How do you surf?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 09:58SEO experts spend a lot of time talking about getting incoming links to your website and boosting your Google Page Rank, your Technorati authority and similar measures of links. Searching my logs, the largest single source of referrers is Google searches, and this is clearly important. However, as I noted from Quantcast, half of my traffic is from ‘regulars’, people that come back again and again.
Since my focus is more on community and relationships, I’m more interested in these regular readers than the casual browsers. It got me thinking about how to get casual browsers to become regular readers and how to get regular readers to become even more frequent readers.
Some people push their RSS or Atom feeds as a way to get people to read more regularly. I’ve taken to usually putting my whole entry on the front page, and in my RSS feed so that people can more easily read the whole entry. Yet, I would really prefer people to come to my site and get the whole experience as opposed to seeing the post in the context of whichever feedreader they are using. I want people to see the widgets. I want them to see what else I’m interested in, what is going on in my broader community.
That is part of what I like about MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, and the other community widgets. They encourage you visit each blog.
All of this leads me back to my discussion about social network aggregating. I would like a good aggregator to pull together my posts on various different sites. Usually, for larger posts I do that manually by posting at remote sites and cross posting at Orient Lodge. For Microblogging, I have Twitter subscribed to Facebook as well as Orient Lodge, and I have Jaiku subscribed to many of my feeds.
For bookmarks, I would really like some sort of tool to aggregate, sort, sift and rate the different sites I’m interested in. For aggregation, I would like to pull in all my communities from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and BumpZee. I would like to pull in sites that I’ve tagged with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. I would like to pull in the feeds I’ve subscribed to with BlogLines and Google Reader.
For each source, I would like to see the sites I’ve subscribed to, tagged, or joined. For each site, I would like to see the where I’ve bookmarked them from, what tags or categories I’ve used, and how I rate them. Ideally, I would like to be able to increase or decrease the rating with a single click. I would like to be able to navigate from one site to the next easily. Right now, it takes two clicks to get from one MyBlogLog site or BumpZee site to the next. It takes three clicks on BlogCatalog.
I would like to add Geotagging into this so I could select sites based on their location, and I would like to add the RSS components so I could visit only sites that have been updated recently. Of course there would also need to be an option to make the lists public or private, or if ‘friends’ capability were added, to make the lists available only to friends.
Using Ruby on Rails, I whipped up a fairly quick prototype. Version 0.1 doesn’t include any RSS or OPML parsing to load data from other systems. As far as I know the MyBlogLog API isn’t available yet, so it doesn’t load from there. However, it was very quick and easy to pull together.
I’ve deliberated about whether or not to share this as a blog post, or to try to find someway to monetize the idea, after all, I do need to find some real cashflow soon. However, as I noted, the coding is pretty simple, and I suspect that there are plenty of people having similar ideas. So, instead of trying to be all NDA and everything, I’m posting the idea here. Perhaps others are interested in the idea and we can refine it further. If you’re interested, let me know your ideas.
Housekeeping
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 11:55Yesterday, I rearranged the blocks on the right side of my site. I’ve added a block for ‘Cambodian Bloggers’. Beth Kanter is trying to raise money to attend the Cambodia Bloggers Summit. It will take place August 30-31. She has been invited to provide a keynote, train the trainers and help bring a stronger connection between Cambodia bloggers and those of us here in the United States and around the world.
I’ve known Beth for quite a while from the non-profit blogging circles and have great respect for the work she does. If a bunch of us all chip in, it would be great; money well spent.
I also moved the Lijit Widget from my general group of social network widgets up near the top. They provide a neat interface to Google so you can search on all your sites, both directly and within your social network. They provide nice little icons pointing to the different social networks your in, and a cloud for searches that have been done.
Lijit is still very early stage. There have been a few bugs setting it up, but their customer support has been great and I hope to see a lot of neat features coming in the future. Like RapLeaf, which does provides reputation related information, I believe their social network aggregation is one of the really important emerging trends, and I’ll be writing more about this soon.
In other website related stuff, quantcast has now gathered enough information to start giving me additional details about my audience. The graph shows the ups and downs of the week. They are currently saying that I get around 2000 unique monthly visits, or which around 1400 are from within the United States. Of that, around three quarters are people passing by, yet the regulars make up about half of the actual page views.
A lot of the traffic I’ve been getting has been Trackback Spam. I worry about the amount of strain the filtering of the spam places on the server, so I’ve ended up completely shutting down trackback on the site. The blog posts that have been getting the most traffic recently have been my posts about Falcon Ridge. I posted a comment about it in Livejournal and Facebook. I expected that Facebook would drive more traffic, but interestingly enough, much more of the traffic has come from Livejournal.
My post about The Motherhood got a fair amount of traffic, some from The Motherhood itself, others from Salon, where my wife wrote about it and on Been There, a blog by Emily and Cooper from The Motherhood. It terms of the interconnectivity, that sites like Lijit and Rapleaf are starting to explore, I found it interesting that Emily and Cooper were also both early contributors to Beth’s fundraising appeal to go to Cambodia.
Yet the post that has been getting the most traffic over the past few days has been my post about Zachary Cohn. I do hope that people reading the post stop and think a little bit about pool safety, the importance of product liability lawsuits, and getting more politically involved. Even more so, I hope that readers stop and read a few of my other blog posts. Yet the whole thing feels a little bit uncomfortable. It feels a little bit like people rubbernecking at a celebrity car crash. I sure hope that isn’t a major reason for the traffic.
Beyond the website housekeeping, the legal issues around the selling of our house continue to escalate. I do believe there is a place for litigation, but it should be avoided wherever possible. Kim, however, sees the actions as impacting Fiona’s education and is starting to talk about wanting not only fairness, but vengeance. I am hoping we will find a peaceful resolution soon enough. Until then, since we are looking at litigation, I’m going to remain mostly quite on this.
Some of Kim’s anger is perhaps fueled by the flareup of her lyme disease; yet another stressor. The final stressor I want to talk about is my mother’s surgery. On Tuesday, she had knee surgery. I spoke with her yesterday. She was groggy from the painkillers and from the lack of sleep. She wants to get home as soon as possible, but it does sound like the surgery went well and she is mostly getting the care she needs.
Any of you with a religious bent, are encouraged to lift up prayers for my mother, for Kim and, I guess, for all of us right about now.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 22:31
Zachary Cohn
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 09:27“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” How often have you heard that phrase? How often has it come close to home? I try not to have any enemies, they just aren’t a useful thing to have. But over the years, there have been people that I’ve clashed with in stressful work situations, and they are perhaps the closest I’ve got towards enemies.
One person I had frequent clashes with was Brian Cohn. We both worked at S.A.C. Capital years ago. I haven’t spoken with him since I left over six years ago. A lot has gone on since then. I was going through my divorce while I was at S.A.C. I’ve remarried, and Fiona was born. Brian and his wife Karen had a boy named Zachary. Zachary was about half a year older than Fiona.
While we were listening to music at Falcon Ridge, a horrible pool accident happened at the Cohn’s house and Zachary drowned. The Stamford Advocate is reporting that the investigation includes drainage apparatus.
When I read about the pool drain, my thoughts went to John Edwards’ famous 1997 case against Sta-Rite. Sta-Rite has made pool products since the 1960 and according to an article in the Washington Monthly a dozen children had already suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains before the trial.
Last month, there was another pool drain accident where the drainage system sucked out most of a six year olds small intestine. TwinCities.COM is reporting that the parents are contemplating legal action “against Sta-Rite Industries, which manufactured the pool's drainage system.”
I don’t know if the drainage system at the Cohn’s was made by Sta-Rite, but it does seem as if issues with pool drainage systems still haven’t been adequately addressed.
Brian is now President of S.A.C. Reports say that S.A.C. currently has $14 billion under management. S.A.C., like other hedge funds, has been making the news in political circles as Brian and others have made major contributions to Chris Dodd’s Presidential campaign. Brian, along with others at S.A.C. also contributed significantly to Dan Malloy’s Gubernatorial campaign.
Riches, political influence, all of that becomes pretty meaningless when faced with a horrible accident like the loss of Zachary. Brian and I aren’t likely to cross paths any time soon. If we do, I don’t know if any of the old conflicts will cloud our interactions. But I do know, that my heart goes out to him, Karen, and their whole family during their time of horrible grief. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.
When I was a Mommy Blogger
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/30/2007 - 21:27I won't forget when Peter Pan
Came to my house, took my hand
I said I was a boy, I'm glad he didn't check
I learned to fly, I learned to fight
I lived a whole life in one night
We saved each other's lives out on the pirate's deck
Yesterday, I received an email inviting me to The Motherhood. Their welcome message says,
If you believe in the power of mothers to make things happen, you're going to love this neighborhood. Come on in and make yourself at home!
Well, I do believe in the power of mothers to make things happen. I spend a lot of time visiting Mommy Blogs around the Internet and I tell all my political friends to step beyond their political blogs and reach out to the Mommy Blogs.
That said, I would like to remind people of my gender. The picture of my white bearded face should make it clear that I am not a Mommy Blogger by most popular definitions. However, Dar Williams
And I tell the man I'm with
About the other life I lived
And I say now you're top gun
I have lost and you have won
And he says, "Oh no, no, can't you seeWhen I was a girl, my mom and I we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked
And I could always cry, now even when I'm alone I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl too
And you were just like me, and I was just like you"
So, to all the Mommy Bloggers out there, either by birth or by conviction, stop by The Motherhood and see if we can save each others lives out on the pirate deck and perhaps even help all of us find some of the kindness that has been lost.
