As Retweeting Rises, Linking Continues to Decline

Operating a blog focused on early adopters means being willing to adapt as technology and the world around us evolves. One of the more-recent additions to the blog was my embedding of buttons from TweetMeme, to show how often my posts were being linked to on Twitter, and making it easier for others to retweet these items, even thought I've already gone on record as not being a big fan of retweeting myself.

I made the change not because of a change in my own practices, but due to recognition that many people are turning to Twitter to share links and find new links from peers. While most of my posts only get a few dozen tweets, some have numbered over a hundred. And as this occurs, in parallel, the total number of links back to the Web site from other blogs is decreasing.

Not too long ago, one of the most common items to see featured on a blog was one's Technorati Authority, showing the number of unique blogs that linked back to you in the previous six months. Looking back at some of my "State of the Blog" entries I used to post monthly, I can see that approximately one year ago, that number stood at nearly 1,000. (See: here) Now, that same measure is only slightly above 500, a decrease of nearly half, despite my posting schedule being fairly regular, and the site's visibility rising over the same period.


Just Over a Year Ago, Technorati Had More Traffic Than Twitter...
Discussion of Technorati Authority used to be a big topic on this blog as recently as 2007. (See: Why My Technorati Ranking Is Slip-Sliding Away, Technorati Needs to Stamp Out Viral Tag Spam Now, Is Technorati Going After Spam Blogs?, and My Technorati Link Stats Make No Sense) But now, not only is Technorati largely overlooked, but so is linking, for the most part. It's easier to send a link via Twitter, or to share a post on Google Reader or FriendFeed.

This change is why in July of 2008 I said The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining, and why Steve Rubel is now saying his stats reflect the way the Web is changing. Not only are people turning to social sites instead of blogs to share links, but often, many blogs do a lot more linking to themselves than they do in linking to other sources, whether set by editorial policies, inertia, or just simplicity. Not surprisingly, we talked about that back in 2007 as well. (Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control)

TweetMeme, which started out as a secondary project by Nick Halstead and his team at Favorit, now looks like a real winner, having gained significant visibility after rebooting last July after Twitter API issues had killed the service following initial launch. The company just announced new ways to display statistics by domain, and it will now enable the ability to retweet items no matter where they are found, including on RSS feeds. Once that gets posted, you can be sure I will find a way to get that button in my RSS feed, and if done well, I will post the chicklet of domain activity alongside my FeedBurner number in the blog's sidebar.

I may still prefer to write long blog posts and link out, but I can't force everyone else to swim upstream. Retweet away.

The Changing Subscriber Definition Points to Potential Over Actual

The dust has not yet fully settled on yesterday's news that RSS feed circulation numbers around the Web spiked, thanks to a new tie-up between FeedBurner and FriendFeed that essentially counted social networking subscriptions as equal to those who signed up for your RSS feed directly. But while more and more people find their statistics up by thousands, and in some cases, orders of magnitude, the discussion has led away from what is "right" or "wrong", but instead, investigating what a real subscriber was anyway, and if we should stop thinking the way we always did.

The worlds of blogging and social networking are numbers-obsessed, and the statistics are so full of holes, most aren't even worth repeating. I may be "following" 10,000+ people on Twitter, but I rely largely on the search tool, or browse individuals' updates in Friendfeed. On FriendFeed, the story is much the same. I heavily utilize lists to categorize people I follow and make sure I don't miss the best content, but I absolutely see a small fraction of items. And don't even get me started on Facebook. Given I practically only go there to accept friend requests, play games against my family, or respond to wall comments, I certainly didn't see the photos you just posted.

The "fake follow" is absolutely in effect - even with best efforts.

But in parallel, I've treated RSS (and e-mail) differently. I believe Google Reader is the gold standard for finding information, and the link blog I produce through sharing the best items is essential for me to highlight what I find best, and for those who follow it, relying on me as a human filter. As such, while I may read quickly, and skim often, I always, always, read every story from every feed, to the tune of 100%. Similarly, I always have read every e-mail, even if I haven't made the time to respond.

But not everybody treats RSS and RSS subscriber counts with such velvet gloves as I do - which means two major things. First, total RSS subscriber counts usually far exceed total page views on most blogs, as RSS items pile up in readers around the world and go unread. Second, the religious adherence to a subscription number in RSS that I tried to have, in the face of bundling and statistics that led me astray, is easily shouted down by reason.

I used to look at subscriber counts as a good benchmark for how much influence a blog might have. A blog with 2,000 subscribers typically reaches more people than one with 200, and less than 20,000. With the addition of more horizontal social networking "followers" or "friends" in the mix, I have to look at the number as potential. For example, the new number of about 14,000 listed on my blog (up from 8,000 earlier this week and 5,000 in April) represents the maximum potential people who would see my content if everybody who subscribed to my content on RSS or FriendFeed actually kept their subscription going and active.

And it is this "potential" that is the new reality, more so than a hard and fast number you can set your watch to. But it's also a slippery slope. If we all start signing up to RSS feeds but we don't read the blogs, and we all fake follow on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and every other network out there, there's not really a whole lot of social going on - just blasting out data, friending and hoping that you're the exception rather than the rule.

To accept my new statistics, and those on other blogs impacted, the new reality requires a changed mindset. It's not saying one way is right and another is wrong, but instead, seeing the new data through the prism of our new world, where with so many information streams out there, we are all hoping that our data will catch someone's eye, not that it always will.

FriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button

It's tempting to go back the age-old line of there being lies, damn lies, and statistics. On the Web, where practically everything is measured and big numbers are almost always better, counting up one's followers, friends, subscribers or authority is practically a pasttime. But with each metric comes a question of validity - how did they approach that data, and is that process consistent with the world view of what is factual?

Today, for reasons known only to their team, FriendFeed started to display subscriber counts to those FriendFeed users who are importing blog posts alongside all other subscribers, displayed in FeedBurner or any other blog analytics tool. With this change, popular FriendFeed users have seen a dramatic jump in their feed subscriber counts, even if actual traffic or readership to their sites has not changed.


BlogPerfume Shows My Stats Spiked Today
A clear beneficiary of this move, my own statistics ballooned from a possibly accurate count of just over 8,000 subscribers on this blog to more than 13,000. And in parallel, thanks to my importing my posts on my wife's blog, her count catapulted from just over 50 to more than 9,000. (For a site that gets only dozens of visits a day)


My Wife's Blog Stats Are Through the Roof
Coincidentally, my RSS subscribers had already been jumping, starting in late April, for reasons largely unbeknownst to me. In the last two months, I organically saw the subscriber counts pass the 5,000 barrier and crest to the more than 8,000, as I poked through the stats and tried to find out why - considering both Google Reader bundles and possibly a part-time inclusion on the Techmeme leaderboard as factors. But now, pointing to that growth seems silly, given FriendFeed flipped the switch and gave me a big, albeit likely false, foundation.


FriendFeed's Impact Rivals that of Google On This Site
The company's comments on this change state that "you are putting your words in front of a lot more people", so theoretically, they should be counted. But I believe it is less-intensive to follow someone on FriendFeed than it is through standard RSS, and I have no idea how this handles duplicates, though I can guess it's somewhat controlled, given my own stats jumped by a mere 5,000 when my wife went up by more than 9,000.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek clearly made his comments understood, when he said, "Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing".

Since you don't have admin access to my FeedBurner stats, you can see the jump by taking a look at Blog Perfume's Feed Analysis tool here.

So the question is - why? Did the FriendFeed team just want to extend the visibility of how much impact their service has with bloggers? This move makes them a clear rival to Google in my own statistics. Or did they really think this was a way to show, accurately, how many people you were exposed to? Either way, as I said on a thread in the site, what's done really can't be undone. I hate upward spikes as much as I hate downward spikes, as we've seen when FeedBurner and Google FeedFetcher miss each other in the night. But it's not accurate, especially when it comes to small blogs hiding on big accounts (like with my wife's blog on my ID). I just hope Twitter, Facebook and other sites don't choose to do the same thing, or we can call the whole tracking bit a wash.

MicroBlink Releases Feedstats.info for FriendFeed Stat Fanatics

In technology, if you can measure an activity and compare it with that of other users, it's likely somebody is working on a service to crunch the numbers. Twitter has TweetStats and following counts. FeedBurner shows RSS subscribers. LinkedIn displays the number of connections. And FriendFeed displays following counts, as well as likes and comments activity, on your profile. But the service, in its latest upgrade, removed the ability to analyze your own feed and see which friends were most active on your thread. Into that void walks a new service from the team at Microblink, called Feedstats.info.

Feedstats.info essentially provides the same information that previously was available to all FriendFeed users, but not just for your own account - opening up the ability to analyze anybody's activity, so long as you know their user name.


Entering the ID into Feedstats.info

The data says I use Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed most often.
If you enter a FriendFeed user's ID into Feedstats.info, you can see how often they post per day (in the last 1,000 items), what services contributed to that feed (both in bar chart and pie chart form). You can see what days and what times of day the user most frequently uses FriendFeed, and also, who provides the most likes and comments on their items.


FeedStats Shows I Use FriendFeed Least On Weekends, and from 1 to 7 a.m.

FeedStats Also Shows Who Has Activity On My Items
Using this service, you can see which users log in to FriendFeed at specific intervals during the day, and those who are pretty much on the service around the clock, stopping only to sleep (I assume). You can also, if you check enough accounts, get a good idea as to who the most prolific people are in terms of "liking" activity, especially if they lead many different accounts.


FeedStats Takes A Look at Rochelle

Hutch Carpenter Under the Microscope
As with most stat sites, it's easy to start playing with the charts, and equally as easy to ask, "what's the point?" At what point does knowing the data is there start to impact user behavior? Should Rob Diana stop sharing so frequently on Google Reader if he finds out that it's nearly 90 percent of his feed? Should I be using Twitter more or FriendFeed less? Or the other way around?


Rob Diana: Google Reader Expert

Jesse Stay Uses Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed.
One of the assumed corollaries offered by Feedstats.info is a guess that those who like your items have a high compatibility with you, making them most "like" you. But what I found is that there is a small subset of users with a tremendous number of likes and comments, far outstripping mine, and they may lead my account as well as others, making our correlation a false one. But other than that, it's still an interesting set of data to play with. You can sign in with your FriendFeed API key, and can check any account, as I have.

Google Reader Extends Statistics On Friends' Sharing Habits

Sharing items I find interesting in Google Reader is a major part of my social activity, as I help promote discovery of quality information to those who choose to subscribe, in a way, acting as a pro bono information filter on behalf of geeks everywhere. With streams from my Google Reader shares flowing into Socialmedian, FriendFeed, Facebook and the shared item tabulators, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme, I recognize the impact a simple mouse-click can do.

Sharing these feeds means I'm not reading my news in isolation. Friends I've connected with can make comments to my items, and should I choose, I can follow others' shared link blogs as well.


My Friends' Sharing Statistics In Google Reader
Today, the Google Reader team introduced a minor update that lets you now see just how frequently you're getting items from friends, and interestingly, you can now, for the first time in my knowledge, see how many other people are subscribed to their feed (and your own). For example, I learned today that 562 people have subscribed to my Google Reader link blog. That's still more than 5,000 behind Robert Scoble, a longtime evangelist of the practice, but only three others who I follow sport more than 100 connections.

And in case I was worried I was sharing too often, with approximately 18 shares a day, one of my connections, our friend Rob Diana, from Regular Geek, is sharing a cool 51.2 items every 24 hours, while two others are closer to me, with more than 10 shares a day.

It's almost tempting to start playing with the math to see what the downstream impact is of the shares.

If Robert Diana shares 51.2 items a day to 72 people, is that about 3,686 total views added?
If Robert Scoble shares .4 items a day to 5,889 people, does that hit 2,352 total views a day?

You get the idea.

Google Reader is trying to become more social and make the RSS reader a destination, rather than a pass-through. And I like their attempts, but it's clear more could be done. I'd like to be able to view just those feeds I subscribe to, and have the option to view friends' shares later, rather than have them combined in the same feed. I'd like to have e-mail alerts available if somebody commented on my shared items feed. I'd still like to know the most popular shared items, and most popular feeds.

But they are making good headway. Which reminds me... Didn't somebody say RSS was dead?

Meta: LouisGray.com Passes 2,000 Post Mark

As I stopped providing monthly updates early last year into traffic activities and other statistics on the blog, I have not been paying as much close attention to achieving what some would call milestones. But on Saturday, with the blog post Good People, Bad Companies: The Intersection of Skill and Luck, I hit the mark of 2,000 posts on louisgray.com, since early 2006, covering a period of 3 1/3 years, essentially. Since then, we've posted 8 more times (including this one), so I am a tad tardy in marking the achievement.

Back when I did watch these things more closely, on October 11, 2007, I marked hitting the 1,000 post number, and at the time highlighted what were then my top ten things I blogged about, including: 1) Apple, iPod and iTunes, 2) Blogs, Links and RSS, 3) Google, 4) TiVo and TV, 5) The Oakland A's, 6) The Cal Bears, 7) The Sacramento Kings, 8) Nintendo Wii and Games, 9) Statistics and 10) Technology Innovators and Startups.

Amazing to think of how much things have changed (in my opinion) in just 18 months, over which I, with the help of some strong guest authors, knocked out the next 1,000 posts.

Of the 10 blogging topics I noted back in October 2007, I would say that Apple, Blogs and RSS, Google, and Technology Innovators and Startups are still core focuses, with early startups rising incredibly. But I don't talk as much about Apple and TiVo as I once did, I reduced statistics discussion, and practically eliminated sports altogether.

Now, and you tell me if I'm wrong, I believe I blog about: 1) New Web Services and Startups, 2) Social Media Tools, including Twitter and FriendFeed, 3) Blogs and RSS, 4) Online Best Practices, 5) Google and Search Competitors, 6) Apple and iTunes, 7) Business and Finance, 8) IPhone Apps and Games, 9) Information Discovery and Overload, and 10) Personal Updates.

I wish there were an easy way to point out what were posts 50, 100, 250 and 500, but for now, it's always good enough just to point out post #1 from January 9th, 2006: Macworld Expo Eve 2006. If only I knew then what was to be a little hobby would turn out to be an obsession.

FiveThirtyEight Founder Speaks On Stats, Elections and Baseball

Even as many voters sat on pins and needles, the 2008 presidential election was among the easiest to predict, according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, whose site skyrocketed to stardom amid high visibility throughout the primary and general election season last year, as he took a thorough background in statistical analysis and focused on the world of politics, hoping to improve the accuracy of polls and predictive analysis. In his comments on a keynote at the SXSW Interactive conference today, he said media outlets relied too much on most recent news, and could improve their prognoses if they instead turned to historical statistics and trend data.

Nate said he started FiveThirtyEight.com "out of frustration" with the traditional media properties, including CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. He said their coverage "wasn't empirically valid and correct," adding, "polls were too much of the narrative and they were taken too seriously as they were poorly conducted and interpreted."

Armed with a history of crunching baseball statistics to predict how well players would perform in the future from his time with the Baseball Prospectus, Nate tried to spot irregularities in polling or find variables that indicated how voters in each state were likely to trend which most pollsters were missing. One example included how in the Appalachian region, voters who declined to state their ethnicity, choosing to instead be labeled as "American", were doing so as a badge of pride, but also indicated a level of "redneckness," as he put it.

Like with baseball, Nate called the political process a long season, where largest trends were not swayed by an individual game's data, or by a single primary.

"You don't get that much information at once. A puzzle gets solved a little at a time," Nate said. "People are trained to over-react to these kinds of things, and I would urge patience."

Having successfully predicted the 2008 elections more accurately than practically anybody else out there, Nate is now being courted to try and solve a wide array of other issues, ranging from predicting the Academy Awards (which was partially successful), to predicting economics. As could be expected, he was asked to provide his thoughts on the economic slowdown that has effected everyone, and how long it would be until potential voters started to blame the Obama administration, instead of the Bush administration.

"We haven't had a situation like this in the modern era," Nate said. "People are really scared, and they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have people who are very pessimistic about the future of the country, but Obama has great approval ratings. Usually that doesn't happen. There is a kind of grace period of three to six months, and after this grace period, of about 18 months, people assign him as much blame as they would Bush for the economy, so he needs the economy to turn around sooner, rather than later."

But even armed with as much data and talent as he has, Nate recognizes that other factors are in play. Baseball players can get injured, and "you can only expect a human to do what they do what they were doing so many times," he said, adding, "in baseball, everything in the last 100 years is 99.9% accurate. The real world is not like that."

Speaking of not predicting the real world, the term FiveThirtyEight, which refers to the number of electoral votes available in a presidential election, may need to change, should Washington DC gain representation in Congress, throwing all the numbers off. Should that happen, Nate just may have to change his URL.

Where is Your Focus: Subscribers or Traffic?

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

James Duthie of Online Marketing Banter has a really valuable post on 5 important lessons that he learned from his first year of blogging. I think everyone could agree to having learned a lot of the lessons that he listed, myself included. However, his first two lessons really inspired me to think about where my focus is when it comes to my own blog. 

Lesson 1 - Momentum disappears damn quickly.

Lesson 2 - It's not all about the traffic.

With these two lessons in mind, I think that as a blogger begins to evolve they have have to make a decision: you can work overtime to keep up traffic to continuously build momentum or you can stop worrying about the traffic and shift your focus to converting the traffic that you receive into subscribers. Some people focus on both, which can be a daunting task. Getting people to visit your site in the beginning of your blogging career is no easy task, unless you have great connections.My decision was to worry more about subscribers than traffic. I figured that with enough subscribers, you can begin to have consistently decent traffic, without worrying about the momentum that disappears all to quickly for some of us.

Know Your Goals

For me, this was an easy decision because I don't display any ads on SheGeeks, nor do I care to. Though recently I've been dabbling in sponsored links. Being aware of what you plan to do with your site can help you better understand what decision would be best for you. The answer to the aforementioned question is all so dependent upon the focus of your site and what you are attempting to achieve. I want more conversation. With more subscribers I can easily generate more conversation. This is easier for me rather than trying to generate conversation by trying to increase my traffic. And no, high subscribers doesn't necessarily mean high traffic, especially if your content is few and far in between.

Know Your Audience

On another note, I'm aware that the majority of my readers user RSS feeds to access the site. I'm also aware that the majority of my readers are probably "skimmers", meaning they don't read everything in its entirety unless it's truly worth their time. So traffic is just a moot point for me the majority of the time. What does this mean? Be aware of your audience and the tools they use. To me, the aforementioned facts reeks of a low click-through rate. So really, why bother?

What's Your Focus?

Which leads me to ask the rest of you: where is your focus when it comes to your blog: subscribers or traffic?

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Three And Out Takes Third Fantasy Football Trophy. Shrug.

As the Super Bowl wrapped up the year's NFL season, so to ended the year's fantasy football season - which on some days seems dramatically more important. And, now that the dust has cleared, my team has finished 1st overall, just like it did the last time I played, in the 2005-06 season, and the 2001-02 season, my rookie year. And while I should be elated, given my push to be competitive, and love of sports and all things statistical, ending up the winner is met more with a shrug than jubilation - partly because of the knowledge the competition is complete, with no more weekly battles, and also, as the margin of victory was already guaranteed, making today's game moot.

As I mentioned back on January 4th (See: Geek Leading Fantasy Football League During Playoff Push), I managed to take a lead after the 1st week of the playoffs, and knew I was well-positioned going into week two, but surprisingly, a lot of little things went right for my squad, and badly for everyone else - so while there were many upsets each weekend, the only real surprise in our league was that I managed to not only keep the lead - but score highest every single Sunday, increasing my lead.


By the time the Pittsburgh Steelers were crowned NFL champions this evening, I had finished the four-week playoff round with a total of 391 points, almost twice that of the second-place finisher, who had 217 points, followed by the stragglers at 190 points and 101. To give you an idea of how wild it is that I scored so many points, just three years ago I won it all with 281 points, beating out the second place team, who scored 239, and the prior year, I had finished second, losing 290 to 265 - much closer contests than the 2008-09 playoffs. (See: Kiss of Death League: History)

So how did this happen? As with any good fantasy squad, significant luck was involved. I had expected the Carolina Panthers to do very well, and possibly contend for the Super Bowl title. But as we were drafting one Saturday morning, I wanted to make sure I didn't post a zero in the initial Wild Card contests, and loaded up on the high-offense Arizona Cardinals, getting the quarterback and wide receiver pair of Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, as well as the San Diego Chargers' Darren Sproles, who I expected to rack up points returning kickoffs against what was supposed to be a superior Colts squad. But then Sproles became the primary running back as Ladanian Tomlinson was injured, and the Chargers beat the Colts. And virtually everyone knows what happened to Arizona. They went all the way to the Super Bowl, and both Warner and Fitzgerald set records along the way. It almost didn't seem fair as my team excelled while others were virtually eliminated by week one.


I'm torn because I love the fact I blew out the field. But I also would have liked some better competition, and to have been watching Sunday's Super Bowl with the knowledge my fantasy season could also be on the line. I love that I won by such big margins because I'm going to enjoy going through the stats, but it isn't exactly fun to talk trash (a major part of fantasy football) when you're ahead by 100 points, so for the last month, that piece has practically been eliminated.

How much did loading up on Arizona help me? According to the league statistics, Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner were the 1st and 2nd highest scorers, garnering me 180 points between them. Add in the 44 points from Arizona special teams, and I'd be at 224, already ahead of the second-place finisher, and that doesn't even take into consideration the 74 points picked up by Sproles, who had an amazing first two weeks.

So now it's all done. At some point, I'll probably get a PayPal notification rewarding me about $200 or so, which is nice, but not life-changing. The first thing I'll likely do? Go out and see if I have to buy my own trophy to match the other two on my bookshelf. What's the fun in winning three times if you can't show everyone?

Watch for the Telephone Game in Your Short Attention Span World

One of the recurring themes on this blog has been how to handle a seeming overflow of information. We've discussed creating a social media consumption workflow. I addressed a new concept I called continuous parallel attention. I said how you handle the information overload Is up to you and later said there is no social media overload and cautioned bloggers to relax, because nobody is keeping score. But we still see problems crop up when a story gets passed from person to person and details get lost. It's the modern equivalent of the popular "Telephone" game we all played as kids, where the last phrase was never close to how it started.

Take a look at an example from this weekend, after Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote a piece saying FriendFeed had seen site growth that reached almost 1 million visitors in December of 2008.

Seems straight forward enough. The data came from Comscore, which shows a higher growth rate for FriendFeed than do other services, including Quantcast and Compete.com. Compete reports 700,000 visitors or so to FriendFeed in December, by the way.

But then, Robert Scoble, a good friend, good blogger, and fellow FriendFeed user relayed the story a little differently, saying that the report said FriendFeed had surpassed a million user accounts.

Using that as the baseline, Robert stated the 26,000 or so subscribers to his feed represented one of every 39 users. (See the FriendFeed thread here) But that only exacerbated the flub. Having used the site myself for quite some time, I'd be shocked if there were more than a million registered accounts, and FFHolic estimates the number to be closer to 200,000 total accounts, one fifth of a million. This of course makes Robert's penetration even higher, as that means one of every eight users follows him, but that's not the major issue.

If you're FriendFeed, and you know your actual user count, you can't exactly issue a correction saying that you "only" have a quarter million users. And if they did announce such data, which they don't, it might seem to be a letdown now that the higher, incorrect number has been released.

The service is now becoming a destination site as users share links on Twitter, their blogs, Facebook and elsewhere, so it's no surprise that the unique visitor count is higher than the number of users. After all, if I visit from home and on my wife's laptop and the office, doesn't that count as three unique visitors?

This is but one example, and I know practically all of us have made the mistake of reading stories too quickly, or coming to conclusions and extrapolations based on only partial data. For example, Stowe Boyd wrote a great piece tonight saying I was "Wrong About Twitter Funding", but he had only seen one of the two posts, which had taken point/counterpoint positions. That's not a victim of the telephone game, but he is a busy guy, like the rest of us, and no doubt overlooked one of the items.

When we're reacting to other items, or relaying them, we should be careful that we're not making new stories based on data that's not true. We're all going fast, and maybe reading a ton of RSS feeds, seeing thousands of Twitter updates, and rushing in an effort to post quickly. But there's something to be said for watching for the telephone game.

What Do You Do When Google Says You're a Zero?

Google's impact on a Web site owner is tremendous. The ubiquitous search engine can deliver anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of a Web site or blog's traffic, and in some cases, has been shown to provide upwards of 90% of all traffic from search engines. Given this, it's no wonder the industry of trying to be at the top of Google's results through search engine optimization is big business - and even though Google's efforts are fairly transparent, they have to be mysterious enough so they can't be directly gamed, and consequences are direct and dramatic. But sometimes, the decisions seem odd enough that it can't be anything but a mistake.


Google Drives Significant Traffic to Most Sites
You have no doubt seen the posts, the articles, the tweets, the e-mails, and all matter of comment spam around increasing your rank on search engines, and "getting to the top". You might also see people eagerly await tweaks to Google's PageRank, an algorithm that gives weight to a site based on its relationship on the Web to other linked sites, and their own perceived rank. Theoretically, it is assumed that the higher your PageRank is, the more likely you are to be higher in search results (based on a 0 to 10 scale). As one's rank is pushed upwards, you can expect to see more traffic on Google, and if you're demoted, you can expect it to similarly drop.

But what if you find your site dropped down to zero?

No doubt the feeling can be one of disbelief and powerlessness. I was surprised this morning to learn that the excellent blog "The Future Buzz" had seen its PageRank knocked down to zero, and while I can't say I watch PageRank that closely, or knew what it was before, I don't think that' move makes any sense. Adam Singer, the author of the blog, and a great electronic musician, by the way, has been running the site since November of 2007, and has grown his RSS subscriber base beyond 500, myself included.


The Future Buzz's Page Rank Evaporated...
So what can he do? I think our typical response is to cry out to Matt Cutts and hope that he can swoop in like the white knight to save the day. But as you can guess, Google is very big, Matt is very busy, and that sort of thing won't scale.

I find the situation similar to the issue we discussed last year, when Dan Morrill of TechWag found his site blacklisted by Google, thanks to what was believed to be a rogue script. One person's power in the face of the Google monolith can seem futile. No doubt Adam is going through the proper channels to learn what he did wrong, or why the site's PageRank changed, but for now it's a mystery. I've been lucky so far that Google and I get along okay. I'll just try not to tick off the pigeons who run the whole thing.

The StatBot Crunches My Google Reader Link Blog

Following last week's discussion around 10 ways you can maximize your Google Reader Link Blog, Yuvi from The Statbot went to work and pointed his super-geeky analytical skills at my own link blog, which I've been filling with shares for the better part of two years. Given I can only look at my Google Reader trends over the last 30 days, his data has brought a lot of insight.

You can see the full leaderboard for the last 10,000 shares embedded here via Zoho:



Excluding the fact I often share my own items (not a big surprise), an interesting mix of sources emerges. Yes, you see TechCrunch, Inquisitr, ReadWriteWeb and other A-List blogs leading the top 10, largely due to their prolific publishing schedules, and ability to attract tips from developers early in the process and time to chase down rumors. But below the top 10, there is a heavy mix of personal blogs, from Hutch Carpenter, to Jesse Stay, Chris Brogan, Rob Diana, David Risley and Mike Fruchter, who all place in the top 25.

In the 25-50 tier, you see John Furrier, Mona Nomura, Kara Swisher, Kyle Lacy, and Sarah Perez, mixed in with company blogs like those from Socialmedian.

In all, 379 different sources are represented in the last 5,000 shares, and 577 in the last 10,000... which shows a fairly diverse data set.

What I like about this data is that it is personal and it is natural - something that organically has developed over time based on my own interests - and is not intentionally manipulated. Yuvi also ran the data on Robert Scoble's leaderboard this week, which you should check out.

If you're not reading the Google Reader linkblog, you can find it here.

Can One's Subscription Trends Indicate Services' Momentum?

As I've mentioned several times before, I border on pack rat behavior when it comes to my e-mail. I very rarely tend to throw anything away - unless it's clearly spam or advertising from someone I don't know. For whatever reason, I save Twitter direct messages. I save responses to statuses on Facebook. I save receipts from iTunes purchases. And I definitely save e-mail confirmations from services that tell me when somebody has started to follow me online - whether that be on Facebook, Socialmedian, Twitter, FriendFeed, Strands, Disqus, or practically any one of the services I use with regularity. With an extremely active 2008 final and in the books, I thought I'd dust off my nerd-approved calculator and see what the trends looked like. If you're willing to say that a single data point indicates a trend, I found the results very interesting.

For the purpose of this navel inspection, I tracked four numbers, including new subscribers to my RSS feed, to Twitter, FriendFeed, and halfway through the year, Socialmedian. It was FriendFeed, Twitter and Socialmedian that saw the most activity for me in 2008, and cognitively, I thought I could sense when one service was spiking and another plateauing.

See the below graph:

RSS Data via BlogPerfume. Some dates to note: 1) I was a FriendFeed user prior to 2008. 2) I joined Twitter mid-way through January of 2008. 3) Socialmedian introduced the "Newsmaker" feature in mid-July of 2008.

At the end of 2007, I had approximately 200 RSS subscribers, and by the end of 2008, that number was approaching 4,000. Interestingly, the 4,000 to 5,000 number is close enough to the number of followers I ended up with on both Twitter and FriendFeed by the end of 2008, with an undoubted extremely high amount of overlap. But while the services are around the same number now, how they got there tells an interesting story.

Early 2008 was relatively quiet in social media. While MG Siegler and I had joined FriendFeed, and were cajoling others to join it, in beta, the service was lightly used prior to its opening to the public. At the same time, I was enjoying writing about newcomers to the Web, like Assetbar and ReadBurner, and, for the first time, gained notice from some strong Web junkies who helped the site gain visibility and RSS subscribers.

I joined Twitter somewhat reluctantly in January, and its growth was good,but relatively small when compared with FriendFeed's boom, especially from March to May as the service exploded onto the tech scene - including more than 1,000 subscribers in May alone. But as is common with many products, FriendFeed's initial spike settled down into a consistent level after the launch, dropping to a third of its peak, below 400 each month from August to October.

At the same time, Twitter's problems with uptime were reducing my use of the site, and others as well. I saw new followers of less than half April by June, before Twitter too settled in at a level almost equal that of FriendFeed.

In July, Socialmedian added a Newsmaker feature, which saw anywhere from 100 to 300 new followers through the end of the year, not quite the level of Twitter of FriendFeed, but respectable.

After a stable Fall, November and December saw a resurgence across all metrics, likely the result of more posts on louisgray.com, as I added additional writers and expanded the posts' reach. But while FriendFeed's climb was gradual, Twitter has exploded - delivering more than 1,300 new followers in December after almost 700 in November, and January 2009 is on track for even more.

Oh! And I barely mentioned RSS. While my aggregate number was much higher by the end of 2008 than the end of 2007, you can see much of the momentum I had was gained in the first half of this year. It could have been due to their being a limited number of tech geeks in the echo chamber. It could have been due to a higher profile on Techmeme, which decreased significantly in the second half. And it's always possible I overweighted social media versus the blog in the second half of the year once the twins were born. Not sure. But what I do know is that with the broader team in place, we are reaching new people, so if I couldn't get any bigger on my own, now I've got help.

So, navel gazing aside... does this show that FriendFeed's spike and then reduced profile is set to grow further again, as the trend from October shows? Is Twitter breaking into the mainstream, as November and December suggest? And will Socialmedian ever trump either of those two? Are you nuts enough to keep all this data like I have, and have you seen the same trends?

Quantcast Shows Which Services Rely Most on Their "Addicts"

If you're like me, you have a list of sites you visit just about every day, without fail, and some may even be visited multiple times a day. Whether you're a frequent visitor of Google News, CNN.com, Facebook or Twitter, site and service owners know they can count on some consistent traffic from their regular visitors, in addition to natural traffic from external links or search engines. Web traffic measurement company Quantcast tracks much of this data, and has even gone so far as to categorize the most frequent visitors to some sites as "addicts", defined as those who visit a site more than 30 times in a single month - the "hardcore segment of a site's audience". As it turns out, some popular Web services rely on these so-called "addicts" for more than a third of their total traffic, and at major social networks, that number is as high as two-thirds of all visits.


Quantcast Defines Addicts as 30 or More Visits a Month
While Quantcast isn't as well-known as its competitors, including Compete.com and Alexa, it is making an attempt to track site and service's traffic, giving significant demographic information for sites, and helping advertisers try and find a perfect match. While the service doesn't claim to have sufficient visitor detail for all sites, many of the largest are now being directly tracked, meaning the data is extremely accurate.

This means that Quantcast isn't simply returning a site's total visits in a given timeframe, as well as whether traffic is increasing or decreasing, but what its users look like, and if they're addicts, regulars, or just passing through.

Some notable data shows:


FriendFeed Trails Twitter In Less-Addicted Regular Users
Twitter.com: 1% of all users are addicts, who drive upwards of 34% of total site traffic. An additional 25% of users are regulars, who deliver 40% of site traffic, meaning that the remaining 26% of traffic comes from the 74% of users who are merely passing by.

FriendFeed.com: Less than 1% of all users are addicts, who deliver 25% of all total site traffic. An additional 4% of users are regulars, who deliver 8% of site traffic. Fully 96% of users are seen as just passing by, accounting for 67% of visits.

This data tells me that FriendFeed has a real problem in converting casual visitors and making them regulars. You are either one of the "addicted", or you're probably not using the site at all. There's practically no middle ground. Twitter also clearly has its addicts, but it also has a healthy middle base of users who check in less regularly.


Facebook and MySpace Primarily Cater to Their Addicted Base
Facebook.com: 11% of all users are addicts, who drive 62% of all site traffic. A robust 53% of users are regular visitors, who give 34% of visits, and the remaining 36% of passers-by only deliver 4% of traffic.

MySpace.com: 20% of the users are addicts, providing 74% of all site traffic. Another 58% are regulars, giving 24% of visits, while the 22% of passers-by are only giving 2% of traffic.

That "addicted" users of Facebook and MySpace provide greater than two-thirds of page views is no surprise. Instead of being engaged on the "real Internet", many users log in to their walled gardens and stay there for some time. And there's not much benefit to being a passer-by for either service, so that doesn't deliver much traffic at all.

Outside of the social networking and lifestreaming spaces, you can look up virtually any Web site and see how much they rely on addicts, provided Quantcast has the data. Quantcast says only 9% of eBay users are addicted, giving 61% of visits. 16% of DrudgeReport visitors are addicted, providing 78% of visits. 2% of LinkedIn users are addicted, giving 36% of visits.

There's practically a catch-22 in business when it comes to appeasing your addicts. Lose your most ardent users, and you could find them to be your most vocal detractors, as they feel looked over and spurned. But if you appeal too much to your most addicted users, you could overlook some major gaps in your product that prevent it crossing over to the mainstream. How can you convert those casual passers-by into regular users or even addicts? Therein lies the struggle of growth. Quantcast gives us a glimpse into how many sites are faring in this battle. The question is, can the data change behavior?

Twitter Followers Spiking As Service Increases Momentum

This holiday season, there's a little something in just about everyone's stockings, it seems. A buttload of Twitter followers. Whether it's due to the microblogging service's increasing visibility, its adoption by some famous users, or new utilities like Mr. Tweet that recommend new followers, it looks like users are seeing an ever-increasing number of followers per day - in the hundreds per day for the most visible accounts, and rates approximately 3-10 times the average growth for many smaller accounts, as tracked by Twitter statistics site, TwitterCounter.

TwitterCounter is a simple service that tabulates your number of followers, and shows how that number has changed over the last 7 days, but more revealing is the site's details box, which shows how many followers the user had when first tracked, their average growth, and how many they had in the last 24 hours. In almost every single case, of those I checked, from household name A-listers to random followers I see on the site, statistics are up, way up. And the rate has only been increasing over the last seven days.

Steve Rubel, a week or so ago, noticed the spike, saying, “Twitter is on fire. I am adding 200 followers per day.” A member of TwitterCounter for almost six months, Rubel has added about 33 followers per day, but has seen activity on his feed accelerate. According to his stats page, he has added nearly 500 followers in the last week, including almost 100 yesterday. And his growth is not alone.

For example, my own data had about 13 followers per day opting in to my feed, according to the last six months worth of information at TwitterCounter. But in the last week, I too have spiked up, adding more than 300, including almost 80 yesterday, and 70 the previous day, well ahead of normal. It's made the confirmations that fill up my e-mail each morning to be pretty close to overwhelming.

In May, I wrote that Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail. But with a continued explosion of services, and so many of them getting even greater adoption rates, the percentage of automated notes is driving ever higher - Twitter being the most notable. So while I get my daily updates from FriendFeed, BlogRize, Strands, Socialmedian, Facebook and all the other networks, it's Twitter that is booming and driving the highest aggregate activity.


Take a look at how some others are seeing similar spikes in Twitter following activity:

Duncan Riley: Average Growth: 7 Yesterday: 43 Weekly: 99


Robert Scoble: Average Growth: 97 Yesterday: 224 Weekly: 1,339


Gabe Rivera: Average Growth: 7 Yesterday: 77 Weekly: 250


Jesse Stay: Average Growth: 16 Yesterday: 78 Weekly: 519


Guy Kawasaki: Average Growth: 127 Yesterday: 353 Weekly: 2,593


Steve Rubel: Average Growth: 33 Yesterday: 94 Weekly: 452


All statistics and images are via TwitterCounter.com
As mentioned, this rise could be due to many things. Maybe people are growing increasingly comfortable with following a higher number of Twitter users. Maybe this is due to automation and matching utilities. Could be a combination of all these things. But I would be willing to bet that Twitter is stepping on the gas in terms of going viral. With the service's troubling summer and downtime issues largely behind it, users are finding it's safe again and inviting others to come join the real-time blabberfest.

Are you seeing a spike in your in box as well or is this a false positive? What do you think is driving the surge?

Sarah Palin Dominates Google's Year-End Zeitgeist

Google's annual year-end zeitgeist gives us a picture of what the United States, and the world at large, was searching for in the past 12 months. This year, Google, in a first for the global search engine, broke out their search results among 30 separate countries, but here at home, there was one individual who clearly had people looking for more: McCain's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Palin's plucking from relative obscurity and continued oddities throughout the campaign following the Republican National Convention kept her atop Google's lists in almost every category. Even her being an attractive woman, to many, kept her atop the image search zeitgeist, a claim that none of her counterparts could manage.

The 2008 results (found here) show "palin" as the #7 overall fastest rising term in the US, "Sarah palin" as the #1 fastest rising term in Google News domestically, and also #1 fastest rising in Image Search. You would think that with all that searching, the GOP would have vetted her a bit more before the election, but that of course is a different story.


In fact, in a year when we had the 2008 Beijing olympics, the election of Barack Obama, a financial crisis, and a stock market meltdown, Mrs. Palin was the fastest rising in all the world. (See the global results)

Following Palin's selection as VP candidate just prior to the Republican convention, searches for her outweighted those for Obama, her running mate, McCain, and Joe Biden, the opposing VP candidate. In fact, it wasn't until October when the eventual presidential pick overtook her on the site. (See the politics page)

Outside of politics, Google shows also that Facebook outpulled MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and LinkedIn in terms of social networking interest, and that hybrid car interest peaked when gas was $4 a gallon, and fell by fall as prices dropped by half. (See: Trendsetters)

The full report is here.

Blogosphere on Holiday: Thanksgiving Drops Posting by Half

Web site traffic and activity follows a fairly regular flow. Any administrator or stat junkie can tell you that the vast majority of sites see much more activity on the weekday than the weekend, and businesses tend to see Sunday traffic higher than that of Saturday, as people start to gear up for the coming workweek. Times of holiday, whether worldwide or just in the United States, also impact the activity, reducing traffic, and seeing a slowdown across the board when it comes to publishing. This year, Google Reader hints the slowdown is as much as fifty percent.

As I've mentioned a number of times previously on the site, Google Reader is my go-to RSS reader. It tracks the 400 feeds I view, when they publish, and how quickly I get to the new items. You can even look at the last 30 days and see just how many items were read versus the number posted.


My last 30 days, according to Google Reader
According to those stats, in a typical seven-day week, I take in about 4,800 new items, ranging from about 700 to more than 900 individual items from Monday through Friday, and between 200 and 300 on the weekend.

In the preceding three Thursday and Friday combinations, Google Reader offered approximately 1,600 items in each two-day set. But in this most recent week, with Thanksgiving coming on Thursday, that number plummeted to under 700 total items, a drop of greater than fifty percent. In fact, you could start to see a slowdown as the week progressed, with Tuesday showing fewer items than Monday, Wednesday fewer than Tuesday, and so on.

In fact, the decrease in posting on the two-day Thanksgiving holiday was so low, it barely eclipsed a standard weekend, eking above that number by about 10 percent, despite the fact the holiday is so US-centric, and we assume that the Web is worldwide. So if you were feeling a bit sluggish after the Thursday feast, and couldn't get out of the tryptophan haze to put a post up, you weren't alone.

And this trend is not new. You can also see a similar note I posted back in May of 2007: Blogosphere On Holiday Drops RSS Feeds by 40%

Twitterank's Leaderboard: Odd, Mysterious and Broken

The launch of a leaderboard for the once-feared Twitterank was inevitable. After all, in the online world, if you can measure something and give it a score, then by all means the next step is to rank people from high to low, and provide a leaderboard. It's happened with blog "influence" (Technorati). It's happened with mentions on Techmeme. It's even happened with how frequently people's items are shared on Google Reader (Feedheads, RSSmeme and ReadBurner). As ranking one's Twitter influence has been tried several times by a bunch of different sites, from Twinfluence to Twitter Grader, Twitterank was practically destined to join the crowd. On Friday, the site launched a "Top 50" list and after watching the dust settle a bit, I have to be extremely amused by the results.


Every ranking system has its flaws. And considering Twitterank's algorithm is both secret and changing, according to its author, Ryo Chijiiwa, initial hiccups are no surprise. But glancing at the top 50 tells me that Twitterank must measure influence in a very odd way, contrary to just about every other measure I've seen out there.

For example, according to Twitterank, the #1, highest scoring person in all the world is Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. (@laughingsquid) Scott's account garners a score of 237.591. His own Twitter account shows he (as of Monday after midnight) is following 1,636 people, has 19,307 followers, and has made 5,285 updates. This does not rank him among the top 50 on Twinfluence in total reach, but he does reach #20 on Twitter Grader.

In the #2 position on Twitterank is Brian Solis (@briansolis), who weighs in with a score of 235.847, and Twitter activity of 582 following, 8,033 followers and 3,524 updates. This activity garners him the #43 position on Twinfluence and #22 overall on Twitter Grader.

While Twitterater's top list does have a lot of "household names" like Dave Winer, Michael Arrington, Jeremiah Owyang and Steve Rubel, there are some big oddities, including at least one account that has never sent a message on Twitter at all.


Let's be honest, there's no way I should be this high.
For example, Loic Lemeur (not pictured, but at 226.91) actually ranks below me in the rankings, despite his following and being followed by almost five times as many people, and sending ten times the amount of updates. Meanwhile, Leo Laporte gets a 179.87 ranking, well off the top 50 list, despite having more than 60,000 followers, behind only president-elect Barack Obama and Kevin Rose of Digg (that I know of). And the ever-present Robert Scoble gets only a 188.63, also keeping him off the Top 50.


Leo Laporte, with 60,000 followers, misses the leaderboard?


And Scoble, Mr. Twitter, doesn't break 200 either?
So how does that make any sense? I was going to guess that Scott Beale ranked highly thanks to his high followers to following ratio, but Leo Laporte's ratio is an astonishing 120 to 1, so that, in theory would rank higher. And Scoble's real numbers are off the charts in almost every metric.

Another canary in the coal mine - the account of @google, which ranks #13 overall, according to Twitterank's Top 50, but has only 366 followers, isn't following anyone and has never updated their Twitter account.

So... @google, a user with no updates, has a higher Twitterank than does Scoble, who tops out at 39,000 followers, and more than 15,000 updates. Whatever you think about the content of Robert's tweets, whether they be too frequent or too off-topic, to say that an unused account is among the top in the world is as they say in the Web world... a big FAIL.

That Twitterank has an algorithm which measures something is clear as it gets some of the names you'd expect, but there are still a lot of questions around this service. Right now, it's basically a toy, and has little value.

RSSMicro Adds FeedRank to RSS Search Engine

RSSMicro and FeedCamp have been out since 2006, trying to measure hot topics, popular RSS feeds and offer a broad search engine through millions of feeds. (See Search Engine Journal for a 2006 review.) In the last week, RSSMicro introduced a new measure they call FeedRank, which utilizes an algorithm they claim taps into a feed's updating frequency, quality of content, and whether the sites are "known", to deliver a numerical score, graded on a steep curve.

The new FeedRank is said to have eliminated many spam Web sites through ensuring the quality of the content on the source, and its unique information across articles. But even if you think you are a top content producer, you might be surprised at how poorly you're rated. In fact, only 1% of all feeds rate better than 7 of 10. 3% rank as a 6, 6% as a 5, and 9% garnered a score of 4. The vast majority of blogs (including this one) get a score of 3/10 or less.

Given the preponderance of low scores, I'd be surprised if most bloggers would want to display their FeedRank.

But outside of that single measurement, RSSMicro, and its companion site, FeedCamp, could give the much more popular Google News and Google Trends a run for their money - if anybody knew about them, or if they worked harder to make their site look current.


Today's Top News and Images are Political, Of Course
The main RSSMicro page highlights top news, videos and images from almost 6,000 different news sources, on top of the more than 4 million RSS feeds they say they scour with their search engine.

The FeedCamp site, powered by RSSMicro, shows the top terms across the many feeds they cover. Unsurprisingly, you see terms like Obama, McCain, Election, Palin and Voters atop today's list. You can also delve into the archive to find out what terms were popular at any date, starting with June 9th of 2007. At that time, Bush and Iraq were top topics, but today's presidential candidates were nowhere to be seen. Flash forward to November 1, 2007, and Clinton ranked as the #7 topic, with Obama as #43. McCain didn't crack the top 100.

The sites are worth checking out, especially for trends, assuming somebody can crack the code and track keywords over time.

If you are interested in seeing where your feed sits in FeedRank, use the FeedRank Checker on this page. And if you crack a 4 out of 10 or higher, consider yourself privileged.

Google Reader Unveils Individual RSS Consumption Statistics

Google is sitting on a goldmine of data around RSS feed reading and consumption. As most universally accept that Google Reader is the most popular feed reader, Google likely has a plurality of information showing when bloggers post, when people read, and what the most popular feeds, items, etc. are. So far, despite having all this detail, the Google Reader team has been largely reticent to reveal their knowledge, choosing instead to promote RSS as a standard, rather than setting bloggers up with yet more ways to measure one another.

Today, a crack opened in the stone facade, as Google Reader delivered charts for every feed you are subscribed to, which shows when the feeds publish, by day, date and time, as well as how quickly you get to read the items themselves. The data, which leverages the last 30 days of activity, rather than the duration of the feed, or when you first subscribed, highlights the total posts per week, the total subscribers known to Google, and when the feed was last pinged. This part is not new.


Google Reader says Mondays have been busy here.
What is new are a set of bar charts showing what days bloggers post, what time of day they post, and when you read the pieces. The resulting charts can show gaps in a blogger's schedule, whether you wait hours to get a feed, or if they are filling your RSS in box overnight as you sleep.


Google Reader Shows Scoble Skips Days and then Spikes
For individual bloggers who post 1-2 items a day, you can see two or three day holes in their publishing, but for more high-volume sites, like Techmeme, TechCrunch, or Wired, for example, the resulting curve of information begins to take on a liquid form with fewer spikes. It's us individuals, who actually don't read RSS feeds 24 by 7, as much as we would like to, who have the holes in our consumption of that data.


Google Reader Shows Techmeme's Activity to be Fluid
To access this information, go to your Google Reader, click on the feed name of any item, and then click "Show Details" in the top right corner. Last 30 days will show what dates the author published (and you read it). Time of day will show the time the author published (in your time zone) and when you read it. Day of the week will show the day the author published (and when you read it).

We already had aggregate statistics, and now we have individual statistics by feed. It's tempting to guess what other mountains of data the Google Reader team is sitting on, and to wonder how we can tap in.

BackType Adds Comment Keyword Trends to Its Arsenal

In late August, BackType launched to track comments across thousands of blogs, and seemingly nearly as many disparate platforms. The service effectively turned blogging on its head, providing a place where comments were king, and the posts themselves, secondary. With BackType, you can see a single individual's comments from around the Web, and follow multiple people, helping to discover new sites. (My ID can be found here) Today, BackType debuted a new trends application, at http://trends.backtype.com/, based on their API, which shows trends within those comments, including how frequently keywords were mentioned, who said them the most often, and on which blogs those topics came up.


BackType Trends Lets You Search Millions of Comments
The effort to harness large groups of comments and make sense of the noise is not new. Fav.or.it pulled in more than 13,000 comments per day as recently as August, forming the basis for its report on the blogosphere's commenting statistics in aggregate. (See: Fav.or.it Comments On Commenting Statistics) But despite that one-time blip, most comprehensive reports on the state of the Web (yes, Technorati, we mean you) walk right past comments and act as they don't exist. Now that BackType has been pulling in comments for a few months, they're ready to position themselves as the authority on comments, and will be writing about these statistics in upcoming pieces, said Christopher Golda, founder of BackType.


The Presidential Election Has Been a Big Topic of Late
The new trends site, found at http://trends.backtype.com/ lets you graph mentions of keywords or phrases from the millions of comments BackType has pulled from around the Web. The tool can be used to gauge a topic's popularity, based on the total raw number of results, or to see spikes in activity, like with "Joe the Plumber", or the word "Macbook", which, as you can guess, spiked upward around Apple's recent announcement, and then quickly fell.


MacBook Mentions Spiked With Apple's New Introductions
The Trends tool shows results over the last two weeks, graphing the total counts by date, and displaying the top five blogs where the keyword is mentioned, as well as the top five authors of that keyword.

The combination lets you know, for example, that Daniel Pritchett, Robert Scoble and Mark Dykeman are the three most frequent users of the word FriendFeed, and that you're most likely to see FriendFeed discussed on Scobleizer, TechCrunch or Startup News (Y! Combinator).


Who Mentions FriendFeed Most Frequently, and Where? BackType Knows.
Similarly, using the same query, you can find that Twitter is most frequently discussed on ProBlogger, TechCrunch and Mashable.

So what has garnered commenters' interests in the last two weeks? Unsurprisingly, a lot more than just tech, but also, politics and finance. "Obama" clocks in with 80,851 separate comments. McCain tries to match with 69,414 mentions and his running mate, Sarah "Palin" counters with 33,593. On the financial side, you see 7,765 mentions of "crisis", 2,344 mentions of "recession", and 2,681 for "depression".

You can even combine searches using boolean expressions. Searching for "depression OR recession" garners 4,666 responses, but "depression AND recession" only returns 359. Good thing, because searching for these negative keywords has me heading to the medicine cabinet...

What I'd like to be able to do in the future with BackType Trends is compare one term versus another over time, or extend the search over a greater period, or on specific blogs, for example, seeing if Twitter mentions are going up or down at ReadWriteWeb or Mashable. It's also not the most robust, beautiful presentation I've ever seen, but the data is more important than its shell. We're seeing the foundation of what could be a very interesting repository of data, one I'll be tapping into time and again.

Follow me on BackType here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray.

Is There a Long Tail to My iTunes Library? The Stats Tell All.

Having long ago passed the point where I could realistically listen to all my music on my iTunes library in a matter of days or weeks, I set up a number of smart playlists that help me to rediscover old music, sorted by the most recent time I played the song. (See: iTunes: Old Music Is New Again from March of 2006) By solely listening to this constantly re-generating playlist, I find myself avoiding repeated songs, and am constantly finding great music that's fallen by the wayside.

But as this playist has continued to expand, and I can't keep up, despite avoiding new purchases, for the most part, we now can further break down the list to see if there is a long tail to iTunes. Am I getting to every song, and what percentage of my songs have been listened to over specific time periods? Also, given I only have a finite amount of time, how many of the songs have been listened to only once?

Let's find out.

First: As of Midnight PDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008:
There are 5,773 items, representing 23.7 days and 35.42 GB.


My iTunes Library, Songs Sorted by Last Played
Of these nearly 6,000 songs, I've managed to get to over 1,000 of them in the last three months, and an additional 500 or so in the prior three months (with no overlaps). But that means more than 4,000 songs have not been touched in the last six months, representing more than two and a half weeks of solid music.

While I've tried to get to every song with some regularity, there's still almost a day's worth of music that hasn't been listened to in more than 10 months.


My iTunes Library, Songs Sorted by Play Count
Additionally, of the almost 6,000 songs in my iTunes library, about 1,000 songs have been listened to greater than 12 times each since iTunes started counting. This compares with about 3,200 songs that have been listened to between 5 and 12 times apiece, and more than 1,500 that have been listened to between 1 and 4 times.


Using a small utility called iTunes Timer, the accumulative play totals for the songs in my library suggest that I've listened to iTunes for more than 195 days and 2 hours. Surely, if I stay connected to the laptop or my iPhone with some good regularity, I can power through those songs I haven't heard in more than six months, or listen to those tracks that haven't gotten enough airplay. But realistically, I shouldn't be letting the statistics drive my listening habits. It's common for people to find their favorite songs and play them a whole lot more than those that don't quite strike their fancy. But with iTunes, and the power of Smart Playlists, I can actually dive in and find out. And to watch me try and catch up, check out my Last.fm page.

What do your iTunes stats show?

OpenMicroBlogger Shows Steady Growth in First Month

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

Last August, on Stay N' Alive, I wrote about a lesser-known open source microblogging tool called OpenMicroblogger. OpenMicroblogger has shown steady growth since my post, and I really think it could be a strong alternative to Laconi.ca in the terms of OpenSource, self-hosted Microblogging solutions.

The Stats

In just one month (August), in raw-traffic alone, it appears, according to Compete.com, that Laconi.ca has taken a sharp drop of almost 50% of their traffic (from near 30k visitors down to near 15k). At the same time, OpenMicroblogger.org, the location to download the OpenMicroblogger code, has seen a sharp increase, from near 0 visitors, to near 2,000 in just a month. While these numbers aren't huge, they show that OpenMicroblogger is quickly becoming a strong alternative, and justly so, to Laconi.ca. According to them, OpenMicroblogger has had near 1,000 downloads in just August alone, with little to no press or exposure.


Compete.com shows Laconi.ca's big drop in traffic month over month.
The working example of the OpenMicroblogger code-base, OpenMicroblogger.com (emphasis on the ".com"), has also shown impressive results in just the one month since launch. Identi.ca has seen an even sharper decline in traffic according to compete.com, losing near 53% of it's traffic, from over 140 thousand visitors down to just over 60 thousand visitors in just the last month. Twit Army, the Leo Laporte founded, laconi.ca-backed implementation, has remained quite steady, but saw a very slight increase since the last month. Leo's site went from near 40,000 to near 50,000 in the last month. Since it only recently started, that too is impressive, but it will be interesting to see if Leo can keep the momentum going. While not near the Identi.ca or Twit Army numbers (yet), OpenMicroblogger.com has gone from near 0 users to almost 2,500 users in just a month, and doesn't seem to be losing momentum - browing the public timeline shows steady, current, and regular use of the service. The recently announced Yammer, a closed, yet internal solution for organizations, has not published any statistics - I see these OpenSource alternatives as a serious competitor against the Laconi.ca and OpenMicroblogger code-base.

OpenMicroblogger as a Platform

The code for OpenMicroblogger is completely Open Source, and supports the OpenMicroblogging (OMB - Emphasis on the "ing") protocol, meaning the software can actually communicate with other OMB-supported software such as Laconi.ca (the software that powers the Twitter-competitor, Identi.ca). This basically means you can subscribe to anyone on an OMB-supported site such as Identi.ca or Twit Army (both Laconi.ca instances), while at the same time users from those sites can subscribe to you as a user of OpenMicroblogger - the horizontal structure of such a large network of "mini-microblogging networks" can be profound. Twitter does not support this, nor does FriendFeed, or even Facebook (but there's nothing stopping them).


Identi.ca similarly has dropped since its initial spike.
What's unique about OpenMicroblogger however is that it hits a mainstream audience of developers that would be implementing the software a little better than Laconi.ca. The code behind OpenMicroblogger understands much of the Wordpress API for plugins and themes, so many Wordpress developers can easily extend the software with little more knowledge than they already have about Wordpress development. In fact, OpenMicroblogger.com, the official working instance of the code runs on the Automattic-written Prologue theme with little to no enhancements.

OpenMicroblogger.com Working Instance

Brian Hendrickson, the developer behind OpenMicroblogger, as mentioned earlier has actually provided a working instance of the OpenMicroblogger code at OpenMicroblogger.com. As I mentioned, it shows continual, current usage, and even has some very interesting features that Identi.ca and even Twitter don't provide. Beyond simple Microblogging capabilities and OMB support, it appears you can also provide links, upload photos, and most impressive, provide tags with your posts. Each Tagged entry gets added in a list of posted tags on the right of OpenMicroblogger.com with the number of posts under that tag allowing you to see the most popular topics and categories of the time.

I have talked before about the power of having meta-tagging with Microblogging services such as Twitter or Identi.ca. Instead of poluting your existing 140 characters with hashtags, you should be able to post them via your client of choice alongside the message so they can easily be categorized. OpenMicroblogger.com actually seems to be the first service to provide this. The only additionaly thing they could add is ability to tag actual users within a post and it would hit what I was talking about exactly.

While still in its infancy having only been around for a month or two, it appears that OpenMicroblogger is becoming a serious contender in the OpenMicroblogging space. Having talked to their developer and knowing a bit about the future of OpenMicroblogger (which I will disclose later when some new features are launched), there is even much more to come. I'll look forward to trying to use the service, and look forward to other organizations trying to implement this innovative software.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

As Twitter Regains Footing, Competitors' Growth Stalls

Over the last few months, Twitter's challenges have been well documented, here and elsewhere. Between issues with uptime, occasional data loss, a reduced feature set, and a difficult relationship with its developer community, the microblogging service frustrated many users to the point they were seeking out alternatives - from Plurk, to Identi.ca, Rejaw and FriendFeed. But more recently, as the service has all but eliminated downtime, and put the "Fail Whale" on the Endangered Species list (See: Pingdom's Twitter analysis), it looks like competitive services are losing momentum, and some are bleeding visitors, if Web visit tracker statistics are to be believed.


Twitter.com's Growth Has Returned, According to Compete.com
According to Compete.com, Twitter saw more than 2.6 million visitors in the month of August, a 500% increase over its December 2007 number, representing a 17.7% increase month over month. The high level of growth since June for Twitter followed a two-month near plateau from April to June, when the service's struggles were at their peak.


Compete.com Shows Twitter's Competitors Have Stalled
In the same time period, from July to August:

• Identi.ca fell more than 58%, to 61 thousand visitors, down from more than 140 thousand the prior month.
• Plurk.com fell to less than 250 thousand visitors, down 7.5% month over month, and down 30 percent from the site's peak, in June.
• FriendFeed.com visits were flat from July to August, decreasing just under 1 percent, to more than 500 thousand visitors.

(All data from Compete.com)


Compete.com Velocity Shows Twitter Extending Its Lead
I can't claim I was an extremely "early" adopter of Twitter, and at times, I haven't been too fond of the service compared to other sites, but when it comes to status updates and "what you are doing", there really is only one game in town, one that's synonymous with the concept of microblogging - Twitter, thanks to it being first on the scene, first to amass a significant user base, and being tied in to other services, like Facebook and FriendFeed.. When Twitter had months of instability, outages, and a reduced feature set, its users didn't make the mass migration to other services that many had expected. And while they're still wrapping their arms around a business model, as services like Yammer claim to have gotten to the financial promised land first, Twitter has got the brand recognition and the massive user base that no other service can claim.

On Saturday, I wrote to Chris Baskind on FriendFeed, regarding Twitter.

"We have huge expectations and therefore, huge frustrations. The site has so much potential, and realistically, they have already won the microblogging battle, so we want them to be great!"

Twitter has the potential to be the conduit for the SMS and text messaging generation to social media. Twitter has already proven to be a great option for news updates, alerts to emergencies, and for using keywords to gauge the temperature of tens of thousands at once. And for anybody looking to the smaller services like Plurk, Rejaw, or Identi.ca, even if those services have incrementally better features or a stronger UI, they would have to expect a smaller user base, becoming an increasingly quiet echo chamber.

Barring disaster or bankruptcy, Twitter's leadership should continue. I've seen increasing examples of late where the site has become more mainstream. Those looking to alternative microblogging services may have had the time to hit at Twitter's weaknesses pass them by, as the site has nearly eliminated downtime, and started again on the growth curve, when others have stalled or seen user traffic decimated.

SiteMeter's Attempted Challenge to Google Analytics Falls Flat

SiteMeter, one of the most widely-used Web log statistics trackers, has seen itself fall well behind the long, dark, shadow of Google Analytics. And while I've been a happy SiteMeter user for almost three years, its statistical data has at times seemed fairly pedestrian compared to Google's advances, lacking the ability to segment the results by selected dates, to build advanced charts, or even to export the records to Excel or a comma separated value file. This weekend, after months of developing a new version of their product in beta, they finally took a leap forward to better compete, but the roll-out has, so far, been a big disappointment. In fact, on the same day they went live, they had to roll back the launch.

SiteMeter, to date, has featured a free version of its product, and a paid version, to premium subscribers, who, for $89 a year, get expanded insight into referral statistics, user behavior, and their Web browsing setup. Premium users get access to data covering the most recent 4,000 visitors, as well as aggregate data comparing the most recent month's traffic to that of prior months - as far back as you started using the service.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, shows you data from all visitors of your site ever tracked. And instead of being restricted to only one set of users (the last 4,000), you can show visit data from the last day, multiple days, or any date segment. The service also lets you carve up your visitors' history with multiple graph options.

SiteMeter must have been feeling the heat, because their newest version hit the major benefits of Google Analytics. It let you segment results from a date range. It let you export any graph's underlying data. And it definitely expanded the range of graphs available.


The New SiteMeter Tried to Pretty Up Its Visitor Graphs


User Visit Data In the New Site Meter: Basically Raw Code


The New SiteMeter Pulldown Menus: Form or Function?

But what SiteMeter didn't do with their new version was make the data look useful for humans. Instead of a friendly UI, its newest offering felt very raw, with unpolished typefaces, and gaps that showed not all the data was being tracked. It's the same type of feeling most Mac users get when entering Linux for the first time.

Meanwhile, old shortcuts that were familiar to existing users, like recent referrals, popular pages, and summary data, no longer worked, and clickable links were instead replaced with a series of pull-down menus. Essentially, form was chosen over function, and the form wasn't really all that good.


Coming Soon: A SiteMeter Scoreboard?
Should they get more comfortable with their new look and feel at any point in the near future, it's clear SiteMeter is also not only going after Google Analytics, but there was a new feature called "Sitemeter Scoreboard" that showed your site's ranking in terms of total visitors or page views, relative to the service's nearly 1 million installations. Maybe the idea is that we would start showing our SiteMeter ranking on our blogs as many do for Technorati or other services. But it looks like we're not going to know for a while. Today's botched roll-out is another black eye for a company that most recently gained headlines for blocking access to Web sites via Internet Explorer, and has had the occasional outage or two without company comment.

If this is the best SiteMeter had to offer against Google Analytics, Google's really in no trouble at all.

Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

It should be no surprise that being part of a site called TVbytheNumbers that I’m obsessed with statistics and this obsession extends to all the web site analytics and statistics that are available to us.

While I hear and read things often about how Feedburner’s stats stink and Google Analytics stats stink and none of them ever sync up well, that really hasn’t been my personal experience. Using either Feedburner or Google Analytics as an intraday tool is certainly problematic, and I have had a day or two here and there where Feedburner did lose data for an hour of five that it never recovered, but mostly both are just slow and do recover. Google Analytics typically tracks visits and visitors correctly intraday within reasonable timeframes, but lags behind in counting total pages for hours. Usually, by 8am Pacific time (but not often before then) all the page views for yesterday show up. And once they do, on a page view basis, Google Analytics, Feedburner and Quantcast all seem like they wind up syncing up within 2%-3%.

Given everything involved, I find the 2% difference very reasonable and it doesn’t bother us any. We wind up triangulating between Feedburner, Google Analytics and Quantcast and it’s less of a hassle than managing our Web logs.

Because of the problem cited above with Google Analytics being slow to capture all the page views, it does make intraday monitoring fairly worthless, aside from tracking visits and visitors. All the other stats – time on page, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. – are all wrong until all the page views are captured. But there’s little we’re doing that requires great analytics on an intraday basis. There are certainly times when it would come in handy, but even as it is, it works well enough intraday where we can at least figure out if we add something or move something around whether the desired result was achieved.

As a tool used after the fact, I find Google Analytics to be an extremely valuable tool, though I often don’t like what I see!

One thing we’ve thrown in the towel on is that referral traffic is almost always bad, no matter the source. There are some rare exceptions where linking produces good traffic (high time on site, number of pages per visit, etc), but that’s indeed rare. In fact, in almost every instance where a specific post is linked, the traffic is bad, with bounce rates often in excess of 80%. That’s whether Louis is linking to it, whether someone throws a link on Twitter, or even if Matt Drudge links to one of our stories. StumbleUpon and Digg show similar results.

Such traffic is great for jacking up visits and visitors, but bad for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. We’ve pretty much thrown our hands up in the air on that score and attributed it to web surfing behavior via links. As an aside, the stable link we have from Drudge to “TV Ratings” produces much better results, but if he links to specific story on our site and gives it any prominence on his site, the traffic has a very high bounce rate.

That seems largely out of our control, however there was still one stat that really bothered me. That was that if someone landed on our site via our home page, the bounce rates were still pretty high, approaching 50%. Better if someone came directly instead of via a referral, but still bothersome either way. Here's the landing page results for our site for August 1-31:

Recently, with that and a couple of other factors in mind – mainly wanting the ability to showcase more content on the home page – we redesigned the site. The bounce rate for traffic landing on our home page was around 47% for August. In the last week, post- redesign, that is now around 25%. The bounce rate for referral traffic to specific posts is still lousy, but again, we don’t feel like we can do much about that. Here are the landing page stats from September 6-12.

All of this has me wishing I’d gotten around to redesigning the site sooner. Who knows how much repeat traffic we may have lost as a result of design? I also feel silly because once upon a time I actually had responsibility for the web design/UI group at Charles Schwab. I recently had lunch with the VP who ran that group in my org and when I told her about the results she shook her head and laughed at me. My mentality had been this: our blog is a blog, pretty much like every other blog and designed pretty much like every other blog so spending a lot of energy on design tweaking didn’t seem like a worthwhile priority.

I definitely should’ve known better. I’m still not very happy about the bounce rates on referral traffic, but am quite happy about the reduction in bounce rates for people landing on our home page and would ascribe that improvement completely to redesigning.

By the way, for anyone interested, we went with the Live Wire theme from Woo Themes that we modified a little. So far I’d consider it the best $70 we ever spent. It’s not a perfect world, so the theme isn’t perfect, but setting the navigation structure (which we’ll certainly still need to tweak) and other modifications didn’t take much time. For $70 and time spent, cutting the bounce rate to our home page just about in half seems like time and money well spent.

Read more by Robert Seidman at TVByTheNumbers.com.

The Even Geekier Approach to Fantasy Football

You would think with trying to keep the blog regular, working a full-time job, keeping active on all kinds of social networks, and raising two month old twins, I wouldn't need yet another time sink. But, clearly not knowing my own limits, I agreed to return to the world of Fantasy Football after taking a two-year hiatus, re-joining the league where I was active from 2001-2005, even though I haven't been paying attention to the NFL at all, and couldn't tell you the starters on just about any squad. So, why do I think I have a chance taking on a group of couch potatoes who have bye weeks and depth charts memorized? The answer: Because I'll be the biggest nerd in the room.

Here's what I do to keep myself challenging for the league title each year:
(I've won the 12-team league twice in five years and finished second once):

1. I don't pick favorite teams or favorite players.

When I was growing up, the San Francisco 49ers were the team of the decade. They won four Super Bowls, and Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig were superstars. But in the last decade or so, the team might as well have fallen into the Bay, and I don't really care. As a result, I'm not drafting them too highly or unfairly promoting my hatred of their rival.

2. I only bring a laptop to draft day, not a pile of magazines and highlighters.

While some guys show up with their dog-eared copies of ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated or Football Weekly, and six colored markers, as well as the year's bye week schedule and an up to the minute injury report, I just bring my laptop and have Microsoft Excel ready to go. While they shuffle papers around and debate how their home mock drafts differ from the real deal, I'm ready to sort and click between tabs to find my data.

3. I believe past performance is the best indicator of future performance.

I don't need to see teams play or practice to believe a quarterback and a wide receiver have "chemistry", or need to see if a guy has had a good off-season regimen. Instead, the most important data is how well they performed relative to their peers at the position in previous years, according to the rules of the league you are playing.


My 2004 Data Set With 2003 Results
That said, I use the tools that are available to get the data I want, and it all goes into Excel, including:

• A worksheet that shows the previous years' league results, sortable by position, name, team, total points, overall points ranking, and average points per week.
• A worksheet that shows the bye weeks
• A worksheet that shows the most recent injury report, by team
• One or more worksheet with the proposed draft order from ESPN or USA Today

I then create two net new tabs, including:

• A worksheet that will display the team I have drafted.
• A worksheet that tracks the entire league's draft for the season

Once all the data is in there, I'm ready to go to work, as soon as the draft starts. As picks are made by each other team, I quickly highlight those who are off the board in multiple places - on the tab showing last year's statistics, and on the mock draft boards from ESPN and USA Today. At this point, the draft isn't that much different in Excel as it is on paper, but as time progresses, and the all too typical first few rounds get chewed up by running backs, quarterbacks and the occasional wide receiver, my preparedness has an advantage.

If your fantasy football league was online last year, all you usually have to do is go to last season's end of year report, and do a copy/paste into Excel, which will recognize all the columns and set you up for sorting nirvana. If at first you don't succeed... keep trying until you do. Worst case, save the pages as HTML and you can bring them to the draft day on the laptop.


The 2004 Draft, A Down Year for Me
Where others are deciding whether to take a team defense or their third running back, I can go and use Excel's Sort option to its fullest. I can take the highest players available based on their points per game average from the previous season, or do the same to fill a position I need. I can know whether taking a good quarterback will mean all that much relative to the next highly rated option, or if I should keep filling the backfield.


My 2004 Roster, For Example
And the latest rounds are where I make a killing. At this point, especially as most drafts are on Saturday mornings, and guys are joking around about taking players who are injured, or complaining about how the guy just before them snaked Fred Taylor or Torry Holt, I can sneak in and find players that were rated highly last year or by the major sports publications, yet haven't been drafted.

In 2004, my 10th round pick ended up being Willis McGahee of the Bills. In 2005, I got Larry Johnson of the Chiefs in round 12, who ended up being excellent injury protection for Priest Holmes, scoring 17 touchdowns on 1,549 yards rushing. As the rest of the teams use all the allotted time, often accidentally drafting players that have already been taken, my turn comes around every 12th pick, and I look to my Excel sheets for the answer. Yes, they overlooked my secret weapon, and I'll be setting myself up for the win, again.

This year's draft time is 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, and I've made it a little more fun by getting Drew Olanoff of ReadBurner and Strands to be part of the festivities, as well as two friends from work, all of whom are joining the league for the first time. We'll see who wins the battle of Fantasy Football geeks.

Fav.or.it Comments On Commenting Statistics

Fav.or.it, which is attempting to bring RSS to the masses, has recently been under fire from people like Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr and Mark Hopkins of Mashable for essentially republishing full feeds of blogs, with integrated comments, alongside advertising.

While I'll leave that fight to them at this point, one interesting byproduct of Fav.or.it's importing of blogs, and their comments, is the ability to spot trends across more than 2,000 feeds, including how often people post comments, what days are most frequent, how often brands are mentioned, and whether the biggest blogs have frequent commentors, or a wide distribution.

An initial post by Nick Halstead, titled "Blogosphere Commenting Statistics", shows an average of 13,000 comments per day coming into the system, and unsurprisingly, that number dives down to just over half on the weekends. And while he only offers three examples: TechCrunch, Mashable and ChrisBrogan.com, it looks like the more intimate feel and participation of Chris leads to a higher level of repeat commenters than do the blog networks.

The discussion around whether RSS readers like Google Reader, Shyftr, and now, Fav.or.it, should include full feeds, include comments, or show ads, has been among the most controversial topics this year in the blogosphere. I believe that at the very least, these systems should make best efforts to push out comments from their system, and that Fav.or.it is actually doing the reverse, pulling in external comments to their system, is at least eyebrow-raising. But while they're doing it, Nick and team have their hands on some very interesting statistics that have got to have Yuvi Panda of The Statbot salivating. Let's see if we end up hearing more from this pool of data.

State of the Blog: July 2008 Recap

July 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,443

Total stories published in July: 54
(About 1.7 per day, up from 1.3 in June)

Total stories in July with comments: 53
(98% of all stories, from 37 and 97% in June)

Total comments on July posts: 783, approx. 14 per post.
(From 493 or 15 per post in June)


July statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 978 (up 190)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,989 subscribers (up 777)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 64 subscribers (up 8)
MyBlogLog Members: 311 (up 31)

Twitter Followers: 1,569 (Up 312)
FriendFeed Followers: 3,268 (Up 726)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter): 1st overall.

Month over month growth: 42.6%
Year over year growth: 1,197.9%

Top Five Most Visited July Stories (According to Analog)

1. Seeing the Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking
2. How Silicon Valley Heavy Are Web 2.0 Consumers?
3. TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service
4. The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining
5. Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air

Others receiving votes: TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize Integration, Groups, Nine Ways to Enlarge the Social Media Audience, July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle, As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier, Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence, and To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier (61 comments)
2. Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking (59 comments)
3. Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence (53 comments)
4. The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining (52 comments)
5. Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail (32 comments)

July of 2008 could have been a challenging one. The first month after having twins, some thought, as did I at times, that the new family obligations could make efforts here come to a screeching halt. Needless to say, that didn't happen. Being on paternity leave for most of the month helped, as did the addition of some great voices as guest bloggers, who I've enjoyed having profiled here. In June, there were guest posts from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, Jesse Stay, Hutch Carpenter, Colin Walker, Mark Dykeman, Rob Diana, and (jeff)isageek. I hope to see their names here quite a bit going forward, and maybe some new names as well? Stay tuned.

Product news in the month saw new Twitter clients TweetDeck and Posty get some solid traction, the opening up of SocialMedian in beta, AssetBar's launch of FanFlow, the acquisition of Ballhype and launch of Beltway Blips, not to overlook the controversial launch of Cuil, and rollout of the new 2.0 software for iPhone and iPod Touch.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

TweetStats Shows Impact of Instability on Top Tweeters' Activity

Much of the impact of Twitter's frequent downtime has been anecdotal. Amid some saying they're leaving the service for greener pastures, or developers pulling up their stakes in the Twitter community, statistics show that some of Twitter's most prominent and active users have dramatically reduced their activity on the site over the last two months.

The drop in total tweets by virtually every top user who was measured could be part technical - due to their simply being unable to login, or psychological, a result of lower activity and lower conversations which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. While none abandoned the site altogether, what could have been an "up and to the right" activity graph has largely stalled, and in many cases, reversed.


My own activity, rising month by month after I finally started using the service in January, stalled in June, and is still well below what it likely would have been had stability not been impacted.

Using TweetStats, a site which can show your total tweeting activity, who you most frequently message, and which hours and days you use the service, I polled ten top Tweeters to see how their June and July activity compared with April and May. Here's what I found:



Chris Brogan / @chrisbrogan
April and May Tweets: 2,896
June and July Tweets: 1,070
Change in Tweeting: Down 63%


Corvida Raven / @corvida
April and May Tweets: 2,669
June and July Tweets: 1,065
Change in Tweeting: Down 60%


Danny Sullivan / @dannysullivan
April and May Tweets: 1,281
June and July Tweets: 551
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


Dave Winer / @davewiner
April and May Tweets: 1,535
June and July Tweets: 527
Change in Tweeting: Down 66%


Drew Olanoff / @drewolanoff
April and May Tweets: 2,131
June and July Tweets: 909
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


GeekMommy / @geekmommy
April and May Tweets: 6,030
June and July Tweets: 1,419
Change in Tweeting: Down 76%


Jason Calacanis / @jasoncalacanis
April and May Tweets: 1,017
June and July Tweets: 562
Change in Tweeting: Down 45%


Leo Laporte / @leolaporte
April and May Tweets: 363
June and July Tweets: 237
Change in Tweeting: Down 35%


Robert Scoble / @scobleizer
April and May Tweets: 3,579
June and July Tweets: 746
Change in Tweeting: Down 79%


Michael Arrington / @techcrunch
April and May Tweets: 1,587
June and July Tweets: 1,079
Change in Tweeting: Down 32%

Across the board, Twitter's issues cut activity to the site by about half or more for some of the most visible users of the site. Others, like Kevin Rose of Digg (TweetStats) and Pete Cashmore of Mashable (TweetStats) saw only a less than 20 percent reduction in their Twittering activity between the two time periods. While there's no doubt many people, like Steve Rubel and Allen Stern, wish discussion of Twitter's problems would just go away, the impact it had on the site over the lsat few months has been very real, and we're just now able to take a step back and measure its impact.

How Silicon Valley Heavy Are Web 2.0 Consumers?

Last week, I used Google Trends to show that some Web services have largely fallen out of favor, leading to fewer searches over time. The same database also offers some hints as to where people are geographically when searching for these terms, and unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is disproportionally weighted for many technology terms and company names. It's sometimes said that in order to reach the mainstream, Web and software companies need to escape the Silicon Valley bubble, so, according to Google, which ones have jumped?


Click for full-size image.
Let's take a look at a sampling, by no means the superset of Web 2.0:

AOL:

#1 City: New York, NY
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

CNet:

#1 City: Singapore
#1 Bay Area: Pleasanton, CA at #2 overall

Digg:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

eBay:

#1 City: Birmingham, UK
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Facebook:

#1 City: Hailfax, Canada
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Feedburner:

#1 City: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

Firefox:

#1 City: Dortmund, Germany
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #5 overall

Flickr:

#1 City: Pleasanton, CA

FriendFeed:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

GigaOM:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

Google:

#1 City: Manchester, UK
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #8 overall

iTunes:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

LinkedIn :

#1 City: San Jose, CA

Mashable:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

Microsoft:

#1 City: Singapore
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #8 overall

MySpace:

#1 City: Irvine, CA
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Reddit:

#1 City: Austin, TX
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

Seesmic:

#1 City: Paris, France
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

Scoble:

#1 City: Redmond, WA
#1 Bay Area: Santa Clara, CA at #2 overall

Slashdot:

#1 City: Austin, TX
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #4 overall

StumbleUpon:

#1 City: Dublin, Ireland
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #2 overall

TechCrunch:

#1 City: Santa Clara, CA

Techmeme:

#1 City: San Francisco, CA

Technorati:

#1 City: Singapore
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #3 overall

Twitter:

#1 City: Meguro, Japan
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #3 overall

Yahoo!:

#1 City: Bogota, Colombia
#1 Bay Area: San Francisco, CA at #9 overall

YouTube:

#1 City: Lima, Peru
#1 Bay Area: None in the Top Ten

Zillow:

#1 City: Renton, WA
#1 Bay Area: Pleasanton, CA at #6 overall

For just about every Web or tech topic, the city of San Francisco, or the San Francisco Bay Area, is represented at a much higher level than any other region, when population is considered. As Google's FAQ states, "for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city." It's no surprise that people in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are looking for Web details more frequently than anywhere else.

What is also interesting is those companies or technologies that broke out of the Silicon Valley bubble. AOL, eBay, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! are not big surprises. In fact, the bigger the name, the more likely they are to get a higher share of searches from somewhere else. As many are eager to see what it takes for a product to break through to "the mainstream" and get out of the geek overload common here, Google Trends can give a little insight as to whether a service has done it.

I didn't name the hundreds and hundreds of Web 2.0 services and companies out there, but Google Trends data is open to all, so run the data yourself at http://google.com/trends and add to the list in the comments.

Related stories:

Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?
On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

FriendFeed Doubles Share of Comments in 2nd Month Tracking

Last month, in Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?, I reported that comments on blog posts and Twitter post notifications on FriendFeed represented about 40% of the total comments I received on the same number of posts, natively, on louisgray.com, for the month of May.

As June drew to a close, the issue of FriendFeed owning the comments flared up again, with Robert Scoble claiming "blog comments are dead". I can report they're not dead, but for the month, conversations on FriendFeed jumped to more than 78% of the comment activity here. This trend, if it tracks for just one more month, will see that FriendFeed has the majority of my comments.

All told:

* There were 493 comments on the blog.
* There were 254 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 133 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.

On the 38 posts:

* On 1 occasion, no comments were on either site.
* On 2 occasions, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 4 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 31 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.


June's Comment Counts for FriendFeed and LouisGray.com
(Click for Larger Image)

You'll note that the overwhelming majority of posts saw more activity here. So why the jump from May to June? Because, due to the more family-oriented updates, FriendFeed's very real community got engaged. While 14 of my more tech-oriented posts got absolutely no comments, I had 40 responses to my sad news of our dog passing away, 31 on a post saying our twins would be on their way in weeks, and 26 more when they finally showed up. For as much talk as there is at times about sites like this being circular in how they celebrate themselves and their underlying technology, when it comes to people and family, the community there is very real.

Also a change from May were a few discussions that struck around my Tweet updates, rather than waiting for the blog post to arrive. The mioNews story, which so far, has no comments here or my stream, has 22 comments on my Tweet, and there were 39 more around the same for Feedly's arrival.

Source data:
* louisgray.com
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=blog
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=twitter

As I noted last month, the data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,543 people following me on FriendFeed, and 2,336 RSS subscribers on louisgray.com, so in theory, with those two measurements being close, there is an equal opportunity for viewers to comment on either location, with there being some significant expected overlap.

Will FriendFeed grow to the point that I should close down Disqus and rely solely on the service to get me the conversations? Absolutely not. But I've made extra effort to participate and engage, and the result has been a more diversified discussion, wherever it makes sense, without demanding it be here. I'm looking forward to seeing just what these numbers look like at the end of July.

State of the Blog: June 2008 Recap

June 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,389

Total stories published in June: 38
(About 1.3 per day, down from 1.5 in May)

Total stories in June with comments: 37
(97% of all stories, from 43 and 91% in May)

Total comments on June posts: 493, approx. 15 per post.
(From 456 or 9.7 per post and 10.6 per commented post in May)


June statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 788 (up 129)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,212 subscribers (up 181)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 56 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 280 (up 34)

Twitter Followers: 1,257 (Up 148)
FriendFeed Followers: 2,542 (Up 544)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
2nd overall, behind only April '08.

Month over month growth: 12.7%
Year over year growth: 1,074.5%

Top Five Most Visited June Stories (According to Analog)

1. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.
2. The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior
3. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next
4. Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS
5. What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Others receiving votes: Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?, The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah!, Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud, RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares, LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network, and OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah! (57 comments)
2. All Dogs Go To Heaven. For Molly, It Took 18+ Years. (41 comments)
3. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter. (37 comments)
4. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next (34 comments)
5. RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares (27 comments)

June of 2008 was a month I'll never forget, obviously - for reasons much bigger than this blog or any dumb statistics. The month started off sadly with our 18 year-old beagle's passing, and culminated in the arrival of our twins. While some thought the doubling of our family overnight would dramatically impact my ability to keep up on the blog and elsewhere, it hasn't yet happened. There are definitely more distractions, and there will be gaps in publishing, thanks to family obligations, but my goal is to keep going. Should be a fun ride.

In between all the changes to the family, it was a great month, where we saw the debut of Feedly, mioNews, NoiseRiver, twitAbit, Loud3r, OneSpot, and FriendBinder, to name a few. Some you will hear about a lot in the coming months, and some, maybe not so much, but they're all trying to make a name for themselves, and they shared part of their stories here.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Often, perception of a site or service's momentum can be self-fulfilling.

Even over the last two years of my writing on this blog, the companies I cover have changed, as what used to be relevant has become less so, and new hotshots have come to take their place. But while some niche services are on their way to becoming household names, others that could have done so are fading, when compared to their peaks of 1, 2 or even 5 years ago.

One tool showing the decline of brands relative to one another is Google Trends, which measures how frequently a keyword is searched for as a percentage of the total searches on the Web.

Using Google Trends, you can see the near-death of older Web 1.0 brands, like Netscape, Lycos and Alta Vista, the plateauing of early Web 2.0 brands, like MySpace, and the deflating balloon of weakened brands, such as Technorati, Digg and Microsoft.


Netscape's Downfall... In Graph Form.

And Lycos Follows Suit.
A little more than a week ago, Google Trends made news by introducing the ability to track data on Web sites, but the service's core element helps shed some light on the fact that the interest level in Technorati has been slashed in half in just the last 12 months, that MySpace peaked a year ago, as did Digg.


The Technorati Monster Is Starving.

And Digg Is In a Rut.

MySpace Is Floating in Space.
Meanwhile, as both Google and Yahoo! have continued an upward trajectory of world interest, Microsoft has seen steady decline every year, starting in 2004, when the data was first tracked.


The Only Thing More Depressing is MSFT Stock.
At one time, it was fun to point out that the Technorati monster had escaped, that Technorati wasn't up to challenging Google Blog Search, or to debate whether Digg's relevance was going to decrease with its move away from solely having a tech focus. But Google Trends lays out on the table the tougher news - nobody cares, and the number of people actively looking for news on Digg or Technorati is going down, while many, many other services are rapidly growing.

While the entire market of Web measurements is questionable, from Alexa to Compete.com and all sorts of competitors in between, it'd be interesting to see Google get even more aggressive with their trends, showing the velocity of a term's decline or ascension. Maybe that'd get the point across a little better for those saying their damaged brands aren't in trouble.

And lest you think Google Trends is all bad news, it's not. Take a look at hotter stories, like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook or Google itself to see what an up and to the right arrow looks like. But if these brands aren't careful, like some of those listed above, they too could stagnate and fall. And once you slow, you're really just preparing for the inevitable drop.

ReadBurner Revamps Stats Pages, Expanding Shared Items Analysis

The ReadBurner team continues to make enhancements to the popular Web site dedicated to showing the most popular items shared on Google Reader and Netvibes. Tonight, in advance of their weekly podcast, featuring MG Siegler of ParisLemon and VentureBeat as a guest, they are rolling out upgrade statistics showing the most popular sources, displaying the average number of shares per story for a given author or source in the system.

In a change from the service's previous methodology, the new reports are intended to reward consistency, meaning that a site won't gain from one-time spikes around a popular story, and won't get more prominence due to a higher frequency of posting.


The new stats, seen at http://www.readburner.com/stats, come only a week after RSSmeme debuted new sidebar widgets that show the top tags and top users for the day, as well as widgets that can show who are the most frequent sharers of a specific blog. You can see the "Top Sharers" on the right side of this page to see who shares content from louisgray.com, as well as the tags I use the most to describe my posts.

Both sites are making strides to expand away from simply counting the data to helping analyze it. Both sites also gave a nod today to the morning's news that Chris Wetherell, the main architect behind the amazing Google Reader, will be leaving the company. Had it not been for his efforts, and Google Reader's growth, neither site would exist.

These, and other topics, will undoubtedly be part of the night's discussion with MG. You can tune in here.

SiteMeter Stats Sputter to a Stop, With No Reason Given

It seems that outages are the new black.

After a weekend filled with stories on Amazon downtime, a brief Disqus blip, continued Twitter troubles, and many sites straining to take on increased crowds swelling to catch the latest from WWDC, I was surprised to see my blog statistics engine, SiteMeter, get in on the act. Since 11 this morning Pacific time, data has been almost completely stalled, not logging visits, and the company's blog doesn't give any reason for the slowness.

I'd like to blame Scoble, or blame Steve Jobs, but I don't think they're the cause.


SiteMeter is one of the most widely used statistics trackers in the blogosphere. And while I could put up with occasional outages from a free product (See: Mark Evans: The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining), I'm one of those who wanted to support the site's developers, paying $89 a year to gain a premium version of the service last year, which gave me expanded access to a wider array of reports.

I'd like to say I don't check with SiteMeter throughout the day out of curiosity, but I'd be lying to you for sure. I love stats. I even made a dashboard widget for Mac OS X that shows me the day's activity, letting me just drag my mouse to the bottom right corner to get caught up. Except, today, I was surprised to see I was extremely unpopular. Not only was the total visit count much lower than I had anticipated, but it said absolutely nobody had checked in in the last hour. And since this morning, I've seen no updates at all.

SiteMeter's seen issues like this in the past. They operate not from one mega-database, but instead, each of its individual servers runs on its own database. When one has a hiccup, only those users on that single server show issues. I expect that's likely what's going on here, and just maybe, with luck, the total statistics will catch up overnight.

Now, we'll see just how much my going dark for about 36 hours over the weekend will have hurt me. With the company's blog not giving any hints as to what's happening, hope is all I have. Maybe it's time to check in with my FTP server and download my logs.

Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?

One of the biggest worries I've seen in blogging over the first half of this year is that with the conversation shifting to social aggregation sites in addition to the originating blog, FriendFeed being the most notable, with Plaxo Pulse, Shyftr and other sites being part of the discussion, that comments on the originating site will disappear, or erode, as activity at the secondary site increases.

As one of the most visible and active participants on FriendFeed, I looked into my data over the month of May, and saw that on my 47 posts last month:

* There were 470 comments on the blog.
* There were 162 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 25 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.


May Comment Counts: Click for Much Larger View
On these 47 posts:

* On 3 occasions, no comments were on either site.
* On 1 occasion, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 6 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 37 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.

Source data:
* louisgray.com
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=blog
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=twitter

The data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,013 people following me on FriendFeed, and 1,969 RSS subscribers on louisgray.com, so in theory, with those two measurements being close, there is an equal opportunity for viewers to comment on either location, with there being some significant expected overlap.

I believe that as FriendFeed grows its user base I will see an increase in total comments on my FriendFeed activity, but it has also helped drive traffic and comments back here, in turn spurring the activity and discussion higher. So, has FriendFeed comment activity eclipsed conversations here? No. Not yet.

This serves as a good point in time capture for where we are today. I'll be watching this for sure.

State of the Blog: May 2008 Recap

May 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,351

Total stories published in May: 47
(About 1.5 per day, up from 1.3 in April)

Total stories in May with comments: 43
(91% of all stories, up from 34 and 89% in April)

Total comments on May posts: 456
(About 9.7 per post, 10.6 per commented post)


May statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 659 (up 88)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,031 subscribers (up 394)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 47 subscribers (up 5)
MyBlogLog Members: 246 (up 43)

Twitter Followers: 1,109 (Up 308)
FriendFeed Followers: 1,998 (Up 1,008)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
3rd overall, behind the last two months.

Top Five Most Visited May Stories (According to Analog)

1. Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers
2. The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War
3. FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function
4. Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.
5. Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

Others receiving votes: Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality, FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet, Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?, Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget, Five Social Media Bloggers to Watch This May, and Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
2. My Social Media Consumption Workflow
3. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
4. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
5. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

After a continued "up and to the right" graph over the last few months, May's overall visits fell about 24% compared with April, at levels 4% lower than even March, according to SiteMeter, while in all other aspects, the surrounding elements of the blog have grown. Part of the reason for the decline? To be direct, the answer is a lowered presence on Techmeme. In April, a number of my more controversial posts, especially around the weekend, drove a significant portion of traffic. In May, I consciously made the decision to not only not launch these controversies, but also to not participate once they had started. It had a negative impact on my simple visitor traffic, but I believe a more positive impact with the blog overall. I didn't exactly want to get the reputation of being a controversy-stirrer, when not necessary.

Now, partly due to not engaging in the more-visible Techmeme headlines, my position on the Techmeme leaderboard is in doubt. At peak in April, louisgray.com had been above position #40, drawing amusement from fellow bloggers like Robert Scoble, who needled me about the positioning on video earlier this month. But now, I'm lingering in the precipitous #98 to #100 position, seeing folks like Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot blow by me.

As mentioned last month, lest it be believed I've started this series to highlight the higher awareness achieved in recent months, be assured that's not the case. I started doing monthly summaries after August of 2007, when I had 103 RSS subscribers, and 40 comments in the month. Hopefully you find these interesting or useful.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

TheStatBot Analyzes Top Tweeters, TechCrunch, Makes Techmeme

It's only Wednesday, but it's already been a very big week for Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot. After launching on May 1st with an analysis of Robert Scoble's Twitter activity, Yuvi has followed on with the most detailed analysis of Techmeme ever done (well beyond my surface attempts), and has now branched out to cover other large social media sites and blogs.

Yesterday, Yuvi published the definitive analysis of Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, picking apart the popular site's 7,000+ posts and nearly 2 million words. See: TechCrunch Statistics A-W. In the analysis, Yuvi discovered the site's posts per day has accelerated dramatically from less than 5 a day three years ago, to nearly 25 a day now, as TechCrunch has gone professional, with a stable of talented writers.


TechCrunch's Posting Frequency is Up and to the Right
That post, as with nearly every analytical post from TheStatBot, made Techmeme. This rate of achieving the popular tech news site has meant that TheStatBot has now achieved a ranking on the Techmeme Leaderboard, down at #99 overall, from the last 30 days. Given my downward trajectory, I'll likely fall of the board as he rises at this pace. (See his excitement here)

Today, Yuvi follows on with a detailed review of the Twitter Clients used by Twitter Power Users, finding that among the top 100 users of Twitter, the Web interface dominates, as it does with the rank and file, but that SMS text messages, Mobile Twitter and Twitterific are much more popular clients, while Twhirl is more popular among the common users. The Web interface, in fact, encapsulates almost 60% of all activity (and more than 90% of my own activity, though I'm not in the top 100 by a long shot).


A Breakdown of the Clients Used by the Twitter 100
As mentioned a few times here, I'm a big supporter of Yuvi's work on TheStatBot. I've informally helped him discuss topics, timing, and given the occasional tip on graphics or grammar, but the work is absolutely all his own, and he's doing great. Now, the 17-year-old is looking into college admissions, and hopes his work on TheStatBot as an extra-curricular activity will help him get further along in the education process. You can help either by linking his way, or ordering up a custom analysis of your site or any service. He would be more than happy to put his analysis to work for you, and obviously does an excellent job.

MyBlogLog's Blog Stats Offer Good Insight to Readers' Destinations

Last year, after publicly wondering about the future of MyBlogLog, and saying I felt the Yahoo-owned friends tracker and blog community site should focus more on tracking blog details than personal details, I was offered a premium account, gaining me insight into daily statistics, and full reports, showing where visitors were coming from, what they were reviewing, and interestingly, where they were headed.

While MyBlogLog is best known for their "Recent Visitors" widget, and has made waves of late with their lifestreaming service, it's now the stats I find myself taking a look at, just about on par with my standard SiteMeter details.

Out of curiosity, yesterday, I ran a report that showed what louisgray.com viewers were most likely to click on, over the last seventeen months, all the way back to January 1st of 2007. While some of the most popular items are recurring links to my RSS feed, MyBlogLog and LinkedIn, it's clear that some of the most-prominent posts I made in the last few months have had significant impact, not the least of which was the Elite Bloggers joining FriendFeed post back in March.


An example of MyBlogLog's Out Clicks Report (Click for More)
It's also clear that unless most people are clicking to new destinations from my RSS feed, and not via the site, I don't have enough traffic to make or break anyone, despite premature talk of a "Louis Gray effect".

Below are the Top 25 "Out Clicks", according to MyBlogLog. I hand-scrubbed a few, as I don't want to further encourage the porn-seekers who think Google Video can get them a quick fix, or take people off-topic.

1. http://feeds.feedburner.com/LouisgraycomLive 1,491 Clicks.
2. http://friendfeed.com/louisgray 1,171 Clicks.
3. http://www.friendfeed.com/ 805 Clicks.
4. http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/louismg 674 Clicks.
5. http://www.readburner.com/ 417 Clicks.

6. http://www.assetbar.com/ 292 Clicks.
7. http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/03/company-profile.html 286 Clicks.
8. http://twitter.com/louisgray 274 Clicks.
9. http://www.linkedin.com/in/louisgray 274 Clicks.
10. http://www.ratingburner.com/ 251 Clicks.

11. http://anzman.blogspot.com/ 248 Clicks.
12. http://friendfeed.com/kevinrose 244 Clicks.
13. http://www.friendfeedmachine.com/ 244 Clicks.
14. http://www.rssmeme.com/ 238 Clicks.
15. http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=4420 237 Clicks.

16. http://www.google.com/reader/shared/05763917848110205585 211 Clicks.
17. http://friendfeed.com/adamostrow 205 Clicks.
18. http://www.techmeme.com/lb 201 Clicks.
19. http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer 194 Clicks.
20. http://www.shyftr.com/ 190 Clicks.

21. http://www.linkriver.com/ 182 Clicks.
22. http://www.mashable.com/ 182 Clicks.
23. http://bhc3.wordpress.com/ 182 Clicks.
24. http://friendfeed.com/techcrunch 181 Clicks.
25. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=589638695 175 Clicks.

There are a million blog stat engines out there, from SiteMeter to Google Analytics, SlimStat and more, but unlike SiteMeter, which limits even premium accounts to the last 4,000 visitors, MyBlogLog keeps all the data, making historical reports quite useful. While I've got quite a bit of traction checking the day to day changes, watching "Out Click" reports is very interesting, and I'll be sure to make up some new reports to see accumulative data.

TweetStats Upgrades Twitter Timing Graphs

TweetStats is a great graphical way to see trends in how often you're sending notes on Twitter, which days you're most often hanging out in the Twitterverse, and what hours are most likely to see you active than others. On Thursday, TweetStats reloaded with an feature which combines daily "tweets" with hourly "tweets", giving new insight into whether you blog from the office during your 9-5, or if you're more of a Twitter weekend warrior.

Taking a look at my own statistics, at http://tweetstats.com/graphs/louisgray, a few trends are noticeable:


1) I am using Twitter on an increasing basis. While I only averaged about 2.5 Twitter updates a day in February, that number increased to over 3 in March, and more than 4 in April. After 10 days in May, I've reached 50, making that new ratio 5 a day.


2) There are a few gaps in my Twittering behavior. The first is a near-consistent hole from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. every day, with the exception of Sunday, when it looks like I just might have something to say around 3 a.m. on some nights. The other gap is a near-emptiness during the workweek between 9 and 5, with occasional activity.

3) I use Twitter @replies for just over a third of my updates, with Robert Scoble getting 12, almost twice that of Cyndy of Profy and Frederic of The Last Podcast, who follow with 7 and 6, respectively.

While TweetStats is not new, the new graph of "Aggregate Hourly Tweets" is new, and interesting, updated for the user's local time zone. As my Twitter activity accumulates, mindful of avoiding an increase in my Twitter Noise ratio, I wonder if the patterns will remain the same. If you're curious as to your TweetStats, go to www.tweetstats.com. You can even put in any Twitter ID you wish and pull their data.

The StatBot Debuts Series Analyzing Techmeme Sources

Last month, working only with Microsoft Excel and archived Techmeme pages, I took a look at how the top ten sites on Techmeme's leaderboard had changed over the first six months of Gabe Rivera offering the rankings. But I knew my minor effort would be no match for a statistically-oriented tech maven, like Yuvi Panda, who has kicked off what should be a very interesting series of posts examining the popular site and how it gets its news.

To date, Techmeme has been something of a black box. Leading bloggers love seeing the regularity of their posts being included. Meanwhile, less visible posters see complaining about Techmeme as something as a rite of passage. Some even claim impropriety and bias, while others still complain the site can be flooded with me-too news and copycats.

But that doesn't change the fact that Techmeme is tremendously relevant and a must-subscribe, either by RSS or by Twitter. To ignore Techmeme is the tech news equivalent of unsubscribing from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and hoping the local town daily can fill the gap.

In my initial look at Techmeme, I had observed that just over 30 percent of all stories came from the top 10 sites from the Techmeme leaderboard, and more than 40 percent came from sites ranked 11-100, leaving about 30 percent to "the field". Luckily for me, Yuvi's first pass at Techmeme arrives at similar results, saying "One third of Techmeme’s headlines come from the Long Tail".


A Graph from The StatBot's Techmeme Analysis
If you think The StatBot's efforts at this point are simply echoing my first pass, don't be fooled. Yuvi has a lot more tech savvy at his disposal, and as he promises in today's post, today's entry is the first in a series. You can expect to be something of a Techmeme expert by the time he's done.

We previously introduced The StatBot here: The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics. Yuvi also lent a hand analyzing my own site here: Analyzing LouisGray.com's Links, Topics, Timing and Comments.

The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

Yuvi Panda, a 17-year-old technology whiz kid from India, has been behind detailed analysis of many high-profile blogs, including Engadget, Robert Scoble, Raymond Chen, Techmeme, Digg, TechCrunch and Matt Cutts. Last month, we connected, and he did me the great favor of looking at louisgray.com, helping me gain more insight into my links, trends and topics.

Now, Yuvi is ready to take what's been a hobby and open it up as a service, for those looking to get custom analysis of their site or other social communities, including Twitter, Flickr, or FriendFeed. Today, "The StatBot" launches, promising a new, statistical look at Web communities including Slashdot, Fark, Engadget, Wikipedia and Firefox. As Yuvi promises on the StatBot site, "The list is endless. Wherever there is a community, I’ll measure it."

First to debut under The StatBot microscope is Robert Scoble's Twitter account.


TheStatBot shows Robert's Tweet Pace Is Increasing
Through April 27th of 2008, The StatBot looked at 10,598 tweets from http://twitter.com/scobleizer, spanning 523 days, and comprising 175,543 words, with more than a million characters.

The StatBot shows Robert has already posted almost 5,000 Tweets in 2008, double his historical average. And he's erratic - at times posting hundreds of individual messages a day, and then during lulls, posting less than 10. Robert uses @Replies from Twitter for nearly two out of every three messages, and has sent @replies to more than 2,200 Twitterers, lending more support for my hypothesis last week that a great deal of Scoble's activity was borne due to the high number of people he is following.

This type of fun and interesting analysis is now no longer at his whim, for us to wonder about how reports could look if we just had the time. With the launch of The StatBot, you can now work directly with Yuvi to have him analyze your blog, and your online activity, or to drop a note into his suggestion box.

And with today's note, Yuvi does more than pick apart the world's most well-known Tweeter. He hints at greater things to come. He expects to debut new reports every two days for the next few weeks, and adds a teaser at the end of his first post.

When Yuvi picked apart my site last month, Eric Berlin wrote, "What a great analysis. An automated service that produced this level of detail would go like hotcakes round the blogosphere." Well, it's here, and it has a name: The StatBot. Check out The StatBot at www.thestatbot.com or follow it on Twitter here: twitter.com/thestatbot.

State of the Blog: April 2008 Recap

April 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,304

Total stories published in April: 38
(About 1.3 per day, up from 1.2 in March)

Total stories in April with comments: 34
(89% of all stories, up from 29 and 76% in March)

Total comments on April posts: 364 (95 on Disqus)
(About 9.6 per post, 10.7 per commented post)


April statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 571 (up 200)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 1,637 subscribers (up 810)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 42 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 203 (up 110)

Twitter Followers: 801 (Up 488)
FriendFeed Followers: 990 (Up 472)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter): 1st overall, by 25%.

Top Five Most Visited April Stories (According to Analog)

1. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?
2. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
3. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
4. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
5. Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren't

Others receiving votes: TechMeme Leaderboard's Top Ten: Six Months In, My Social Media Consumption Workflow, Shyftr Responds to Critics, Alters RSS Commenting Strategy, Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close., FriendFeed's Increased Filtering Clears Deck of Unwanted Junk, and Alpha Twitter Ranks Most Popular Shared Links from Twitter...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves
2. Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones
3. LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel
4. Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag
5. ReadBurner Lights Up In Simmer Mode

While April again saw personal records fall for blog traffic, it's clear the real growth and engagement is found in Web services, external commenting and linking. Overall traffic grew 25% from March, measured in unique visitors, and individual days saw spikes that rivaled a month's traffic for me less than a year ago. Yet it's activity at FriendFeed, Twitter and Disqus that is really growing. Technorati and MyBlogLog rankings also spiked dramatically in April.

One word of caution, lest it be believed I've started this series to highlight the higher awareness achieved in recent months, be assured that's not the case. I started doing monthly summaries after August of 2007, when I had 103 RSS subscribers, and 40 comments in the month. Hopefully you find these interesting or useful.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on our shared link blog!

Should Bloggers Open Up Their Statistics?

The Web makes it incredibly easy to be measured, and to be measured publicly. There are many metrics out there, be they Technorati Authority, based on unique external hyperlinks, total RSS subscribers (via FeedBurner), total Twitter followers, and friends of all types, from FriendFeed to Facebook and back. But while most of us are more than eager to share that data, when it comes to actually sharing the traffic we receive on our blogs, it can be a closely-guarded secret. Talking about visit counts can be seen as off-limits as one's salary.

As today is April 30th, wrapping up another month, today offers yet another opportunity to sum up the month's statistics, show trends, and compare to the past. (You'll see a "State of the Blog" post from me on this early tomorrow, as we do each month) But while, to date, I've shown graphs, I usually hide the total number of visitors, page views, etc. And now, I ask openly, why?

I think there are two major reasons that bloggers as a whole don't open up their statistics for others to view:

1) The Inferiority Complex

By sharing my statistics openly, it will now be obvious to the world how little real traffic I get, opening me to ridicule. The emperor has no clothes, it could be said. Also, maybe the traffic I receive isn't seen as "quality" traffic? I still get a lot of visitors from Google image searches looking for R-rated material in vain. Maybe I don't want everybody to see that, and, therefore, take the site less seriously?

But yet, the reverse problem also holds true.

2) The Big Head Complex

By sharing my statistics openly, it could be shown we're bragging, highlighting traffic, growth, and the trends. Smaller bloggers just getting started might see the data as unattainable and could throw potshots.

It all depends on perspective.

So why open up? We've come a long way since free hit counters were the rage back in the mid to late 1990s, and one could up the number just by refreshing a page in the browser. Now, whether your stat package of choice is SiteMeter or Google Analytics, your site traffic has likely been made invisible to your readers, making actual, true, traffic a mystery. But in the interest of openness, data sharing, and collaboration, I think it's time to consider making our blog traffic 100% available and visible.

Advantages:

1) Making traffic details public establishes a data point

Just as it makes sense to visit Salary.com and determine what other people with your title in your geography are commanding, viewing other's statistics can give you a reference point for how you are performing against your peers.

2) Making traffic sources public enables new sites' discovery

One of the most interesting things I find from my statistics are where people are coming from, in the referral logs. It's likely that those people caring enough to send a link my way might be interested in the same topics I am, and, using the transitive property, my readers would be interested in what they are as well.

3) Making content details public shows popularity of topics

Despite one's best efforts, not every single story gets the same amount of solid traffic. There are peaks and valleys. Making this data public could better give guidance to other writers as to what topics are most interesting, might get the most engagement, or views.

Disadvantages:

1) Establishing that data point puts you on a chart somewhere

Whether the total number of unique visitors, page views, referrals is in the hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands, by establishing that data publicly, your traffic now becomes part of the conversation, relative to yourself and relative to others, so you'll need to come to terms with this in advance.

2) Exposing traffic details could lead to others' snooping

A good blogger who knows their statistics can get used to specific readers. With a good combination of MyBlogLog, and location-based visits, I have a good idea of who the most frequent visitors are, and I think I know what stories they read, if I get the time to look it up. Maybe others could be as aggressive and figure out the same information. Some visitors might not like having this potential to be snooped expanded to the masses.

3) Your statistics could actually go down

It's one thing to post data at your peak when things are going well. But if you have a slow week or months, and your numbers collapse, there's no hiding it. You can't undo a number once it's out, so that too would be a risk.

So here's what I'm thinking. I have nothing to hide. Tomorrow, when we do our statistical summary for the prior month, I'll use the statistics I have on hand, and expose the sources of the data. We'll see what happens. And maybe, as you go about your efforts, you'll consider opening up. This isn't a question of who's bigger than anybody else or what's good traffic versus bad. I feel that as bloggers, the more data we have available, the more empowered we are. Let me know if this is something you would be eager to participate in, and what your thoughts are.

More Noise About Twitter Noise

My Friday post on trying to determine a way to measure Twitter users, by using available metrics, including total updates and total followers, turned out to be a more visible and conversational than I had anticipated. While some objected to the ratio, and others objected to the analysis, it has been interesting to watch the continued discussion in recent days, as additional metrics for measurement have debuted, with the same objective in mind, essentially trying to find if you're using Twitter in the way your audience wants you to.

Some highlights from around the Web, which I tracked on Del.icio.us:

BroadStuff: Aspects of Ratios - Noises, Signals and Friendliness

"...I'm not sure it measures signal to noise per se as it has no time basis inbuilt, and looks at relatives output rather than the relative input I experience..."

Sweet!: Talking loudly on Twitter

"...I guess I take offense (in a very lightly term) to the statement that there are more “noisy” people who have “… a lot more ‘updates’ than actual ‘followers."

Stowe Boyd: The Twitter Conversational Index And The Twitter Noise Ratio

"Boyd's Twitter Conversational Index = (number of tweets / number of replies made by followers)"

Dave Winer: Twitter Spewage among Dave Winer's contacts

"... these numbers give me new respect for Twitter. Each twit you post has to be delivered in some fashion to everyone who follows you. That's a lot of delivering!"

Stephanie Booth: Twitter Metrics: Let’s Remain Scientific, Please!

DCortesi: Twitter Reputation Statistics

"... people are trying to figure out how best to use Twitter given its recent surge in popularity and accompanying spaminess."

Commetrics: SocioTwitting - developing metrics for Twitter volume vs. Twitter influence

"... what is needed is a set of statistical indicators that give us a better approximation of reality."

Sarah In Tampa: Another Way to Classify Twitter Users

"... this represents a completely different way to categorize users - some of our megaphones become healthy and some of our listeners become twittercasters."

Interestingly enough, as casually as I put together the "Twitter Noise" ratio, many people on Twitter went out and measured their number, even if they felt the methodology was flawed. And amazingly to me, Twitter Portugal, a Twitter-related site for Portuguese users, even embedded both the "Twitter Noise" ratio and Dave Winer's "Spewage" ratio into user profiles, to give potential followers an expectation for what they were getting into. You can see some of those profiles here: BrunoFigueiredo, Publico, and Phantas. I don't know if that's a statistic I would want sitting on my profile, but the site's already jumped ahead and done it.

Also very interesting is a site called Twitter Quotient, which has multiple measurements, with even harsher descriptions than I had intended. Pretty wild. Who knew the landmine I was stepping on Friday?

And in case you were curious, my Twitter Noise ratio dropped from .49 on Friday to .45 today. Sounds like I need to Tweet more!

What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?

The many thousands of people who use Twitter do so in wildly different ways. Some use it to deliver minute by minute updates of their daily activity. Others use it to hold conversations with friends and peers using the service. And still, a good percentage of people use Twitter as a broadcast medium to announce items, but not necessarily to engage. Meanwhile, as Twitter has grown, its not uncommon to see people either following, or being followed, by thousands of other users. Some do so reciprocally, while others are more discerning.

I feel there are different categories of Twitter users, from those who have a listening audience, measured by a high "followers" to "updates" ratio, those who are engaging, seen with near equal "followers" and "updates", and those who are more noisy, with a lot more "updates" than actual "followers".

Taking a look at 48 Twitter users I either follow or engage with, I found the average number of "tweets" per "follower" was almost exactly 1, measuring at 1.02. But the ratio of updates to followers varied widely, from the sleepy 0.06 (@om) to the firehose-like 9.75 (@corvida). And surprisingly, those Twitterers best known for creating a lot of noise, like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis, were quite in line with their number of followers, measuring in with ratios of 0.50 and 0.18 respectively, making their perceived noise to be in fact, a consequence of their engagement.

Download the Microsoft Excel data file
One of the informal guidelines I've used since opening my Twitter account a little over three months ago was to maintain an updates/followers ratio of less than one. I feel if I "tweet" too often, those following will opt out or gain in annoyance. As of today, my ratio is at 0.49, with 318 updates for 644 followers, putting me on the quiet side in comparison to the others I looked at.


A Twitter "Noise" Chart for 48 Users
(Click for Larger Image)
Of note, this was done by hand, via Excel, without fancy algorithms, so it can be assumed to recognize a point in time from Friday, April 25th.

Twitter's Listeners (Ratio of Updates to Followers of Less than 1)

@om	Noise Ratio: 0.06
@erickschonfeld	Noise Ratio: 0.08
@nbradbury	Noise Ratio: 0.08
@techcrunch	Noise Ratio: 0.11
@jasoncalacanis	Noise Ratio: 0.18
@gaberivera	Noise Ratio: 0.23
@ev	Noise Ratio: 0.25
@louisgray	Noise Ratio: 0.49
@scobleizer	Noise Ratio: 0.50
@dannysullivan	Noise Ratio: 0.79
@gapingvoid	Noise Ratio: 0.90

Twitter's Middle Ground (Ratio of Updates to Followers of 1 to 2.0)

@jowyang	Noise Ratio: 1.03
@tamar	Noise Ratio: 1.14
@loiclemeur	Noise Ratio: 1.16
@adamostrow	Noise Ratio: 1.19
@iankennedy	Noise Ratio: 1.20
@mashable	Noise Ratio: 1.28
@susanmernit	Noise Ratio: 1.31
@nicolesimon	Noise Ratio: 1.52
@elliottng	Noise Ratio: 1.59
@tonyhung	Noise Ratio: 1.67
@calebelston	Noise Ratio: 1.72
@shelisrael	Noise Ratio: 1.81
@ebrage	Noise Ratio: 1.98

Twitter's Conversationalists (Ratio of Updates to Followers of 2.0 to 5.0)

@centernetworks	Noise Ratio: 2.02
@markevans	Noise Ratio: 2.15
@sarahintampa	Noise Ratio: 2.22
@marshallk	Noise Ratio: 2.26
@mariosundar	Noise Ratio: 2.26
@charlieanzman	Noise Ratio: 2.29
@chrisbrogan	Noise Ratio: 2.45
@mathewi	Noise Ratio: 2.50
@mukund	Noise Ratio: 2.77
@rizzn	Noise Ratio: 2.99
@parislemon	Noise Ratio: 3.07
@nickhalstead	Noise Ratio: 3.35
@duncanriley	Noise Ratio: 3.43
@jeffisageek	Noise Ratio: 3.67
@krynsky	Noise Ratio: 4.36
@pkedrosky	Noise Ratio: 4.68
@fredericl	Noise Ratio: 4.95

Twitter's Megaphones (Ratio of Updates to Followers of more than 5.0)

@stevenhodson	Noise Ratio: 5.12
@stephtara	Noise Ratio: 6.42
@bgolub	Noise Ratio: 6.79
@idonotes	Noise Ratio: 7.91
@solacetech	Noise Ratio: 8.50
@fourlittlebees	Noise Ratio: 9.06
@corvida	Noise Ratio: 9.75

This is, of course, a simplistic analysis of a select number of Twitter users. An argument could be made that those with thousands of updates are flat-out noisy, regardless of how many followers they have, but I also believe that being selective in one's tweeting habits can lead to an increasing audience for further conversations. If there's an imbalance between how often somebody is tweeting and how many people are choosing to follow them, it could be the noise has grown too loud.

Have any better examples of odd ratios between total number of Twitter updates and total Twitter followers? With thousands and thousands of users, there's no way this 48-person list gets everybody. What's your Twitter noise ratio?

BlogPulse Offers Insight into Blog Trends, Conversations and Influence

While BlogPulse has been around since 2005, I have largely ignored it, relying on Technorati, Google Blog Search and my own internal metrics to gauge momentum, trends and how conversations get shaped. But in light of this weekend's discussion, I was drawn to the site, and found it offers the best, closest, picture to how the story developed, who linked to who, and how a story can gain influence.

You can even see which people, famous or otherwise, are getting cited most frequently, or are the most "bursty", showing they are climing the ranks. (Key People for April 13, 2008)

Part of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, BlogPulse highlights the top blog posts, news stories and videos on the Web each day, and offers the ability to search for trends, track conversations across multiple blogs and get profiles of a site. Interestingly, I was alerted by Technorati to the fact that Friday night's post was somehow labeled the second-highest "top blog post" by Nielsen, and Scoble's follow-on "Era of Blogger's Control Is Over" ranked fifth. This was tabulated by the blog posts gaining the most external links. You can see the top forty for today listed on their site, ranging from technology to politics. Unsurprisingly, the weekend discussion on Shyftr figures prominently, with Scoble and me being joined by Tony Hung.


What makes BlogPulse most interesting, at least to me, is the ability to break out conversations between blogs, like a family tree, seeing who linked to who, and how while I may have kicked off the discussion, its clear that Scoble and Hung have their own spheres of influence. Of course, as some reactions linked to all sites, it's not a perfect measure, but BlogPulse is the best I've seen here. (See: BlogPulse: Conversation Tracker)

But BlogPulse does more than just track the conversations. Like Technorati, BlogPulse can show charts, displaying if one topic or another is capturing the fancy of the blogosphere as a whole.

Here is the chart showing Shyftr's spike over the weekend:


The same chart for FriendFeed:


And for Twitter:


And if you're so inclined, you can even search for yourself, like I did.


Drilling down further, BlogPulse offers site profiles for the many blogs they index. The front page of the site claims nearly 78 million identified blogs, with more than 80 thousand net new in the last 24 hours, with almost 700,000 new posts indexed. Now that would make for a big fat, RSS to-do list, would it not?

Looking at my BlogPulse profile, common keywords in my recent posts include "TechMeme", "Blogosphere", "Subscriber", "Momentum", "Anticipated", "Linking", "Embedded", and "Screenshot", to name a few. BlogPulse also offers graphs showing the number of posts per day, and how often the site has been cited in the last month. The chart for my site is below:


Can BlogPulse replace Technorati, as many have expressed frustration with the one-time blog search king? Maybe not, but it certainly has a lot of very interesting elements that I like. While it's not new, I'm definitely going to be paying a lot more attention now to BlogPulse than I ever did before. After a crazy blog weekend, it's offered us the best picture of how it all unfolded.

Checking In With RatingBurner, and Their New Widget

In late January, we first discussed RatingBurner (www.ratingburner.com), an interesting entry in the market, which helped rank blogs by their number of public FeedBurner RSS subscribers, and showed their day to day growth, both in aggregate numbers, and percentage increase. While Alexander Fedorov has been a little quieter than some other new entrants in the Web sphere, he has continued to update the site, adding new blogs daily, and inserting new features - including the debut of a new widget, which bloggers can use to show where they rank in RatingBurner's current standings.

While the value of ranking sites by their RSS count is the subject of some debate, in the absence of public, uncontested traffic and return visitor data, it is one metric available to nearly all major blogs, especially as FeedBurner has become the online standard for RSS delivery and tracking.

In the last few months, Fedorov wrote me to say, first, that support for branded feeds (i.e. not from feedburner.com) was added, and that feeds which point to subdomain of a blog but are still published with FeedBurner, can be added.

This might sound like a minor change, but this enabled sites like Engadget to be included. Engadget, which didn't figure in the first screen capture, now shows 1.6 million RSS readers, and even minute swings can show adds and drops of thousands per day. From January through today, you can also see TechCrunch increased from 654,000 readers to 782,000, and Mashable from 143,000 to 167,000.

As for me, at the time I clocked in with that post, I had 436 readers, and we're now seeing FeedBurner report 1,028 total.

Last week, Fedorov added a button for bloggers to post on their own site. As he wrote, the "button will automatically show a blog's ranking and when you click on it, you will be redirected exactly where they are sitting in the ranking."

For fun, I added mine to the site, and you can see my ranking (in the 400s) on the right side of louisgray.com. Does it add a ton of value? Not a lot, especially as you can consider to Rating Burner doesn't have the entire blogosphere indexed. But the database has grown dramatically since it first showed up in January, and it's always fun to see where you sit against your peers and competition, so if you're so inclined, it's real simple to add the button to your template. You can find out how on the RatingBurner Web site.

Analyzing LouisGray.com's Links, Topics, Timing and Comments

This special feature comes courtesy of Yuvi Panda, a 17-year-old stats whiz, who has made a real name for himself by taking a look at some of the biggest sites around the Web, and seeing their patterns or statistics. He did me a great favor by seeing if I follow my own guidance as to linking externally, helped show what times of day I post, and which days, what are my most common topics, or which ones gain traction with readers of louisgray.com.

You should also check out his previous coverage of Engadget, Digg, and Scoble's Link Blog.

This summary was completed by Yuvi in late-March, and any edits here on my end are only grammatical in nature, or for layout. Enjoy!
-- Louis Gray

---

Size

LouisGray.com is not exactly small nor new, running for 802 days or approximately 2 years and 2 months (9 Jan 06 to 21 Mar 08), producing a total of 1,256 posts at an average of 1.5 posts a day. The posts too, were not exactly small, averaging 337 words per post (compared to Scoble’s 192 words a post). So Louis Gray is more words and less linkouts (i.e. posting just for the sake of linking).

Growth
Looking at the posting rate per day graph:


No post binges, no long breaks: Just consistent posting, with consistent short breaks between posts. The trendline is almost flat.

Now looking at the growth of the length of posts:

The only-slightly-sloping-upwards trend line shows that the average post’s length is slightly increasing, up from 200 words per post when the blog was started to 337 per post now. Also, the increase in the number of skyscrapers from October 2007 suggests increase in “binges”, i.e. Posts which are much longer than average.

Conclusion: Blog is neither growing too fast, nor slowing down: Just as steady as it was in the beginning, and perhaps just a tad longer.

Links
There were a total of 6,629 links in the 1,256 posts, at an average of 5.2 links per post. At face value, that is a lot of linking: Engadget averaged only 4 links per post. But, digging deeper, there is only one link per 63 words, so LouisGray.com is more content and less linkouts (i.e. More like Wikipedia (content) than Digg (links)).

Diversity
The 6,629 links are distributed among 892 different sites, at an average of 7.4 links per site (note that all of wordpress.com and blogspot.com is included as a single site). Here’s the list of the top ten most linked to domains:

Apple isn’t a surprise, since the Blog’s subtitle mentions that, among others, the Blog is for Mac Freaks :) Links to FeedBurner.com are almost exclusively from the “State of the Blog” type posts that seem to be posted every month(automated, I guess). Athleticsnation.com is natural, since Louis Gray also contributes some stories there. Scoble and TechCrunch seem to feature in almost every blogger’s top 10 list, for obvious reasons (A Listers, Newsmongers, widely popular, etc). Amazon.com’s 98 links contain mostly of book referrals :) Blogspot.com here is the aggregate of all links to all blogger blogs (mainly Google Blogs, and “Change Microsoft” Blogs like minimsft and msftextrememakeover). Louis’s interest in FriendFeed is extremely apparent here, as the comparatively newer service finds it’s way into the Top 10 (while the list of A Listers on FriendFeed might be a cause for this spike, it still does show that he’s extremely interested in FriendFeed). Google.com links are mostly to Google Reader (shared items dominate), along with some to Google Finance and Searches using the Market Symbols (That too, primarily for AAPL)

FriendFeed
FriendFeed is a peculiar case. Here’s the chart showing outgoing links to FriendFeed:


That large skyscraper there is the “List of Celebs on FriendFeed post”. Here’s another chart comparing FriendFeed vs Twitter:


You have more posts linking to Twitter, but that single, post skewed it towards FriendFeed.

Self-Linking:
I started the above list at Rank 1. I lied, because I wanted to point out the Amazon Book referrals :) In reality, the most linked to site is LouisGray.com itself, accounting for 1,053 of the 6,629 links, or 16% of all links!

Here’s a comparative chart:


One site has 16% of the links, 8 sites have 23% of the links, 81 sites have 39% of the links, and 792 sites have 22% of the links. Does this say anything at all? This says that there’s a focus to the blog. Can you think of Scobleizer.com’s focus? I certainly can’t. But, with LouisGray.com, I can say with some amount of confidence that the focus is on Apple, Google and of-late FriendFeed.

Conclusion: Focused Linking. More Content than Links.

Linking
Here’s the chart showing the number of links going out from your site per day:


Again, from the trendline, you are linking more now than you were previously.

Tags
Blogger calls Tags Labels. Here is a chart showing the top 20 labels used:


So, I’ll call LouisGray a Technology-Sports-Apple-Blogging-Google-ANticsComics-Baseball-Finance-TV freak :)

A total of 262 tags were used, at an average of almost 5 tags a post.

Here’s a chart showing number of Comments to the posts which carried that Tag. Note that this might be a bit skewed since Comments were on only after Feb 2007

You write the most about Technology, and that gets the largest amount of comments. But, Sports is the second most applied Tag, but it doesn’t even feature in the Top 20 here! Also, Apple and Google have kinda switched places between the two stats, with Google getting considerably more comments than Apple. FriendFeed does great here too :)

In short, one thing that you seem to like writing about but people don’t really pay too much attention to is sports.

Posting Habits
I have three graphs, and a conclusion here:





You don’t have any specific posting habits (besides the regularity pointed out earlier): You just post whenever you want to. The third chart has an interesting bit of information: All your posts have a very consistent size, regardless of the day on which they were posted. So, you are pretty consistent in your post size as well, and not just on your posting frequency. And, no out-of-the-ordinary, specific habits (Like Engadget’s less-posts-on-Friday thing).

Hourly

Posting by the Hour



From the first graph: You post more in the evenings, after 6, and in the morning, at 7. Also, the spikes in the second graph at the “even minutes” (i.e. 00, 15, 30, 45) show that most, if not all of your posts have a preset time at which you tell blogger to publish them. So, your workflow is more like write-save-set-time-for-publish than write-save-publish. Even the smaller spikes come at “even minutes”(i.e. 10, 20, 25, 35, 40, 50, 55).

Comments
Comments were on only from Feb 2007, so the usefulness of Comment data is a bit limited.

Here’s the Charts Showing Comments per day from Feb 07:



As you can see from the black trendline, yes, the number of comments is increasing, and you do get some days with way higher than normal comment counts (those few skyscrapers), but overall, you don’t really get a huge amount of comments (a la Scoble or TechCrunch).

Conclusion
Analysis of LouisGray is complete here. It’s not as complete as I would have liked it to be: The absence of comments early on was a major factor, since comments are a good indicator of attention paid to that post.

I appreciate Yuvi's taking the time to go through my blog and teach me a few things about how often I link out, where I'm linking, and what topics are gaining your interest. So... given the above, are we on the right track? What should we be talking more about or less about? Sounds like you don't like sports!
- Louis

TechMeme Leaderboard's Top Ten: Six Months In

Gabe Rivera turned the world of ranking technology blogs upside down six months ago, seemingly overnight, with the debut of the TechMeme leaderboard, constituting the top 100 blog or news sources whose posts reached the popular site in the prior 30 day period.

A more focused and relevant measurement of a tech-oriented site's momentum and impact than the flaccid Technorati Top 100, the TechMeme leaderboard has already undergone significant change in the six months since its debut, as new sites emerged near the bottom. But in large part, the largest sites solidified their positions at the top, not yielding ground, and in the specific case of TechCrunch, increased their percentage of stories, expanding the gap between first and second place.

Utilizing the TechMeme leaderboard's archive pages for its debut and each of the following six months, our source data is:

• October 1, 2007 snapshot
  
• November 1, 2007 snapshot
  
• December 1, 2007 snapshot
  
• January 1, 2008 snapshot
  
• February 1, 2008 snapshot
  
• March 1, 2008 snapshot
  
• April 1, 2008 snapshot

TechMeme Leaderboard: The Top Ten

Of the original Top 10 sites ranked on the TechMeme leaderboard, six have maintained a top 10 position in each snapshot at the beginning of the month, with TechCrunch maintaining the #1 overall position in each month since the leaderboard was made public. In fact, those holding the top five positions today (TechCrunch, CNET News.com, New York Times, Read/Write Web and Ars Technica) have never been placed lower than #7 overall. (Read/Write Web was positioned at #7 from December 2007 to February 2008)

Outside of these elite sites, there has been some movement with the original ten leaders. Engadget, the original #2 overall source, has fallen to the #11 overall position in April, while GigaOM plummeted from #7 overall in October down to #20 in November, only now crawling back to the #10 position. The BBC, ranked 8th in the original survey, has been mired in the teens, before falling precipitously to #29 overall this month. Also, the Wall Street Journal, which owned the #10 spot back in October of 2007, slipped as low as #23 overall in January before recovering, where it holds the #13 spot now.

In their places, a number of other blogs and traditional media sites have at times clawed their way into the Top Ten, sometimes just for one month, and other times, longer.

• November saw InfoWorld, the Associated Press and Silicon Alley Insider rank #8 - #10.
  
• December saw Computerworld and Reuters take the place of AP and InfoWorld at #9 and #10, with SAI bumping to #8.
  
• January saw Gizmodo debut at #6 (from #12 and #54 in prior months)
  
• February saw paidContent.org jump to #8 from #22 and #21.
  
• March saw no new entrants in the top ten.
  
• April now shows VentureBeat at the #8 spot, from #15 and #18 in the last two months.

TechMeme Leaderboard: Percentage of Stories

TechCrunch has always had the leading position on the TechMeme leaderboard, with about 1 of every 16 stories coming from Michael Arrington's popular blog. But TechCrunch's percentage of stories on TechMeme has never been as high as it is now.

When the rankings debuted, TechCrunch was credited with 5.56% of the prior 30 days' stories, and Engadget was relatively close behind, with 4.84% over the same timeframe. By the following month, TechCrunch increased to 6.08% of the total, and expanded again, to 6.86% by December 1.


While the gap between TechCrunch and the second-highest position was closest in the March snapshot (6.14% for TC and 5.8% for CNET News.com), it looks to have been a one-time blip. In the ensuing month, TechCrunch jumped to 7.17% of all TechMeme stories, while CNET fell back to 4.57%, still good for the #2 overall position. Effectively TechCrunch grew their lead over the field from a 6% gap to 57%, a nine-fold increase.

The weight of the top ten ranked sites on the other 90 is interesting as well. Starting with the October rankings, the top ten sites encompassed over 27.5% of the stories on TechMeme. That number has grown to 31.29 percent in the April snapshot, and has been in the 30 percent range for the duration. With the top ten holding down about 30% of stories, that leaves the other 90 entrants, and not to mention the hundreds of other sites that may have made TechMeme sporadically in the last six months, to fight over the other 70% of stories.


April's data shows the other 70 entrants on the TechMeme leaderboard constituted 42.35 percent of the stories in the prior month. Combined with the top ten, fully three quarters of all TechMeme headlines were from the 100 sites that encompass the leaderboard, with one quarter coming from additional sources.

Is the Leaderboard Relevant?

The higher the positioning on the TechMeme leaderboard, the more accurate the rankings become, in my opinion. There's no question that TechCrunch enjoys the largest voice in the tech blogosphere, and has for some time. As the site adds more writers and posts with more frequency, it is extremely likely that the network can continue to grow and take share from competition with less funding or resources. Some have called for a TechMeme without traditional media, such as the New York Times or Associated Press, but the truth is that traditional media continues to have a voice and is relevant, starting discussions and getting bloggers to link.

While this data shows the top ten positions have a significant voice, I believe it's accurate. ReadWriteWeb, Engadget, Ars Technica, and News.com all have significant weight today. Even as we may at times instead enjoy the work of individual bloggers like Mathew Ingram, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel or Steven Hodson, none of us have enough time and juice to take down the big blog networks, and so we are destined to play a role somewhere in the middle of TechMeme's leaderboard, or down a few rungs of the ladder.

The data also tells us that while the top ten players command about a third of the attention on TechMeme, there is the same amount of room available for those not even in the top 100. With good content, and good linkage from others, reaching TechMeme is available to anyone. While Gabe's algorithms are a well-kept secret, it's unquestioned that the data is driven mathematically, and doesn't smack of human intervention to push one site's stories over another.

It's been an interesting six months for the TechMeme leaderboard. In this time its moved from an intellectual curiosity to a respected measure of influence. It should be fun to check back in six or twelve months from now and see what's changed.

State of the Blog: March 2008 Recap

March 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,266

Total stories published in March: 38
(About 1.2 per day, down from 1.4 in February)

Total stories in March with comments: 29
(76% of all stories, from 36 and 87% in February)

Total comments on March posts: 177
(About 4.6 per post, 6.1 per commented post)


Graphical representation of the site's increased reach...

Technorati Authority Ranking: 371 (up 110)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 827 subscribers (up 206)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 33 subscribers (up 7)
MyBlogLog Members: 93 (up 26)

Twitter Followers: 313 (Up 146)
FriendFeed Followers: 518 (Up 356)



Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12: 1st overall, by 33%.

Top Five Most Visited March Stories (According to Analog)

1. Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves
2. Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed
3. 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
4. LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel
5. LinkRiver Embeds Shared Feed Stats, Attention Data

Others receiving votes: How I Found or Started Using A Dozen Web Services, 5 Blog Candidates for Tomorrow's TechMeme Leaderboard, I'm Not Reading and Engaging With Enough Female Bloggers, My iPod Touch is Rarely Used for Music, ReadBurner to Return With New Ownership, and Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. February 29th's Leap Day Robs Us All
2. MyBlogLog LifeStream Is a Quiet Trickle
3. Dealing With Offline Companies Can be Such a Pain
4. FriendFeed Opens Up, Raises $5 Million in Funding
5. Starts With B, Ends With N: Six Letters.

As March concludes, it makes me both more eager to see what April brings, and once again raises the bar for what's expected here at LouisGray.com. In March, we saw the world debut of Yokway, MergeLab, Shyftr, and Toluu. ReadBurner died, and then came back. FriendFeed graduated from plucky Web startup to a major force. And guess what? We're far from done, so stay tuned!

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on our shared link blog!

The Largest Blogs Are Still Rapidly Growing Their Subscriber Base

There's no universally accepted way to track momentum in the blogosphere. Some point to Alexa and ComScore statistics, while others poke holes at this data. Others instead look to the TechMeme leaderboard to show who has the largest share of voice in tech. But we do have access to some quantitative tools that give us a clearer picture into just how fast the largest blogs are growing their most loyal readers via RSS, thanks to FeedBurner and tertiary services, including BlogPerfume and RatingBurner.

In December I first mentioned BlogPerfume and the site's ability to review your FeedBurner RSS growth, and project your statistics three, six and twelve months ahead. But more interesting than self navel-gazing, you can view any blog's statistics, so long as they use FeedBurner as their RSS engine and activate the Awareness API.

(This restriction made some popular feeds, including Engadget and Robert Scoble, unavailable for analysis.)

I clicked over to RatingBurner, which ranks public FeedBurner feeds from most popular to least popular, and fed BlogPerfume some of the most popular technology blogs.


(Click for larger image)
A quick look at some of the leaders in the so-called A-List, who hover in the 100,000 or so RSS subscriber range and above, shows 3-month growth of 10 to 25% per site. Looking much lower in the list, to those who are in the 500 to 5,000 or so RSS subscriber bracket, you can see a great deal wider range, including some who have nearly doubled their subscriber count over the last 90 days.

Unsurprisingly, TechCrunch is the king of the hill here, with an average of nearly 700,000 subscribers this month. Over the last three months alone, TechCrunch added nearly 84,000 new RSS subscribers, for a growth rate of 13.72%. BlogPerfume also showed single month growth of 4.2%, and projected TechCrunch would break 1 million subscribers before this time next year.

TechCrunch's enormous subscriber base means other sites can grow more quickly, despite getting fewer net new RSS readers. In the same period, Read/Write Web grew 16.47%, adding 25,017 subscribers, and Mashable! grew 15.77%, increasing their total by, 20,954. In fact, Mashable!'s high growth rate, coupled with GigaOM's lower 8.92% growth rate, would see them pass up Om Malik's team before six months are up, if you project that 90-day trajectory forward. Lower down the chart, you can also see Fred Wilson and Brad Feld posting growth rates of more than 20%, as they reach six digits. (Also Included: Guy Kawasaki, John Battelle)


(Click for larger image)
In fact, RSS subscribers are growing steadily at all levels. Looking down where I live and breathe, growth rates over the last three months at those off us under the 5k level show 30% increases for Andy Beard and Mathew Ingram, and dramatically higher levels for people like Tamar Weinberg (78.72%) and Muhammad Saleem (59.67%). (Also included: Mark Evans, Zoli Erdos, Susan Mernit and Sarah In Tampa)


Our own stats reflected one-month growth of 41.88%, and three-month growth of 286.89%, with an average of 708 subscribers, up from just 183 back at the start of December. (See: BlogPerfume: LouisGray.com and above chart.)

Even as some are openly discussing dropping the RSS feed reader, or asking where they are going next, this rising tide is raising all boats. While there's no doubt this initial report is partial, it shows RSS adoption is strong at every level. With anticipated further growth in adoption and gravitation toward tech blogging, the momentum is sure to continue.

---

I know I didn't get every relevant site, so if you found one that is remarkable in growth rate or wasn't what you expected, head to http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/index.php, put their FeedBurner URL in, and note it in the comments. I'm eager to see what you find.

LinkRiver Embeds Shared Feed Stats, Attention Data

For more than a year, Google Reader has let users know which blogs and RSS feeds are those they read and share most frequently. About a month into LinkRiver's being in the public sphere, the shared item aggregator launched a similar functionality, letting us see not only the topmost 25 shared sites, but also the top 25 most shared keywords. The development comes as developer Adam Stiles continues to quietly expand the site and make it a serious challenger in a growing field.

(See: Adam Stiles: LinkRiver Adds Attention Data)

As discussed in February, LinkRiver is primarily focused on gathering your RSS streams from Google Reader shared items, del.icio.us and other services, letting you act as a human filter for the best of the Web. Through LinkRiver, you can subscribe or "follow" others, and let their streams mix with yours to make a river.

And now, looking at my own statistics, by adding both my Twitter feed and the RSS feed for louisgray.com to my LinkRiver, I've artificially overweighted both services, making me look like a serious egomaniac.

Via LinkRiver/Louis: Attention, we find the sites I share most often includes the A-listers like Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch and Read Write Web, but also B-listers including Steven Hodson and Frederic Lardinois. My top keywords included big companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, but also FriendFeed (at #7), FeedBurner (at #14), ReadBurner (at #24) and LinkRiver (at #25).

Unique to LinkRiver, so far as I'm aware, is the ability to see the same data for other users of the service. I can see that Frederic shares ValleyWag a lot more than I do, and enjoys both BlogHerald and LifeHacker. I can also see that Paul Buchheit shares items from VentureBeat, Marc Andreesen, and Andrew Sullivan.

The shared attention sites are available not just for the active users of LinkRiver, but the seed accounts as well. You can look in on such folks' activity as Jeremy Zawodny, Nick Bradbury, Daryl Tay, and Chris Brogan, for instance.

Unsurprisingly, LinkRiver's data on me is fairly in line with what Google Reader reports, given the high overlap. But it's more comprehensive than Google Reader, thanks to LinkRiver's incorporation of other services. The data is good to see, and something I think other aggregators, such as FriendFeed, would be wise to follow.

State of the Blog: February 2008 Recap

February 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,228

Total stories published in February: 41
(About 1.4 per day, down from 1.9 in January)

Total stories in February with comments: 36
(87% of all stories, from 37 and 64% in January)

Total comments on February posts: 135
(About 3.3 per post, 3.8 per commented post)

Technorati Authority Ranking: 261 (up 70)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 621 subscribers (up 183)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 26 subscribers (up 6)
MyBlogLog Members: 67 (up 17)

Twitter Followers: 167 (Newly tracked)
FriendFeed Followers: 162 (Newly tracked)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12: 2nd overall, behind January.
(If you divide visitors/days, it's pretty close. Visitors/posts set a record.)

Blog Value Estimator: $147,344.94


You can see January's momentum largely continued through February, despite fewer posts.

Top Five Most Visited February Stories (According to Analog)

1. FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats
2. LinkRiver Enters Life Streaming Fray, Focused on Link Blogs
3. Yahoo! Calls Microsoft Cheap, Will Reject Offer
4. Warning: Google Reader Congestion of Up to Five Hours
5. Expanding and Explaining the Early Adopter Role

Others receiving votes: Companies That Listen to Their Users Will Win In the End, Dear LazyWeb, Won't Somebody Notice RSSMeme's Updates?, AssetBar Proposes Solution to Twitter Scaling Problem, AssetBar Adds River of News, Extends New Invites, and FriendFeed Admits They Know Me Pretty Well...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. Watch Every Episode of The Simpsons Online - Free
2. Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats
3. I Have Seen the Future of Social RSS Feed Readers
4. Add Items to Your Google Reader Link Blog Without Subscribing
5. Kudos to Mashable, and Three Links Their Way

As anticipated, I just didn't have as much time to devote to the blog in February as I did in January, with things getting quite busy offline. I revealed my wife and I are now expecting twins, and are about 20 weeks along. This just might impact future schedules, as can work, travel, etc. During February, I was glad to introduce the new blog design for louisgray.com, and some critical pages which best explain what the blog is about, as well as tracking coverage, and hope to keep advancing forward. On to March!

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on our shared link blog!

Google FeedFetcher and FeedBurner Miss Each Other Again

This hasn't exactly been FeedBurner's best week.

First, the RSS syndication engine dropped all-time statistics due to a code error, and didn't quickly respond to user complaints, leading to questions from around the blogosphere, mine included. Making the problem worse was that the company's blog, once quite active, hadn't been updated in three months, most notably called out by Mashable.

Seemingly, both those issues were resolved, first, with the restoration of all-time stats, and second, seeing FeedBurner update their blog with a post, Hello? Hellooooo?, where they outlined their recent activity. First on their list? "Full integration with Google", no doubt much harder than it sounds.

But now, the very next day, it looks like Google's FeedFetcher, which reports how many RSS subscribers a blog has from Google Reader and iGoogle, didn't update FeedBurner. And around the blogosphere today, statistics are undoubtedly plunging. For example, louisgray.com saw subscribers more than cut in half, from 606 yesterday to 241 today, and ParisLemon plummeted, from 550 yesterday to 288 today. It's not the first time this has happened, but past instances have always led to promises of improved integration, and they're clearly not there yet.

It's enough to make me curious how RatingBurner is going to handle this data, once they synchronize their stats tomorrow.

If You Talk About Ice Cream, You'll Attract People Who Like Ice Cream

I humbly continue to be astounded by the rate at which my RSS subscriber base is growing. At just 200 in December, and around 350 just 30 days ago, we've rocketed through the next marks, hitting 500 subscribers just Monday, and a whopping 606, according to FeedBurner, as of today - showing 85% growth in the last month alone!

But then I started thinking. It's all my fault. It's not necessarily due to good content, or scoops, or anything like that... as much as I'd like it to be... it's because as I've gravitated toward talking more and more about RSS readers, RSS distributors and link blog aggregators, I've attracted the people most likely to be comfortable with RSS, and want to know more about RSS, and who are most likely to be no more than 2 clicks away at any time from adding yet more feeds to their undoubtedly overflowing reader software.

It's essentially a byproduct of gaining a focused audience who is in line with one of the metrics by with this blog is measured. While total page views are increasing, due to the niche focus we've had here of late, that number is growing even more. Every time we talk about AssetBar, FeedBurner, FriendFeed, LinkRiver, ReadBurner, RSSMeme, or Shared Reader, we're only offering an article as the next drug hit for RSS addicts.

So I came to the conclusion that this otherwise impressive spike is no more valuable than saying the ice cream man does better business when the sun is shining, or that if I made this blog all about my beagle, I just might get a lot of dog lovers here. While I can get all excited about plowing through 500 and 600 like a hot knife through butter, it's silly to do so. Now, the hard part will be keeping on topic and keeping my new RSS converts entertained.

Feedburner Restores All-Time Feed Statistics, Google Not Proven Evil

In the world of blogging, feedback can be widely and quickly disseminated, and in a modern version of the kid's game "Telephone", a message that gets passed around can take on new meaning. That's why companies that step up before a rumor gets out of control, and transparently talk to their users, have an innate advantage over those that let the story keep rolling.

As I said this Sunday, companies that listen to their users will win. We saw a fantastic example of this today, when FeedBurner, after I noted a much-liked feature had gone missing, commented on my blog that the missing all-time statistics was not a nefarious move by their new Google overlords, but instead, simply a bug. (See: Steve Olechowski's comment)


My All-Time Stats are Back!
It was only yesterday, after seeing FeedBurner's silence on their company blog, and letting user complaints sit for a few days over the weekend, I had asked, "What's the deal, FeedBurner?"

And my questioning of their intent with the missing features had far-reaching echoes, from Mashable (Google Nixes FeedBurner’s “All Time” Stats) to Search Engine Journal (Feedburner Takes Off All-Time Stats Without Notice?), HipMojo (Web 2.0 Free Gravy Train Stopping, Abruptly), Web Log Tools Connection (FeedBurner: No more all time feed stats), Search Engine Land and even TechCrunch, who got a note from FeedBurner's CEO saying it was just a bug.

It was interesting to see how many people immediately assumed Google must be at fault. While I certainly was curious as to the reason behind the change, and saw it as running contrary to Google and FeedBurner's stated mission, I didn't outright blame Google - unless you think I did. It just seemed like a well-liked feature was taken away with no good reasoning.

But in just over 24 hours, what did we get? We got an answer, as poor Steve Olechowski had to go from blog to blog letting people know it was being fixed, and by this evening, I saw it fixed myself. There's no evil Google plan to see here, guys. Just some technology that didn't do what it was supposed to. That's why those who were in less of a rush to blame the Internet giant, like Steven Hodson of WinExtra, ask, was it "another rush to publish a story?"

So, thanks to FeedBurner for restoring the capability, and for transparently responding to its users, and to bloggers interested. It definitely shows the FeedBurner community values their service!

FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats

FeedBurner, the RSS syndication engine behind the vast majority of leading blogs, now part of Google, quietly turned off the ability to view all-time statistics for individual feeds at the end of last week, erasing years of accumulated data, without any explanation. Now, instead of seeing options for "One Day", "Last 7 Days", "Last 30 Days" and "All-Time", feed owners can only see statistics over the last 30 days at maximum, and it doesn't look like there is an "Pro" version that lets us get them back.

When FeedBurner was acquired by Google last year, the company made a lot of noise about how what had previously been premium services would now be free, with Google footing the bill. (See: FeedBurner: From Fee to Free: Should We Flee?) I was then worried that the company, not seeing inherent revenue-associated value, might slow the innovation. But to remove features outright, possibly in an effort to reduce data storage or bandwidth demands? I never expected that.


Google is great! So... where are my all-time stats?
So, what's the big deal? The big deal is bloggers that have relied on FeedBurner for any good length of time just lost all access to historical data. We can no longer see how our RSS subscriber growth rates are changing over time. We can no longer see accumulative statistics for click-throughs to popular articles, and and we can no longer show when our feeds reached specific milestones.

For a great example, just look at my December 28th post, "Feedburner Milestone Reached: 200 Subscribers". In that post, I noted when we hit 50 subscribers, 100, and then, 200. Well, the big news would be that last night, for the first time ever, we reached more than 500 total subscribers to louisgray.com, but now, I can't show you that all-time graph. It's gone.

And FeedBurner remains silent. Their official blog hasn't been updated since November of 2007, and as customers beg for an explanation in the site's support forums, there hasn't been any response.

We already know the blogosphere loves their RSS. We know they love their stats too. So, I'm a little surprised more folks haven't caught on to the fact this data's been erased. What's the deal, FeedBurner?

FriendFeed Admits They Know Me Pretty Well

Of all the different sites I've talked about over the last year which look to bring people together with similar interests and shared viewing habits, none has driven more consistent activity and real sense of community than FriendFeed. The site offers friends a meeting place to aggregate, follow, and interact with a diversified set of Web services. Starting first as a centralized in box for all my activity across the Web, it's added social functions with comments and "Likes", the ability to post directly to the site, and now, as of yesterday, FriendFeed has unveiled a sweet set of statistics worth obsessing over.

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, in a blog post titled "Personalized FriendFeed stats", shows how the team rolled out a set of simple graphs, showing the top ten people I find most interesting, the top ten people who find me interesting, what types of services my friends like, and what are the top sites which I like. People I find interesting are tabulated by entries I've commented on or liked, and top sites are determined by the last 30 days of my activity.

Looking at these statistics at first glance, I'd have to say there aren't any major surprises.


I have a pretty good idea whose updates I most look forward to, including those of FriendFeeders Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Kevin Fox, B-Listers MG Siegler and Frederic Lardinois, Mashable's Mark Hopkins, RSSMeme's Benjamin Golub, and Mathew Ingram.

I also knew that the highest percentage of activity I deliver to my own FriendFeed is through my Google Reader shared items. Nothing can compare to it in sheer volume. Lagging behind Google Reader for me are Twitter, Del.icio.us, louisgray.com and FriendFeed itself. Of more interest was seeing how my friends' top sites show Twitter almost equal to that of Google Reader, and del.icio.us playing a smaller role, with Digg and Reddit breaking out of the "Other" category.

Also extremely interesting (and humbling) was seeing the stats from Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit.

Paul Buchheit's statistics (shared on Flickr) show me as the FriendFeeder he finds most interesting, narrowly beating out his own wife, Jess Lee of the Google Maps team, Bret Taylor and MG Siegler.

Meanwhile, Bret Taylor had me in the #3 overall position, behind Paul and Jess. Not too shabby.

Now, the question is, with these stats available, will I try to over-compensate by using less-favored services to give them a piece of the pie? Will I start making more comments to other friends and mentally reduce those for others, to affect the rankings? I hope not. In order for FriendFeed's latest innovation to work, the data needs to be true and not manipulated, despite human nature. Regardless, it's yet another sign that FriendFeed is innovative, fun and listening to its users. Now, I've got to go back to FriendFeed and add some more comments...

Also See: Paris Lemon: FriendFeed Can Now Tell You Who You Find Interesting

State of the Blog: January 2008 Recap

January 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,187

Total stories published in January: 58
(About 1.9 per day, up from 1.8 in December)

Total stories in January with comments: 37
(64% of all stories, up from 27 and 49% in December)

Total comments on January posts: 142
(About 2.4 per post, 3.8 per commented post)

Technorati Authority Ranking: 191 (up 65)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 438 subscribers (up 232)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 20 subscribers (up 5)
MyBlogLog Members: 50 (up 11)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12: 1st overall, and a new record! (By far)

Blog Value Estimator: $107,827.14


January 2008 was one new record after another - more than 3x December.

Top Five Most Visited January Stories (According to Analog)

1. Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz
2. Can We Talk About Twitter for a Second?
3. ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items
4. Google Honors Building Blocks of the Non-Web Kind
5. I Don't Care About Macworld This Year

Others receiving votes: ReadBurner Keeps Improving With Stats and Upcoming Items, Robert Scoble to Kick Off Fast Company TV Wednesday, Mashable Promises to Upgrade Linking Policies, and The Data Ownership Wars Are Heating Up...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech
2. Soft-Core Porn, Sex Themes Power Google Video
3. Watch Every Episode of The Simpsons Online - Free
4. Scoble's Link Blog Delivers An Influential 1 Percent
5. The Mac's Role In My Getting Married

January was a huge month for the blog, and intimidating in a few ways. As previously mentioned in The Downside to Raised Blog Expectations, I can't help but feel some pressure that comes with knowing the site's gaining momentum. We more than tripled our traffic in January versus the prior month, which in turn was the previous record. To put things in perspective, there were four individual days in January which had more visitors than all of January 2007's monthly total. That's ridiculous. Year over year, we're looking at growth above 1,000 percent. In the month, we got even more geeky, surprisingly. We helped launch ReadBurner, Rating Burner and Shared Reader. We announced Robert Scoble's Fast Company move before he did. We started working with fellow B-Listers on a custom Elite tech news Reddit. We had a public spat with one of the most-prominent blogs, and later made up. We gave up and finally joined Twitter. We remain addicted to FriendFeed and Google Reader, but are tantalized by AssetBar, and have enjoyed the early testing there. But while January was huge, trust me, we're not done. I've got some ideas already for February. Hope to see you here.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed, or keep watch on our shared link blog!

Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats

There's precious little that bloggers like to do more than measure their own statistics, and gauge how they're doing, relative to the rest of the blogging community. And there's similarly precious little that smart Web developers like to do than harness publicly available data, point it at an intelligent database, and debut a new service.

When the two come together as one, you have the potential for a must-bookmark site that stataholics and egotists alike will visit time and again.

While earlier this month, we talked about two new sites focused on tabulating popular shared links from Google Reader, in ReadBurner and Shared Reader, today we've seen a new, unheralded site emerge, which displays the most popular blogs, by RSS feed subscribers, and shows their day to day momentum in terms of new subscribers or defectors. That site's name, appropriately enough, is Rating Burner.

(Note: There are no blog hits for Rating Burner as of 8 p.m., but the secret is now out!)

Though in its early stages, Rating Burner is accomplishing what many geeks set out to do by hand just a few short months ago. (See: Top Blogs On Google Reader, How Many Google Reader Subscribers Do You Have? and Find the Number of Google Subscribers for Any Feed)

The site, currently holding approximately 400 individual blogs and RSS feeds, at time of this posting, aims to summarize a blog's feed popularity, show its Google PageRank (a measurement often used to illustrate trust), its aggregate change in subscribers over the previous 24 hours, including percentage change, when they most recently posted, and what, if any, ad services they use.


The Most Popular Blogs, According to Rating Burner
While the list isn't yet 100 percent inclusive, Rating Burner unsurprisingly shows TechCrunch, the official Google Blog, Mashable and Guy Kawasaki among the top-subscribed feeds. Amazingly, Rating Burner shows more than 11,000 new adds to TechCrunch's 654k subscriber army in the last day alone, dwarfing the 709 Mashable picked up, and my measly 38, although I did manage to go up more than 8 percent between the two snapshots.

As with ReadBurner, Rating Burner should only get better with time, and with user submissions of new blogs. The site offers an entry form to post new blogs for inclusion, and looks like it will soon add categories, to further segment the data. So far, the site has SEO blogs and Gadget blogs listed as possible filters.

Also like ReadBurner, upon initial writeup, Rating Burner's UI is quite spartan, but the functionality is very interesting. I'm impressed to see the developer has grabbed the FeedBurner statistics for each blog and is hosting the results on their site, rather than externally pointing to FeedBurner graphics. I for one noted the statistics listed for louisgray.com were from Monday night, so it's likely the data trails by a full 24 hours. Thanks to my subscriber count dropping from 436 to 413 overnight, I would expect my own stats to drop tomorrow, reflecting Tuesday's data.


louisgray.com, 37th fastest-growing, according to Rating Burner
If you would like to be included in Rating Burner, post your blog feed at their URL, and they will likely index you for tomorrow's results. While I used the site's contact us form on their Web site to reach the developer, I haven't yet heard back, and we don't yet know for certain the individual behind the service. Domain name records show Rating Burner registered to Alex Fedorov in Massachusetts, so we hope to hear from him soon and see the service further develop.

RSS Subscriber Count Doubles In 4 Weeks

December 28: Feedburner Milestone Reached: 200 Subscribers... and 4 weeks later... January 25: 400+ RSS Feed Subscribers. From that note, I said, "... it'd be nice to have 500 subscribers or so by this time next year." Sounds like I may have to change that goal to a higher number!

HTML Colors for mosaic from Web Developers Notes | Chicklets from FeedBurner

The Downside to Raised Blog Expectations

Heading into the last week of January, this has been more than a record-breaking month for louisgray.com. Instead, it's been a tidal wave. Without giving away all the fun statistics, planned for a February 1 post, suffice it to say that we've already had traffic more than 1,500% greater than January 2007, also more than double that of December, which was the previous record.

Rather than resulting from a few Digg spikes or runs at StumbleUpon, this increased level of activity has been through increased presence on Google, significantly higher linkage from other blogs, and a number of highly-discussed posts, both here and elsewhere.

And with the higher page views, site visits, RSS feed subscribers and Technorati Authority, I'm feeling as if I'm going to fall victim to my own raised expectations. While I used to be content to make comments on the latest updates in Bay Area sports, or my favorite TV shows, the threshold has been heightened, and more is expected.

After all, take a look at what Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write Web (and formerly of TechCrunch) was saying on Twitter last night...


Via http://twitter.com/marshallk
Whether he was being too kind or just trying to send me a few new visitors from Twitterland isn't 100% clear, but now that we're getting noticed by some high-profile folks, and achieving previously uncharted levels of traffic, as well as reaching the rarified air of the TechMeme leaderboard, I'm feeling the pressure if I'm staying too many hours at work, or if I'm putting the laptop down a few hours to catch up on TV. My new subscribers are going to expect big things from this blog, and they won't want to be let down.

While I can't expect to find new services like ReadBurner and Shared Reader every day, and I don't anticipate starting a verbal war with one of the most widely read blogs on the planet all that often, I do expect we'll try to find new insight into the world of technology, and hope to earn the kind of accolades I've seen from people like Marshall, or VentureBeat's Eric Eldon that we've received over the last few weeks.

I do expect there will be days when I don't post at all. There will be days when my posts just might not be interesting to people, and there might be days when my RSS feed count goes down as people unsubscribe. And just as we've seen our traffic jump in January, it may fall in February, making me feel we're not measuring up. Even if there were an official "Up and coming tech blogger of the month", and even if I won for January, somebody else would win the next month, and I'd be yesterday's news, potentially fighting to stay relevant.

louisgray.com Debuts at #92 on TechMeme Leaderboard

I only mention this because it may not ever happen again. :-)


Source: http://www.techmeme.com/lb at 11:45 p.m. Pacific on January 20th.

You know the stat is screwy when I've managed to top well-respected folks like Jeremiah Owyang and Jason Calacanis.

Other good friends of note:

#18: Mathew Ingram
#25: Robert Scoble
#73: Paris Lemon

As you might recall, the TechMeme leaderboard launched in October of 2007. This is the first time I think I've been included.

ReadBurner Keeps Improving With Stats and Upcoming Items

I always knew the first service to crack the code of showing the most popular shared items in Google Reader, along with who shared them would be a fun utility. The catch? I used to think it would be Google who would be the winner. But now, with ReadBurner almost two weeks old, I've already seen the site change the way I think about and interact with RSS feed aggregators and shared link blogs.

In the last two weeks, Alexander Marktl has made his experiment into a useable, enjoyable site, filtering it into no fewer than five different language families, adding RSS feeds, revealing the individual sharers, and adding profile pages for each individual user.


Meanwhile, he has added a new page dedicated to "Upcoming" items that haven't yet reached the popular stage, just as Digg does.

The sum of all these changes? Even more reasons to keep checking in on the site - and two major shifts have occurred in my thinking over the last few weeks because of ReadBurner.

1) Google's Shared Link Blogs are a Big Barrier for Competitors

When AssetBar launches for good, there are some tremendously interesting services the site will offer that nobody else does today. But assuming I leave Google Reader for AssetBar (or any other service), my shared link blog from Google Reader will go dark. That, in turn, will stop my updates from being included on ReadBurner, Shared Reader and other services.

Even if AssetBar shows the most popular shared items, it will likely be doing so in a way where its data will be parallel from Google Reader, and therefore, won't be counted in ReadBurner, Feedheads, Shared Reader and others. If my shared link blog is important enough to me, I wouldn't make the move.

Even though Google hasn't done much with these shared link blogs, they already post a barrier for new companies.

2) I Finally Know Who Reads My Blog and Shares, but Doesn't Comment

ReadBurner, by revealing who is sharing blog posts from louisgray.com, shows me the link blogs from people I've never known. Even as my RSS feed reader subscribers ticked upward, my subscribers are largely an enigma. A small fraction of them make comments here, or send me e-mail. Now, I can go to ReadBurner, click on the names of people who have shared my items, and find them for the first time.

This alone is a very powerful thing.

And Alexander's not done. ReadBurner just launched a "Stats" page highlighting the most active link bloggers, the most common sources for shared items, and most common authors - the very beginning of exactly what Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and I have been asking for Google to do for the better part of a year. (See below screenshot)



Whether this addition was spurred forward by a similar feature debuted by "Shared Reader" I saw in the middle of last week or not isn't certain, but it's impossible to know. After all, "Shared Reader", after a very public debut, both here, and on Mashable, looks to be down at the moment. Good thing ReadBurner is still up and innovating.

Feedblitz Bug Sends My RSS Stats Through the Roof

Today has been a big day for louisgray.com. For the first time ever, I had two posts atop TechMeme at the same time (one | two), with my question around Twitter generating a ridiculous amount of buzz, garnering over 1,000 visits, more than a dozen comments, and several different articles through the blogosphere. All told, it was the second-highest traffic day ever.

But not even this good news can be credited for my huge spike in RSS feed subscribers reported by Feedburner. That... unfortunately, is a bug.


Did your RSS Subscribers Double Overnight?
Overnight, I saw my total RSS subscribers nearly double, from 287 yesterday, to a whopping 570 today, an increase of 283. The culprit? My blog to e-mail service, Feedblitz, which somehow reported to Feedburner that instead of 18 e-mail subscribers, I somehow had 305. Simple math tells me Feedblitz added my 287 number to the 18 to come to 305, but regardless of the reason... it's just wrong.

While I'd like to think I'm Mr. Popularity, I'm still Mr. Small Potatoes.

The Feedblitz blog says its "probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code." It might be related to Blogger's feed redirection, and it might not. Who knows? I had hoped the double TechMeme hit plus organic momentum had made me an overnight sensation, but it was not to be. Dang.

At least I wasn't the only one with a temporarily oversized ego.

See also:
Franzone.com: Subscriber Count Madness
BizTechTalk: Feedburner - Analyze Feed Subscribers
Authority Blogger Forum: Feedburner Messes Up

Measuring One's Technology Addictions

After publicly saying I wasn't all that interested in the MacWorld Expo this year, Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica stated I just might have to give up my Apple fanboy ID card. I had stated the unforgivable, and had lost the respect of Cupertino - only a few miles away.

To redeem myself, I set out to prove my lapse was momentary indeed. One survey online helped put me back on my feet, as after answering 15 short questions on "How Addicted to Apple Are You", I was told I had achieved an 88% score - not bad. I could likely have scored higher if I had waited in line overnight for the iPhone, but we're not perfect...


Along the same lines, out of curiosity, I took a similar 14-question test on "How Addicted to Blogging Are You". I scored even higher, achieving a 92% mark - an A in my book. I'd only have scored higher if I used Twitter or installed Wordpress. That'd have given me the 100% score.


I was tipped off to the Apple Addiction test by Earl Moore of Meandering Passage, who achieved a 54% mark. I think he undersold himself, and should try the test again..

State of the Blog: December 2007 Recap

December 2007 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,129

Total stories published in December: 55
(About 1.8 per day, up from 1.1 in November)

Total stories in December with comments: 27
(49% of all stories, up from 16 and 47% in November)

Total comments on December posts: 85
(About 1.5 per post, 3 per commented post)

Technorati Authority Ranking: 126 (up 23)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 206 subscribers (up 25)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 15 subscribers (up 1)
MyBlogLog Members: 39 (up 4)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12: 1st overall, and a new record!

Blog Value Estimator: $71,132.04


December hit new highs, pushed by an end-of-month spike.
Top Five Most Visited December Stories (According to Analog)

1. I Have Seen the Future of Social RSS Feed Readers
2. Feedheads Approaching 10,000 Active Facebook Users
3. Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins
4. The Web Advertising Bubble Has Got to Pop
5. AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best

Others receiving votes: What I'm Reading and Sharing on Google Reader, Doubling Down On Our TiVo Obsession, 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech, and Buy Your Favorite Bloggers a Gift this Holiday...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. Soft-Core Porn, Sex Themes Power Google Video
2. Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved
3. Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control
4. eBay Locks Me Out for My Own Good
5. 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader

After November's ho-hum showing, December was a record-breaker of sorts for us, returning to the momentum we've been building up all year. Not only did we have the strongest numbers of total visitors and page views on record in December, but we had a high amount of interactivity, from good comments, to a good amount of posts being sent to StumbleUpon, or added to Del.icio.us. We've been relatively Digg-free since April, but won't be holding our breath to see that change. Also, the last five days were all extremely strong traffic-wise, with Monday being in the top five days for total traffic all-time. Not bad. Of course, with this under our belt, we're starting 2008 at zero again, and look forward to setting and achieving new goals.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed, or keep watch on our shared link blog!