Andy Grove used to say (and perhaps he still does!) that only the paranoid survive. Google is helping us paranoid folks survive! I love this view of the future. Although, given Google's track record, I'd say it will be more like 2010 when all of these services should be available (beta starting next year of course!).
Thanks James!
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Blog Analytics Tool - MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is a simple tool that provides bloggers with a very straight-forward way to determine what external links their visitors are choosing.
Blogs and feeds have different requirements for analytics than most web properties. MyBlogLog helps answer an important question for bloggers: What external links are my visitors choosing? MyBlogLog provides their customers with some javascript to allow them to wrap an onclick event around external links.
Good idea. It probably needs to get wrapped into a larger web analytics offering to provide richer overall traffic data. But for a free tool that's so easy to deploy, this is a smart start for bloggers who would like to understand more about where their site is driving traffic.
Blogs and feeds have different requirements for analytics than most web properties. MyBlogLog helps answer an important question for bloggers: What external links are my visitors choosing? MyBlogLog provides their customers with some javascript to allow them to wrap an onclick event around external links.
Good idea. It probably needs to get wrapped into a larger web analytics offering to provide richer overall traffic data. But for a free tool that's so easy to deploy, this is a smart start for bloggers who would like to understand more about where their site is driving traffic.
Filed in: blog technology
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Paying (for) Attention
For awhile now I've been watching a parallel analytics field getting started and I believe we ought to be discussing the implications within the web analytics world. I'm talking about attention. It's based on a specification that the fine folks at Technorati started, with many others joining them in the definition process, but no analytics vendors as far as I can tell.
In short, the idea behind attentiontrust is that my analytics data (called attention data) is mine. Here are the "rights" as defined by attention.org:
Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
Mobility:You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.
Expect to see some interesting work around this area. A local Portland company, Attensa, has released a slick RSS reader for Outlook, and is working on other tools to help folks manage their feeds and leverage the attention spec.
At Web2.0 this week, the attentiontrust folks released a Firefox recorder extension that sends your attention data to the attention service you choose. It seems clear that this is an early attempt to get this tool out to kick the tires a bit. The tool sends your "clickstream" data to a "trusted" service. The only service available currently is with acmeattentionservice (who I believe should add a bit more to their website if they want to be perceived as trusted!).
I'll talk more about the underlying technology in a subsequent post. If you'd like to understand more about what the founders of attentiontrust are thinking, check out this very long but quite informative article.
Note too that Paul Miller and Michael Arrington over at Tech Crunch have written about attentiontrust's efforts this week.
In short, the idea behind attentiontrust is that my analytics data (called attention data) is mine. Here are the "rights" as defined by attention.org:
Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
Mobility:You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.
Expect to see some interesting work around this area. A local Portland company, Attensa, has released a slick RSS reader for Outlook, and is working on other tools to help folks manage their feeds and leverage the attention spec.
At Web2.0 this week, the attentiontrust folks released a Firefox recorder extension that sends your attention data to the attention service you choose. It seems clear that this is an early attempt to get this tool out to kick the tires a bit. The tool sends your "clickstream" data to a "trusted" service. The only service available currently is with acmeattentionservice (who I believe should add a bit more to their website if they want to be perceived as trusted!).
I'll talk more about the underlying technology in a subsequent post. If you'd like to understand more about what the founders of attentiontrust are thinking, check out this very long but quite informative article.
Note too that Paul Miller and Michael Arrington over at Tech Crunch have written about attentiontrust's efforts this week.
Filed in: attention
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Amazing photography and case study
I'll run a few articles on a new case study that has quite literally dropped into our laps. We're going to keep tabs on an analytics event as it unfolds, triggered through a slashdot effect (although this one was kicked off by boingboing). The impact is quite fantastic.
But first, let's talk about art. Martin Waugh is a colleague of mine (and a heck of a guy to boot) who has managed to develop several terrific photography jigs to take some truly wonderful photographs of drops. His work has recently been featured on boingboing, fark, yahoo picks (they did a very nice write-up), the nytimes, and of course, by our local WWeek.
Enjoy the great photography. I'll talk more about what's been happening to his traffic in the past few weeks since the boingboing bounce (a newly coined phrase!).
Here are a few samples:
Check them all out on Martin's site (http://www.liquidsculpture.com).
But first, let's talk about art. Martin Waugh is a colleague of mine (and a heck of a guy to boot) who has managed to develop several terrific photography jigs to take some truly wonderful photographs of drops. His work has recently been featured on boingboing, fark, yahoo picks (they did a very nice write-up), the nytimes, and of course, by our local WWeek.
Enjoy the great photography. I'll talk more about what's been happening to his traffic in the past few weeks since the boingboing bounce (a newly coined phrase!).
Here are a few samples:
Check them all out on Martin's site (http://www.liquidsculpture.com).
Email/blog etiquette
off topic...
Tim O'Reilly noted that he had received an email with the following note as part of the signature:
this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private
Apparently this signature has been described previously by Ross Mayfield. I've said similar things in previous emails, but hadn't thought of how to keep it simple like this. Good call.
Tim O'Reilly noted that he had received an email with the following note as part of the signature:
this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private
Apparently this signature has been described previously by Ross Mayfield. I've said similar things in previous emails, but hadn't thought of how to keep it simple like this. Good call.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Scaling a startup
Richard McManus has noted that Bloglines is losing ground in the RSS world, noting that they are "already no longer the market darling amongst bloggers". I like the simplicity of Bloglines and use it almost daily to keep tabs (literally!) on the world.
Richard's complains that Bloglines isn't adding new features fast enough. I agree that vendors need to keep their first-to-market edge. Bloglines has a large user-base and many of us a very devoted fans.
Mark Fletcher started Bloglines after already developing another excellent program, ONElist, which Yahoo bought (and is now well known to many people: Yahoo Groups). Mark responded directly to a post from Russell Beattie saying that Bloglines has been "...working hard on the back-end of the system." Russell was also noting that Bloglines has been "...really suffering since it got bought by Ask Jeeves".
The issue at this moment for Bloglines seems to be one of scaling. This is what I'd like to talk about now.
Developing a web application is relatively easy these days. Especially with the fantastic tools available and access to data ala web 2.0-style apps. Making the application scale requires a bit more work. Really making it scale requires a lot more work.
I don't know Mark, but I'm sure he knew this when he started. He had previously built, released and subsequently sold an amazing tool. He must have gone through the startup scaling lifecycle (I'll talk more about this in a subsequent post). Given what he knew, and given that he must have had access to at least a little bit of money to help get Bloglines off the ground, it's interesting to note that he still built Bloglines on the cheap.
In March of this year, Mark presented to eTech. I didn't attend the presentation, but I read through his materials and really enjoyed his approach. In his presentation materials he talked about his "garage philosophy" of startups. He talked about using "cheap technologies" and one note that I really liked was to "release early/release often". I believe a lot of folks have this same approach, and it serves them very well at the start.
What happens next though? Can a startup application scale quickly for rapid adoption as Bloglines has, then successfully transition to a truly scalable and stable architecture?
Again, I don't know Mark. But I do like that he's sold Bloglines to Ask Jeeves and he's still actively involved with the business - especially now that they have to do the less-than-glamorous job of trying to make the tool scalable and stable. I hope he/they succeed!
Richard's complains that Bloglines isn't adding new features fast enough. I agree that vendors need to keep their first-to-market edge. Bloglines has a large user-base and many of us a very devoted fans.
Mark Fletcher started Bloglines after already developing another excellent program, ONElist, which Yahoo bought (and is now well known to many people: Yahoo Groups). Mark responded directly to a post from Russell Beattie saying that Bloglines has been "...working hard on the back-end of the system." Russell was also noting that Bloglines has been "...really suffering since it got bought by Ask Jeeves".
The issue at this moment for Bloglines seems to be one of scaling. This is what I'd like to talk about now.
Developing a web application is relatively easy these days. Especially with the fantastic tools available and access to data ala web 2.0-style apps. Making the application scale requires a bit more work. Really making it scale requires a lot more work.
I don't know Mark, but I'm sure he knew this when he started. He had previously built, released and subsequently sold an amazing tool. He must have gone through the startup scaling lifecycle (I'll talk more about this in a subsequent post). Given what he knew, and given that he must have had access to at least a little bit of money to help get Bloglines off the ground, it's interesting to note that he still built Bloglines on the cheap.
In March of this year, Mark presented to eTech. I didn't attend the presentation, but I read through his materials and really enjoyed his approach. In his presentation materials he talked about his "garage philosophy" of startups. He talked about using "cheap technologies" and one note that I really liked was to "release early/release often". I believe a lot of folks have this same approach, and it serves them very well at the start.
What happens next though? Can a startup application scale quickly for rapid adoption as Bloglines has, then successfully transition to a truly scalable and stable architecture?
Again, I don't know Mark. But I do like that he's sold Bloglines to Ask Jeeves and he's still actively involved with the business - especially now that they have to do the less-than-glamorous job of trying to make the tool scalable and stable. I hope he/they succeed!
Monday, October 03, 2005
Dig it!
Dig is an old standby DNS utility. As internet technologies have matured, the use for dig has gone down, but it's still very useful for finding out who owns which domains or IP's and where they point on the internet.
I always forget what dig means, so of course, I consulted the DNS wiki, reminding me that dig is the "domain information groper". True name...I couldn't have made up anything better than that.
My favorite dig site is menandmice. Very simple, straight-forward and a good one to bookmark. Use it to confirm DNS configurations or find out what's going on behind the scenes on a site. To see an example of a fairly confusing DNS configuration, look up yahoo: http://www.menandmice.com/cgi-bin/DoDig?host=&domain=www.yahoo.com&type=A&recur=on. You'll see that they CNAME (or alias) their www site to Akamai, which has DNS servers all over the world (providing speedy, redundant and DOS-proof (mostly) DNS).
Why is this interesting? DNS is a core foundational component of the internet. All web requests must first be resolved by DNS. In order to make web analytics data collection fast and reliable, everyone must have a reliable DNS infrastructure and really understand how it works. Dig is a great tool for taking a closer look.
I always forget what dig means, so of course, I consulted the DNS wiki, reminding me that dig is the "domain information groper". True name...I couldn't have made up anything better than that.
My favorite dig site is menandmice. Very simple, straight-forward and a good one to bookmark. Use it to confirm DNS configurations or find out what's going on behind the scenes on a site. To see an example of a fairly confusing DNS configuration, look up yahoo: http://www.menandmice.com/cgi-bin/DoDig?host=&domain=www.yahoo.com&type=A&recur=on. You'll see that they CNAME (or alias) their www site to Akamai, which has DNS servers all over the world (providing speedy, redundant and DOS-proof (mostly) DNS).
Why is this interesting? DNS is a core foundational component of the internet. All web requests must first be resolved by DNS. In order to make web analytics data collection fast and reliable, everyone must have a reliable DNS infrastructure and really understand how it works. Dig is a great tool for taking a closer look.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)