Skip links

Performancing

Main navigation

nickw

AOL Muscles in on Financial Blogging

by

In what can only be seen as a “tip of the iceberg” move, AOL have finally made their next play in the blogosphere. Tipped off byHeather Green posting for BusinessWeek I see AOL’s new BloggingStocks.com, a weblog about, yes you guessed it, stocks.

Heather has the details:

Bloggingstocks.com is a unique idea. AOL hired bloggers to write about product announcements, earnings releases, and commentary on 8 stocks initially. On its first day, the network will do live blogging of the Microsoft earnings call, for instance. (Good luck!)

So, what about the $64,000 question? Can the bloggers hold the stocks they are writing about?

Indeed. In fact, AOL encourages them to be stockholders, if not necessarily in the companies they’re writing about.

It’s the first big move since they bought AOL and like Heather, I’d expect to see a lot more. The fact that the “big boys” are starting to move into lucrative keyword areas in the blogosphere means that it’s probably only a matter of time before regular commercial bloggers start to really feel the pinch. And that IS interesting. What’s more interesting right now though, is if those “sponsored links” they have on the right (currently empty) are going to be straight, or condomed?

Afterall, GOOG now own 5% of AOL right? So we wouldn’t want anyone doing anything as dreadful as shoing text links for other sites now would we?

powered by performancing firefox

5 Yahoo Search Hacks

by

Quite some time back I wrote about Google Search Hacks that you could use to check the health of your blog. I promised at the time to look at Yahoo hacks but never got around to it. Well, lets put that straight now shall we? Here’s a short list of some of the more fun things you can do with Yahoo Search…

1. Use the Real Interface

Just so that we’re all on the same page, search.yahoo.com is the url you need.

2. Find ALL Your Links

Finding links to your blogs is easy enough in part. Google will show you some of them, but only to specific pages, and technorati will also show you some of them, though they’ll arguably be a little fresher than Google. What you can do with Yahoo though is better, much better:

Enter the linkdomain command in the search box like this: linkdomain:mydomainsanswww.com. You can see how it works in the image below:

3. Yahoo Blog Search

You can do a Yahoo blog search by hacking at Yahoo News. Try the Search box below:

Yahoo! Blog Search




If you want to put that code on your own site, just paste the code below onto a blank html page or put it on a post.

4. Search Creative Commons

This made a big splash when they first announced it, but i’ll bet it’s news to some of you reading this right? You can search for only material licensed under creative commons, which means that if you’re looking for content to mix into topic then you can do so without fear copyright violation.

You have to go to the advanced search page and tick the appropriate box. Easy eh?

Tip: The advanced search page is only one click away, and can REALLY help you search better.

5. Get Search Results as RSS

Unlike Google, Yahoo make it possible for you to subscribe to regular search results. There is no button on the page, but if your browser does not pick up the RSS via auto discovery, you can check the souce for a url like this: http://api.search.yahoo.com/ WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid= yahoosearchwebrss&query=performancing&adult_ok=1 (note i put a couple of spaces in there so the line would break).

Anyone Else?

I’ll be the first to admit that my search skills aren’t what they once were, so I’d love to see any other hacks you can come up with specifically for Yahoo search!

powered by performancing firefox

Powered by Performancing Firefox

by

Dammit. I just went on a little post frenzy and totally forgot about a small feature we built into the new PFF 1.2: Namely the “powered by performancing firefox” attribute you can enable in the settings tab.

A small thing for sure, but for anyone kind enough to want to help us spread the word, a simple way to do it without even thinking about it….

Keen observers will note that the html actually gives the “powered by” a CSS classname aswell, so you can conceivably style it any way you wish. And if you manage to do something neat with it, do post a link here…

powered by performancing firefox

Digg in a Hole

by

So if you hadn’t realized what a complete bunch of arse this whole “wisdom of crowds” bollocks was previously, you can see it in action as Digg takes a slamming due to nothing more than its own popularity.

My friend Peter sums it up well:

The lunatics invade, the system breaks, authoritarianism replaces democracy. Eventually, your founding mission statement becomes rather comic

Apparently Digg have taken steps, but is it just an interim measure, what happens next time?

There is No “I” in Blog

by

Well, there isn’t for most bloggers with commercial intent anyway. See Brians The Two Most Important Words in Blogging:

It’s certainly ironic that a medium often used as a self-absorbed journaling platform would now need to be overwhelmingly focused on the reader in order to be effective. But if you’re blogging for marketing or public relations purposes, your every post should be purposefully aimed at the needs and wants of others.

Once you realize that deep down we’re all just selfish bastards, it all becomes so much clearer 🙂

Where Am I, What Can I Do, Where Can I Go?

by

I remember quite some years back reading about usability and instantly recognizing from my own experience that the three questions in the title of this post are exactly what we need ot know when we land on a page.

Im pretty sure it was this post from Jakob Nielsen but sheeesh, it was ages ago, so forgive me a little vaguity here ok?

Today though, i was going to do a little post about the natty new nav widgets we have at the top of each page when i ran across Darren talking about Seth’s post on landing pages.

Unfortunately, landing pages as a term has gotten rather a spammy feel to it in recent years, it always makes me think of doorway pages, pages created specifically for search engines to funnel visitors through – an ugly, but at least at one time, very effective way of getting traffic (dont try this at home kids, it’s somewhat out of date now..)

Despite the spammy feel of the term though, the idea that every page is a potential entry point onto your site is not a new one, and it’s as valuable a truth today as it was years ago — and when a vistitor does find your page, via a search engine, or a direct link from another blog, you’d better be answering those three questions dammit!

  1. Where am i?
  2. What can i do?
  3. Where can i go?

If every page on your site does not clearly answer those questions then you need ot have a think about how you can change that. Usually it’s fairly simple. Untill recently though, we’ve been guilty as sin of not following our own advice, and it’s been commented upon on quite a few occasions that it’s just not clear what you can do here at Performancing.com

Enter the new widgets…

They don’t complete the task, but they do go quite a way forward. You can now get an idea of what you can do here, and we’re better communicating our goals and steering random visitors toward the areas of the site we think most important.

I’d welcome comments on what more we can do, and any thoughts you guys have on the general topic of navigation and usability on blogs…

Sifry: ‘Sphere 60x Larger than 3yrs Ago

by

That’s great, but being the miserable party pooper that I am, i need to point out that the figures on Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere post just aren’t reliable, as the amount of spam in the ‘sphere doesn’t appear to be accounted for, and Technorati certainly dont’ seem to be able to spot it.

Not Judging by the state of my rss subscriptions to Technorati results anyway.

Still, I DO like these things he puts out every quarter.

One thing that I wonder about every time i see these types of things is when will we finally stop gazing at our blogging navals in awe? I mean, really, the ‘sphere is growing, bloggers are human, people are arseholes, bloggers are saints… it goes on.

For a classic example see the headline over that BH this morning: Blogger arrested for Murder in Oklahoma – Heaven spare us all…

Metrics Maintenance – Monday 10th April

by

On monday there will be some scheduled, planned maintenance being performed on some of the core Metrics backend. For most of you it shouldn’t cause much inconvenience, but so that you know what’s going on, and in the interests of being as open about the system as possible, let me tell you what’s going to happen and why…

What’s Going to Happen

  • At 10am PDT on Monday, Metrics will go offline for 30-60mins while a file system copy of all the databases is performed.
  • When that’s done, Metrics will come back online. During this time, and throughout thewhole operation, data will continue to be collected.
  • The next 6-12hrs will be spent running a conversion script to move us to a new database schema (more on why later..)
  • During this time, processing (turning raw data into meaningful statistics) will be stopped, and once the above task is done, it takes about 6-12hrs to fully catch up again.
  • Everything should then be back to normal

Why We’re Doing This

The difference between theory, and real live data is vast. Now we have around a months worth of real data to analyze, we’ve found that we can make improvements to the system that just hadn’t been noticed in the theory part of Metric’s development.

We’d like to make those improvements for the good of the system, and hope you’ll bear with us during Monday while this work is done.

What Comes Next?

A few weeks down the road, there will be another tweak similar to this. I’m hoping we can also learn from this and fine tune the process so it has even less impact on users, but i’ll have to talk to you about that nearer the time when more info is available.

Thanks everyone…