests or network if it needs more engagement, not if it’s already going viral.
• Elevating conversations with things that encourage a response (like opinions commentary alongside content), as well as posts that use mentions and hashtags to bring other people and interests into the conversation and elevating posts from users that respond to commenters.
• Elevating niche topics of conversation will perform better than broad ones. (When it comes to length, LinkedIn says its algorithm doesn’t favor any particular format, despite rumors that it does.)

This matters because…advertisers want higher-quality engagement, which in turn leads to happier advertisers, which in turn leads to more ad revenue for LI.

Have *you* noticed a difference in your LI feed?

SmartPhone Needs A Bat Phone

So how’s that iOS 5 install going for everybody?

Yeah, it’s definitely slow on the uptake.  I was joking with some friends on Facebook last night that perhaps Apple should buy some new IBM Blade servers to help speed those downloads along.

But hey, at least the download/install eventually worked, slow though it may have been.  That juxtaposed with our friends at Research In Motion, whose BlackBerries have been on the blink since Monday of this week.

RIM is reporting now that everything’s back in working order, but this outage was a black eye that the BlackBerry simply *didn’t* need at this particular moment in time, considering all the other smartphone option available in the market these days.

Once I turned in my BlackBerry Bold for an iPhone 4, I must say, I’ve missed the BlackBerry service, particularly because I’m guilty of being an email junkie.

But I haven’t missed it so much to want it back, and it’s features were certainly not keeping up with the iPhone Joneses.

The BlackBerry for me was mostly a one-trick pony, whereas the iPhone 4 (which I’ll be learning about again for weeks with the iOS 5 upgrade) has been more of a Swiss Army knife.

During my recent trip to Bangalore, I didn’t bother taking my iPad, as I wanted to travel light and figured I could use the iPhone for a number of different things.

And I did.  I used it to watch movies, play games, and read books on the flight.

Once in Bangalore, I used it to take some pictures and shoot some videos of me almost getting run over in the Bangalore traffic. I also used Skype on the iPhone to call back to the States via the hotel wireless network.

I used it to keep track of all the social media activities I needed to follow while I was out.  And I did all this without even bothering with the local phone service or a proprietary network (I did all this via wi-fi).

So, I’ll stick with my iPhone 4 for now, as it gets the job done.

Speaking of jobs, Nielsen is out with a study informing us that 40% of TV viewers use their tablets or smartphones while they’re watching the boob tube. Whoa, this could lead to a major advertiser’s dilemma.  Do you advertise on the boob tube or the tablet and/or smartphone?

I’m gonna go with both.