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Social Linking sparks Adaptive Learning

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 18th, 2007
Tagged as: Long Tail, Projects, Shel Israel, Social Media

I am going to be absorbed by two things this week:

The first is something I caught off of Jack Humphrey’s fabulous Friday Traffic Report blog.

Called social power linking, in essence the theory is that Search Engines do not have the monopoly on surfers. By that I mean that surfers don’t start at a SE, visit a site, go back to the SE, visit the next site and so on. Once they’re surfing, they’re probably bouncing from one site straight to the next. I know that’s true for me - I use a non-personalized Google page as my homepage (to get off it ASAP), and only ever go back there as a starting point when my personal search conversation changes.

In between, I’m clicking around a lot, using one site’s links to head off to another, that I probably wouldn’t have found in in SE’s.

Here’s where the “social” aspect comes in and it’s particularly important in blogs, after all we bloggers will link to anyone!

Just like in SEO, Social Power Linking gets you in the way of passing traffic but not just SE traffic generated by a few, carefully guarded keywords. It’s about giving and getting. Being part of communities, throwing up and promoting your feeds within them and getting much more efficient and effective in what Jack describes as “marking your turf”.

There’s quite a lot to pick up on here so I’m going to spread it out over the week ahead and share a little of the experience online every day.

The other thing I’m involved in this week is getting my Web-Teach project into first gear. This is one of those ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind for longer than my pride will allow me to admit, and the reason it’s surfaced now is thanks in no small part to a recommendation by Shel Israel when replying to Tom Shelley of the Economist.

The idea of paying bloggers part of the Adsense (or similar) revenue  from their particular page is as simple (and obvious) as it is pure genius and exactly what my Web-Teach project is looking for.

Web-Teach (not its final name BTW) is essentially an adaptive online language teaching project, designed to offer language students access to relevant content (personalized fields of interest) that is also didactically in line with their linguistic needs. A way of giving what they want AND what they need. A kind of B5Media for language-learners if you will.

Trouble is, this idea is so far down the Long Tail it’s mind-bogglingly complex to undertake alone and that’s where Shel’s revenue-sharing idea steps in (if you’re reading this Shel, thanks for that).

So Web-Teach is now almost viable.  It’ll have an unglamorous launch but maybe, thanks to the power of social media, a bright future.

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