Archives for July 2006

Our Ads Move Out to the Wild

July 25, 2006 by nickw

Those of you browsing the html version of this site will probably have already noticed that the new Performancing Partners ad format has moved out of testing to the right hand side of our regular pages. They actually make quite nice navigational tools for the various products and services this site offers…

The next step, as i mentioned to our beta group in email, is to get the generic house ad out onto participating sites — that’s not happening today, but it shouldn’t be long, so if you’re interested in helping us build the Partners network, and getting in at the beginning of a great project, drop your email into the slot on the link above.

Feedback welcome…

Some Guy on the Internet Said

July 24, 2006 by Chris Garrett

Have you noticed how blogs can give a person more authority just by virtue of the fact that their thoughts are “published”. In some circumstances this can be pretty bad, at least for the gullible. How many times will people make decisions based on advice or reviews that basically comes down to acting on the opinion of “some guy on the internet”?

For some reason the same person could post the same thoughts in a forum and not get noticed, but publish a popular blog and all of a sudden they seem to be an expert. No additional qualifications, no visible change in talent, experience, wisdom or clarity of thought. No, just the same thoughts published in a blog.

It seems in a certain segment of the online population a blog is like having a book published. The act of publishing bestows some veneer of authority. Having been published and technical edited/reviewed others I know what a fallacy even that is but at least with print publishing there is some fact checking, at least with the good publishers a modicum of quality control. Nothing stops a blogger spouting absolute complete offal and having it taken as gospel.

OK so most of the time the blogger has to build up some sort of following before this takes place but I actually believe it is that very following that causes many bloggers to think they know better. “10,000 rss readers can’t be wrong”. After this happens comments they make that would be taken as trollish in other media becomes dogma for their followers. Just look how disproportionately influential some blogs have become, say, in the web2.0, tech or marketing crowds. Yes some of them deserve to be popular, but do they deserve to be followed blindly? I would say no-one deserves that. A healthy level of cynicism is worthwhile while reading anything on the interweb.

The good news is this affect can be used to your own evil advantage if you want to generate consultancy work, attract writing and speaking gigs or just become internet famous. Just remember wise words from Spiderman; “with great power comes great responsibility”.

Metrics Signup Bug Fixed

July 22, 2006 by nickw

Just to let you know, that the bug reported by several users that was causing a blank page to appear instead of content after a Metrics account was activated should now be fixed.

I have tried the following,and all appears well:

Sign up as new user
Go to the /metrics page and hit “Activate Performancing Metrics”
Get the “add a blog” page directly after.

If anyone has any further trouble, please report it here, and please include as much detail as possible — really, go to town on the details, “it doesnt work” just isnt that helpful 🙂

Apologies for the inconvenience folks, and thanks to those members that reported and described the issue.

One World (Wide Web). One Identity?

July 21, 2006 by Chris Berry

How many times have you had people sending you invitational eMails saying, “Try this cool site I found!” or “This is an amazing site!” or “You’ll absolutely love this one!” or lines to thato that effect?

Too many, I suspect.

Web 2.0 and the concept of User Generated Content has had the world in a tizzy for quite a while now. Innovative ideas and domain name registrations seem to go hand in hand. The people riding the waves of the Internet never had it so good. New services are introduced every day and competition is building up before you can say, “Watch out!”

As the Internet grows, as the flood of ideas increases, so will the number of identities. The number of services we use though, will continue to remain the same, maybe a few additions here and there.

Why? Because we are all loyalists to the core. We all have a list of our favorite sites that we visit regularly and we rarely visit the competition. There are innumerable excuses for this loyalty ranging from the old ‘comfort zone’, to the very latest ‘swanky look’, and the geeky ‘amazing feature-set.’

Truth is, we cannot handle multiple identities.

Having multiple identities is similar to owning two or more cell-phones. The greater the number of phones, the greater the interruption. Each cell-phone contributes an identity (in the vaguest sense of the word). Each eMail address is an identity that we have created for ourself on the WWW. Each profile on a social network is an identity that we maintain.

The number of eMails in your inbox is a fair indicator of the number of identities you have on the Web. And those of us, who are actively tracking the development of the collaborative Web, must have emails running into hundreds.

One idea would be to have a single secure identity that will cater to logins all across the internet. If such an idea were ever to gather support, it would have some interesting implications:

Naturally, this would imply a unique database to cater to all our identities across the web. But who should get the right to create and maintain such a database? The huge set of meta-data that would result would be a statistician’s dream come true! The flip-side of this is obviously the large ‘corporations’ that would give a few arms and legs (or even take a few) to get a crack at this data. (Ok, so I am a li’l partial to scientific research…)

What could be better than acquiring this data?

Having the data on your own servers! MyOpenID, Windows LiveID, Google Account Authentication, are a few names in this context. This probably explains why there is an intense competition between the Big Three and a few other key players.

If this sounds fairly Orwellian and reminds you of “1984” and Big Brother, you are probably right. :o)

The virtual world we live in, closely resembles the Orwellian 1984. Recent cases (Digg v/s Netscape, for instance) indicate as much. Search Engines indexing our content have the power to convey them to the faceless ‘Thought police.’ We have rich-sounding names like User Generated Content and Long Tail. And we have a faceless Big Brother who ‘purportedly’ keeps everything in check.

Makes you wonder: was Orwell right all along?

Technorati Tags: identity, web, orwell, 1984,

103bees: Search Engine Traffic Analysis

July 21, 2006 by markusm

A very interesting new and fresh approach in analyzing inbound search engine traffic only (!) is coming from 103bees.com. Not the normal traffic will be analyzed but only the referrers coming from search engines. You put the typical small Javascript call into your template and then you will get in-depth information about SE traffic. The registration (at the moment) is free.

A nice explanation for the name:

Bees are very likeable and hardworking insects relentlessly gathering millions of pollen every day. Just like our ‘bees’: they collect search terms so you will be able to analyze them and get more search engine traffic and revenues – the ‘sweet stuff’ everybody is so fond of!

That’s a very nice philosophy for analysis tools in general. The user loves the honey but doesn’t want to do the hard work 🙂

Check out the features …

Most interesting output of the SE analyzis provided by 103bees.com

Top landing pages – Which search phrases targeted which landing pages.
Top keywords – Single (!) keywords which gives a follow-up in form of a list of the phrases where that single keyword showed up
Multiple domain analysis – called projects.

103bees features available at the moment

The main menu is “Analyze projects” which will give you the following items after choosing the individual domain to look at:

Latest search terms – This will show the latest search phrase and the follow-up analysis for the landing page and the search engines which triggered that landing page. Links for every single search phrase are ‘Pages’ and ‘Engines.
Top landing pages – This will show the landing pages with the most search engine traffic in the chosen time-frame (7 or 30 days). Follow-Up analysis shows an individual traffic graph for that landing page and (!) which search engine phases lead to that landing page (very, very interesting). Links for every landing page are ‘Traffic’ and ‘Phrases’.
Top search terms – Search terms ordered by most traffic. The rest is like ‘Latest search terms’.
Top keywords – Single (!) keywords ordered by generated traffic. The keywords are presented as list or cloud. Both presentations show the most used keywords which generated traffic for that individual project (domain) for the given time-frame (7 or 30 days) or a maximum of 5.000 search hits. The follow-up analysis in the list view allows to check for related keywords and to get a list of the phrases where that single keyword showed up (very, very interesting). Here you can define stop-words which will not show up in that list anymore.
Search engines – The typical list of search engines but you can see absolute numbers and percentage.

The standard time frame is seven days. At the moment you can upgrade for free to 30 days of traffic history. The explanation is transparent (and a possible reason for a later monetization).

Please notice: 30 days of traffic and search terms history consume an enormous amount of disk space and server performance. You can upgrade your account for free to 30 days of traffic history. However, you will be asked to confirm the upgrade every two months.

I have added the code yesterday and the service responds very fast. The numbers seem to be shown in real time. As the interested crowd using the service from 103bees.com will grow we will have to wait and see how the service will respond and react in the future.

Negative

A little disadvantage of the whole service is that you have to perform many clicks to get to the individual in-depth information. Many double linked presentations could be combined easily to show on one page.

Resume

A recommended very, very interesting fresh approach in analyzing inbound search engine traffic. Really worth to combine with PMetrics!

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, 103bees, SEO, search engines, analysis, tool, traffic, statistics

The Web2.0 Mafia

July 21, 2006 by nickw

I rarely find myself in agreement with AOL’s Jason Calacanis.It’s not that he’s a bad bloke, he just gets on my nerves. He does occasionally have some interesting things to say though, and this post about the “Web2.0 Mafia”, and how the “Web2.0 elite” want to control what we, the masses do, and how we, the masses, get paid, is brilliant. Absolutely spot on.

Despite the fact that Netscape stinks, (and Jason’s offer to pay bookmarkers wont make it any less stinky) his points about the web2.0 elite ring a strong bell with me. I’ve always viewed Mike Arrington’s Techcrunch as a kind of Lord of the Flies meets 1984, where some are most definately more web2.0 than others, and sucking up seems to be the order of the day if you want to BE web2.0

That sucks. Clearly.

I don’t think Jason entirely get’s the reason for many people being against his offer to pay top bookmarkers though. It’s not really about the prospect of being paid (which i strongly suspect he knows damn well), it’s about the slimey way he’s trying to lure away assets (albeit unpaid ones, which is a good point) from something we all love: Digg

There’s a tremendous amount of goodwill aimed at Digg right now, and when someone does something to intentionally hurt it, people will react strongly.

So, in conclusion:

Yay for Jason! (just this once hehe..)
Boo for Web2.0
Yay for the prospect of a less cliquey tech community

Somebody really needs to step up to the plate and produce another great Web2.0 hub — CNet for example…

PMetrics WordPress Plugin Wishlist?

July 20, 2006 by Chris Berry

I’m scrapping what code I had for the PMetrics WordPress plugin v0.4 (don’t worry, it wasn’t that much progress) and I’m focusing on a complete redesign for an official 1.0 version of the plugin. Before I get further into development, I wanted to ask what features you, the users, would like to see included in the plugin. What I’m planning:

Subversion repository to help me better organize changes and development (maybe host at wp-plugins.org once they get their domain expiration issues sorted out?)
A project management page where end users can submit bug reports and request features (Trac, FlySpray, Drupal Project Module, Eventum, Mantis, phpBugTracker, ?)
Improving the sidebar widget

Displaying your BlogRank
Graphs
More detailed information (especially on individual post pages)

Displaying metrics in your WordPress dashboard
RSS tracking for those of you who don’t use Feedburner redirection of your RSS feed
Automatic detection/matching of the domain when you set up your Metrics at Performancing and option to redirect to correct domain (with or without ‘www’) so no metrics are missed
On install, checks your blog’s template to make sure you don’t already have the Metrics code inserted yourself and that the plugin will be able to insert the code using the wp_footer hook.

Seems pretty good? It’ll take some time, but I’m starting to look for a more office-oriented job rather than the restaurant I’m working at – it tends to drain me out and I don’t get much time to work on outside projects. If you’d like some input or just want to feedback, comment away! Remember, you’re still more than welcome to sign up for the PMetrics announcement mailing list as well.

Please Note: I’m going to be transitioning my website to Drupal soon (hopefully moving a Drupal installation from a subdomain to the main domain won’t be too hard) so there might be some down time. I’m going to have to figure out how to smoothly redirect all the incoming links as best I can.

Performancing.com Upgraded to Drupal 4.7.2

July 20, 2006 by nickw

At the time of writing, you’ll notice that the author pictures in posts have gone AWOL, and i’ve no idea why, but am working on it. If that’s the only thing that went screwey when transitioning from 4.6.8 to 4.7.2 though, it’s pretty damn good.

The move to Drupal 4.7.2 has taken about a week of coding, and really i’d rather have been doing other things, but if we don’t upgrade, we’ll not be able to use some of the fancy new features in 4.7 — and besides, the dev list are already discussing 4.8, so it’s high time we got it together before we did much more work on Partners.

Forms API — the Biggest Nightmare

By far the worst thing with this upgrade was painstakingly going through all of the Metrics code and updating to the new Drupal forms api. It’s so much easier to do this stuff if you wrote the original code yourself!

It all seems to be working well though, but of course if you spot oddness in anything, do let me know.

Odd Characters?

I had a hell of a time updating the DB. For some reason it just did not want to update nicely on our staging server, despite a flawless execution on an almost identical server here at home. So I had a bunch of fun trying to “beat the clock”, see the sanity checklist for the gory details…

One thing you may notice right away, is that the encoding on the DB is now UTF-8, and we may have a few issues to work out with odd characters showing up in old posts — really we wont know till we’ve all had a chance to use the site for a while whether this is a big issue or a small one, but im aware of it, and am looking out for it.

New Look for Forums

Also, the Forums got a new look. They look much nicer now. In fact, to be precise, it’s more of an old look, as i discovered some long lost CSS that got bungled when we moved to the current server setup. They really are quite pretty now though, and should be more usable too.

Modules and Functionality

If you’re interested in Drupal, and would like to see Performancing.com implement any of the newer functionality or modules, let me know, im open to suggestion.

Feedback

Lastly, please do take the time to report any weirdness, bugs or problem here in this thread, or in the forums

Thanks everyone,

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