Archive - 2010
April 14th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/14/2010 - 08:22
April 13th
Using Graphviz, Drupal and Google Analytics to Display Keyword Relationships
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 08:45Recently, I started experimenting with the Google Analytics API. Using it, you can extract data from Google Analytics for whatever processing you might want to do. My first attempt was to access Google Analytics to see who is viewing the most pages on my site when the come from an EntreCard inbox. Yesterday, I went a bit further and used php and graphviz in Drupal to create a graph of the relationship of keywords used to access a site.
Here is a graph of the relationship of the most frequently used keywords for Orient Lodge over the past few days:
For the geeky details, read on.
April 12th
#blogchat – A Review
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 09:26Last night, I stumbled into another #blogchat. This is a chat about blogs that takes place on Twitter. I’ve had mixed feelings about the blogchats, sometimes they seem too focused on the relationship between blogs and marketing and miss many other aspects of what makes blogging wonderful.
The discussion last night focused on metrics. What tools do you use to measure your blog traffic? Which metrics are of the most value? How does this relate to the overall goal of the blog?
There was a lot of interest in Google Analytics. I brought up writing PHP code to customize Google Analytics data, like I did for ecanalytics which I use regularly. I’m also thinking of building a tool that generates a word cloud of search terms. However, most people weren’t all that interested in that aspect of Google Analytics.
One very useful suggestion from the blogchat was to filter out your own IP address when looking at Google Analytics. You can find out more about how to do this on the Google Analytics blog.
There was a good discussion about the value of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus customer interaction. Again, this reflects a marketing perspective, but if you change customer to reader, you get a broader idea that still fits. I tweeted, “SEO v Cust interactions: SEO is for getting new readers. Cust interaction is for keeping them”.
As to the bounce rate, I tweeted, “As to bounce rates, I like mine high. It means that ppl are finding what they want w/o having to click on extra pages”. Some of my regular readers will recognize that as a familiar refrain of mine. However, others on the blogchat found this an “interesting perspective”.
People commented that a high bounce rate could also mean “they don't like your site and are outta there!” and another asked “Would you not want reader to stick around for more content?” Again, my thought is coming from the regular reader perspective. My hope is to develop loyal readers that will regularly visit my site. I would prefer to see them exhibit their willingness to stick around by coming back as regular readers and see what is new each day, than by visiting just once and looking around for more content.
Looking at my own analytics, I find that returning visitors have a higher bounce rate and visit fewer pages, as I would suspect, although the difference is smaller than I would have suspected. My returning visitors has remained fairly steady, very slowly inching upward. My new visitors show much more variation.
A final topic was about which sites seem to give the best metrics. Alexa was generally not well regarded. Some asked if it was useful at least for trending analysis. Yet even for that, Alexa seems to change their algorithms enough so that it is not very reliable for trending data. Besides Google Analytics, Quantcast and Compete were listed as the most credible sites for traffic data.
A side discussion also came up about RSS data. If people are reading your content via an RSS feed, it isn’t showing up in a lot of the traffic analysis. Personally, I’m more interested in people reading my content than I am in my own ability to quantify my traffic. Of course, all of this comes back to what are you trying to do with your blog. I am working on improving my writing, sharing my ideas with others, and gaining new perspectives. Keyword analytics can help me to find what others have found interesting. Traffic analysis can help me find other sites where people might be interested in what I’m saying and where I may be interested in what is being said. In addition, I can get a general sense of how things are going.
These goals may be different with some people’s marketing goals. It may overlap with others. The bottom line is to focus on the goal of the blog, and use analytics to see what you can do to better achieve these goals, and not make analytics a goal in and of itself.
So, what do you think? How much do you look at the analytics for your site? Are there things that I should be considering to help me better reach my goals?
April 11th
The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/11/2010 - 14:17A recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future suggests:
Most surveyed believe that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.
Mostly, the people surveyed were ‘technology experts and stakeholders’ who would be expected to believe that technology is going to make things better.
Recall Congress Now reports that
A New Jersey Appellate Court, in a March 16th unanimous ruling, paved the way for the first ever recall effort of a U.S. Senator. After originally being denied their constitutional right last September by the New Jersey Secretary of State for the circulation of petitions to recall Senator Menendez, The Committee to Recall Robert Menendez sued, taking their case to the New Jersey court…and won. The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) was the only outside organization that filed an amicus brief with the Court supporting The Committee to Recall Senator Robert Menendez, the group formed by NJ Tea Parties United and the
Sussex County Tea Party.
Is this the sort of more efficient and response government we are looking for? I know that a lot of people would have liked to recall Sen. Lieberman here in Connecticut, but I worry that this moves us even further into a world of constant campaigning, paid for by the most wealthy and creating more gridlock in Washington.
To support the Project Vote has announced “the first mobile canvassing tool for Apple's iPad. This will increase voter registration and drastically reduce canvassing costs”. As a Nokia N900 user, I’d love to see this tool available on other platforms as well. The press release notes that “Currently only four states, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, support online voter registration”. Slowly, we are seeing that more and more government services are going online, and hopefully, move governments will use technology to improve their voter registration process, and make it easier to register online as well as easier to verify the legitimacy of the registrations.
Meanwhile, here in Connecticut, the battle over the future of the Citizen’s Election Program continues. The current Governor, who was elected before the program went into effect, wants to take over a quarter of the remaining funds in the program as part of the deficit mitigation efforts. Many express concern that cut of funding will force the program into insolvency. Perhaps everyone in the Governor’s office and the Legislature should take a 25% pay cut before we make that large a cut to the Citizen’s Election Program, since it is people that were elected prior to the program that have gotten us into this mess.
This again, returns to the latest Pew survey, where people noted that institutions are a strong resistance to change. Barry Wellman, of University of Toronto noted “Institutions know how to protect themselves.”
Will government be more efficient and responsive as a result of innovative forms of online cooperation? It would be great if that turns out to be the case, but the efforts of institutions to protect themselves significantly cast doubt on this.
April 10th
The Google Virtual Wave Biennial
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 10:03It has been a while since I’ve written about Google Wave, Virtual Worlds, or for that matter the Whitney Biennial. However, since attending the Biennial with two of my daughters, I’ve been kicking around the idea for this blog post mashing up ideas from Google Wave, Virtual Worlds and the Whitney Biennial.
One of the things that jumped out at me as I looked at paintings in the Whitney was how different we approach the visual from the written. With the written word, we typically start at the beginning and follow read the material sequentially. As I’ve written about before, some people get bent out of shape when emails are not sequential, but the most important content is posted at the top of a reply, instead of at the bottom or interspersed in the email.
Google Wave was set up, in part, to address some of that and material is added at various appropriate points throughout the wave. To address the chronological sequence, Google Wave gives you the ability to playback a wave over time so you can see where the content fits, not only on the page, but in the time stream. Material is arranged in an order created by the artist. At the Whitney, it is typically shown over and over again, and people may walk in at the middle and only watch part of it, or may watch the end, followed by the beginning. Yet there is still a sequential aspect. The same applies to music.
While Google Wave does have the ability to add rich media content, it is predominantly text based and there does not seem to be much of intermixing sequential audio and sequential video content with the static text content. Likewise, the various pieces of content are not arranged spatially as they would be in a painting.
One way to expand the use of Google Wave for artistic expression would be to look at better interoperability with virtual worlds like Second Life or OpenSim. Imagine, for a moment, a virtual world where people could interact and not only add three dimensional models, but pictures, text, and music in a Google Wave style where you can playback the modifications in the order in which they were added.
To add to the spatial component, the scene could be presented more like a painting with the video, audio, or text being played back when the user moves the mouse over the content, so the viewer could start at whatever point and have more control over the experience.
It may be possible to do some of this already with virtual worlds, but I haven’t seen any good examples of this. With a system like that, some interesting installations could take place in a Google Virtual Wave Biennial. What do you think?
