Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Visits, Bounce Rates, Time on Site and Other Disasters
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/21/2008 - 12:57A while ago, I installed Google Analytics on my website. However, there were some problems with the configuration, so I never went back and checked it, until today. A bunch of interesting things jumped out at me on my first reading of the Google Analytics. According to Google, the top source of my visitors is EntreCard, making up about 50% of my traffic. Coming in second was Google searches making up 17% of my traffic. 13% of my traffic came directly. Blogexplosion, Twitter, Yahoo, BlogCatalog and Facebook were the other major sources.
My overall bounce rate was 87%. All of my Search Engine Optimization friends are likely to say uh-oh when they see a number like that and roll their eyes. However, I think people may be looking at bounce rates wrong. Bounce rates are the number of times people come and look at a single page, and then leave without looking at other pages.
If you are a company trying to sell product online, or if you are a candidate hoping voters will spend time learning about you and getting involved in your campaign, your bounce rate can be very important, especially if you have a splash page.
Yet if you are a blogger, a high bounce rate may not be bad at all. People come, read your blog post, and move on to whatever they are looking for next. 92% of my traffic from EntreCard bounces off to the next site. Actually, I don’t view that as bad at all. It means that 8% of the people who visit the site via EntreCard spend time to read other posts. People coming from Google or Yahoo bounce about 80% of the time. Twitter is giving me a bounce rate of 84% and Facebook is at an astoundingly low 67% bounce rate.
To me, what is more important is how much time do people spend reading material on my site. Interestingly enough, people coming from BlogCatalog lead the ranks in average time on the site, at over 2 minutes. The overall average is just under a minute. BlogExplosion comes in with the lowest average time, of just 11 seconds. I may have to rethink my use of BlogExplosion. EntreCard does well enough with the average time of 36 seconds.
Perhaps, this is in part because I’m not on any of those speed dropping lists. EntreCard speed droppers talk about trying to drop 300 cards in fifteen minutes. That works out to be three seconds per visit. Canny Granny commented in one of those discussions about how she likes to actually read the blogs that she visits. I imagine she puts a lot of time into her writing and likewise hopes that people spend time reading what she writes.
There are a lot of good reasons to spend time reading blogs that you through EntreCard. They provide a great snapshot into life. BlueStem Winery has a stunning picture and story of their son and daugher-in-law’s house which was hit by a tornado. A Changing Life has pictures of flooding, and My Interesting Files has remarkable photographs by a wedding photographer in China during the earthquake.
Yeah, you can measure website traffic in terms of visits, bounce rates, and how long people spend on a page, but these metrics pale compared to moments of real life as they get captured in blogs.
It seems like Pisio got that part of my interest in blogs in their review of Orient Lodge. If I spent a little more time on the general layout of my page, in part following Pisio’s suggestions, I could perhaps decrease my bounce rate a little bit. I might get around to that some day, but right now, my writing is more important.
Heavy Hands and The Angry Villager Rule
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 08:32Recently there have been a lot of stories about people or organizations reacting heavy-handedly to events online, where people have organized and pushed back. It seems common enough that a look at the underlying dynamics needs to be looked at.
The hottest right now is probably the DMCA takedown requests that the Associated Press has issued against Drudge Retort. A lot has been written about this already, and a lot more needs to be written and will be written. For those who have not followed this, I would encourage you to check out the UnAssociated Press website. As you might guess from the title, they have a particular slant, going so far as to call for a blogger boycott of the AP. Culture Kitchen is another site which is providing important coverage and attempting to keep focus on the larger issues.
A second organization that seems to be constantly stumbling over its heavy-handedness is Linden Lab. Whether you look at the recent flap over whether adults who wish their avatars to appear in the shape of children would be allowed to participate in birthday celebrations for Second Life, or there repeated struggles with trademark and currency issues, Linden Lab consistently appears to act heavy-handedly, most likely at the advice of their lawyers, and then find themselves in the middle of a major brouhaha with the residents of Second Life.
Then, of course, there is the administration of Lewis Mills High School, which reacted in a heavy-handed manner when a student wrote criticisms of the administration at home one evening. This case is continuing in the Federal Courts, and one member of the administration has already received disciplinary action related to the case, and the lawyer for the administration has received a major warning from the chairman of Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission.
Now, let us look for a moment at ‘The Angry Villager Rule’. This was a rule from the game Dungeons and Dragons in the early days, probably over thirty years ago. Essentially, the person running the game could invoke The Angry Villager Rule, where the villagers would gather together and defeat even a very strong player in the game, in a manner similar to how army ants by their sheer force of numbers, could defeat much larger prey.
I’ve always thought of the Angry Villager Rule in terms of the Mandate of Heaven, a Chinese view that a King’s ruled by the blessing of Heaven. This blessing was seen by good weather, good crops and content citizens. Floods and famines were a sign that the mandate had been repealed. The citizens, suffering from floods and famines always seemed to me to be like the angry villagers seeking a new leader.
Perhaps a more current version of the Angry Villager rule is Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody”. Internet based tools are enabling angry villagers to organize in response to heavy-handed actions of regimes that are losing their power because of these new enabling tools. Perhaps the folks at the Associated Press, Linden Lab, and Lewis Mills High School should be given a copy of Shirky’s new book.
So, we have a dynamic of people used to using the Internet for more and more of their social interaction, including organizing when the existing institutions don’t understand and attempt to thwart online communities. It is a compelling narrative. However, the means of mediating this dynamic seems to be slow in appearing.
The Associated Press, after a backlash against their heavy-handed DMCA takedown orders, is now talking about engaging bloggers in a discussion about what constitutes ‘fair use’ in a digital age, and even these efforts are receiving criticism from the angry global villagers. They would have been wiser to start this discussion long before issuing any takedown orders.
Even with these feeble efforts, it seems that the Associated Press is making more progress in understanding the new millennium than Linden Lab or the administration at Lewis Mills High School have been.
So, how do we establish a meaningful dialog about how the Internet is changing our social structures? How do we find a space that helps older institutions evolve at the same time as not surrendering some of the boon that the Internet has provided?
New Social Networks and what you can find with them
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/08/2008 - 13:54Over the past week, I’ve been suffering fairly badly from my sinus infection and bronchitis and haven’t been writing nearly as much as I would like. There are several important blog posts I want to get to, and perhaps even some that have become moot, or at least changed direction considerably over the past week.
I have been trying to keep up with emails, social networks, visiting various blogs, and so on, and have lots of notes to highlight.
In the social network space, the big development is Plurk. You can sign up and follow me there, or if you want to boost my plurk karma, you can signup here.
Plurk is yet another microblog. You write 140 character messages to say what you are up to and your message gets displayed with messages of your friends. Sound a lot like Twitter? Well, it seems a lot of the users are people who were frustrated by Twitter’s downtime. Yet there are some interesting differences. Plurk is a bit like what you might expect to get when Microsoft attempts to take Twitter, shoehorn it into a Gantt chart and display it on an ajax version of MySpace. When I described it that way to my eldest daughter, her eyes just sort of glazed over, but I’m used to that from my daughters. So, if what I said doesn’t make sense, just go over and take a look at Plurk.
So far, most of the discussions on Plurk seem to be about Plurk, with a bit of emphasis on how you build karma there. So, I’ll keep playing with Plurk and building my karma there, but I’ll probably stick with Twitter, even with its downtime, to get my real news.
People have commented that they don’t want yet another site to update their statuses. Why can’t someone build one place where you can update your status and have that sent out to all the other sites? Well, I’m told that ping.fm does that, but you need an invitation, and I haven’t scored one yet. If anyone can get me an invitation, drop me a note.
Ping.fm’s current competition is hellotxt. I’ve signed up for hellotxt and sent a few messages from it. The MySpace and Bebo connectivity didn’t work for me during my test, it doesn’t cover as many sites as ping.fm does, and there isn’t a nice SMS interface right now for people in the States, but it looks promising.
The other site that just came on my radar is mento. Mento is a tool to save a link to a bunch of different places at the same time. They have a Firefox addon which I’m about to start testing. No opinion on this one yet.
My first attempt at using Mento, after bookmarking Orient Lodge, to bookmark an article about an effort to build a Croquet VM. Croquet is a virtual world system, based originally on SmallTalk. It is an important part of Qwaq, and I want to keep an eye on the what goes on in that space.
If I had Mento installed earlier, and felt that it was working properly, I might have used it to flag three recent posts I’ve stumbled across via EntreCard. New York Renovator has this post about Victory Gardens. She talks about people growing victory gardens as part of the effort to live greener lifestyles, less dependent on foreign oil. It fits nicely with my interest in Project Laundry List, an effort to get more people to dry clothes outside, even fighting restrictive covenants that prevent it, and noting that “Electric dryers use five to ten percent of residential electricity in the United States!
Another cool blog entry I found through EntreCard was Your Fun Family’s pointer to a 50 State map game. I’ve played it twice, and do pretty well. Some of the first states that I put on the map are a little bit off, but once a few states are on the map, it becomes easier. My average error has been 11 to 13 miles, missing 3 to 5 states. My last round I got a score of 90.19.
One last blog post, found through EntreCard, is of a waterslide, which I believe is in Germany. Check it out.
One final note: I did get a chance to check a few of my Facebook requests. Facebook has a new application for blog networks. Stop by and join the Orient Lodge blog network on Facebook. If your blog is in a Facebook blog network, let me know.
Enough for now. Now, I need to try and sleep off some of the heat and the sinus infection.
Teach your children well
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/03/2008 - 09:40“I hate you,” she shouted as she stormed out of the room and slammed the door. Shaken and hurt, I sat quietly. I will give her some time to calm down, and then go to her, let her know that I love her, even if I do things that I think are the best for her and she disagrees, even if she behaves in an inappropriate way. I can help her with that another time.
Does this sound familiar? I suspect that anyone with a teenager at home must have experienced something like this. The teenage years are difficult, not only because of the raging hormones, but also because of the need for teenagers to separate themselves from their parents and authority figures, to establish their own identity, authority, sense of self worth, and find ways to express it.
As much as I hate the phrase, “The Internet has changed everything”, there is a hint of truth about it for teenagers. At home, at night, they can shout and slam virtual doors online. They can call the administration of their school douchebags. They can create MySpace parody pages of their school administrators.
Of course, this presents another problem. These outbursts, which in previous years might have been confined to the family room, are now available for everyone to see, including the douchebags at the central office.
It is reasonable to believe that the school administrators may also be shaken and hurt by these outbursts. Since they are acting “In Loco Parentis” at the schools and since they should be much better trained in dealing with the traumas and dramas of teenagers, you would expect them to handle the situation even better than I have in my house.
Yet school administrators are also human. They err. They fail. Since their parental relationships are based upon a job, instead of deep familial love of the children, they may act in ways that are more focused on defending their reputations and their jobs than on being good educators.
It seems as if this provides a useful framework for understanding what went on with Avery Doninger and the school administration at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, CT. Avery wrote a blog post at home one evening after a dispute with the school administration about a concert she was helping organize. She referred to the ‘douchebags’ at the central office. Some of the administrators’ feelings were hurt and they lashed back at Avery. The case is currently in the courts. Yet Avery’s case is not the only one of its kind.
From the Student Press Law Center, I’ve learned of the case of Justin Layshock. At his grandmother’s house one evening, Justin created a parody profile of his high school principal, Eric Trosch, intimating that the principal was a drunk and a drug user. Mr. Trosch responded in a manner more like Paula Schwartz and Karissa Niehoff from Lewis Mills High School and focused on his reputation rather than his responsibilities as an educator.
In a rather bizarre move, the school district blamed the ACLU for the “damaged reputation because of the publicity the lawsuit elicited”. So, yet again, we see a school administration more concerned about reputation than pedagogical interests.
In a preliminary ruling on the Layshock case, a judge wrote, “They [the school administration] may not like something students say on their home computers and post on the Internet, but it’s for the parents to decide what, if any, discipline is appropriate.”
Yet a bigger question remains for me. What happens when parents show their children love and stand up for the children when they express themselves poorly, but legally? What happens when children learn that what they say matters and that freedom of speech needs to be protected?
Avery will be spending a year working Americorps. In a subsequent article about Justin Layshock’s case, we learn that Justin spent last summer volunteering at an orphanage in Africa.
In can be very difficult for parents and educators to act in love and in the best educational interests of their children when the children criticize them. I must admit, I don’t always do it right myself. But, by managing ones hurt and focusing on helping the child become more effective in speaking up clearly and strongly, we will create a new generation of leaders, like Avery and Justin and our country, and our world will be better off for it.
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Wandering through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, and EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/01/2008 - 09:54Perhaps the Internet hasn’t really changed things all that much from when I was in high school over thirty years ago. Back then, the thing to do was to go down to Spring Street to hang out and see friends. There were two competing hangouts, Colonial Pizza and Pizza House. Each one attracted specific cliques. There were also places to just hang out on the street and events at the college hang out at.
Instead of hanging out with a specific clique, I would wander from one group to the next. I always felt like a bit of an outsider, an interloper, but was usually accepted, even though I might not have been told all the inner secrets of the cliques I visited.
College was much the same as I would drift from one gathering to another on the weekends. I probably came a bit closer to finding groups that I identified with, yet the pattern was the same. I found myself enjoying the works of Hermann Hesse with themes of the solitary wanderer, and one of my best friends from college often compared our relationship to that of Siddhartha and Govinda.
Some of the discussions of the past week have brought me back to these thoughts as they relate to the Internet, another recurring theme for me. The announcements of the lists of credentialed bloggers for the Democratic National Convention have riled many of my friends. It seems to many of them that felt they were rejected because they were in a clique different than the clique selected to cover the convention. As the wanderer in the group, I suggest that people try to step away from their cliques.
How many people do you know that read just DailyKos, or local progressive political blogs? How many people do you know that read just the right wing equivalents? What about the Mommy bloggers who only read other Mommy blogs? The members of Tribe.net? Salon.com? The search engine optimization folks and the make money quick online folks? The pet bloggers?
It seems like the different cliques from high school and college years ago have replicated themselves in the blogosphere.
Now, if you are a Mommy blogger or a pet blogger whose goal is simply to talk about how your little one is doing and you are happy that your friends and relatives are hearing the stories, then this post is not for you. You have found your place and it is a very good place.
Yet if you are a political blogger or a marketing blogger, I want to toss this out as a challenge to you. What are you doing to expand the circle of people listening to what you have to say?
Part of the power of the Internet is that it enables more of a discussion. How much are you reading what others have written? How are you incorporating this into your own writing? When you use tools like
BlogExplosion is set up nicely for expanding connections. You are randomly taken to different sites and have to stay at the site for at least thirty seconds to receive your credit. While your there, you might as well read the blog post, and maybe interact a little bit with the site. I like visiting sites on BlogExplosion that have EntreCard and MyBlogLog. It provides a double or triple win as I drop my EntreCard and show up in the recent readers list.
When I use MyBlogLog to explore the blogosphere, I normally follow the links of recent readers. It matches my style of wandering and often seems to put me in touch with people that wander in similar ways. I’ve learned a lot from these new friends. Sometimes, I will visit people who have added me as a friend in an effort to keep the friendships active and alive. Other times I may search for people who have been tagged as interested in a specific topic if I want to spend time within a specific set of communities.
My use of EntreCard is similar. Typically, I click on the advertisements from one blog to the next, until I finally reach a blog that I’ve already read. Sometimes I start off from the people that have recently dropped cards on me. I try to visit as many of these people as possible. I also try to visit those who have dropped the most cards on me. Sometimes, I go to the advertising section and check to see that I’ve dropped cards on the most popular. However, if I’ve followed the chains of advertisements, I usually catch these sites anyway. I like to make sure that I visit the site of whomever is advertising on my blog as well.
I’ve gathered lots of EntreCard credits and am just starting to use them for advertising. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck with my ads. Should I advertise on the hugely popular and hence very expensive sites? Should I advertise on the less popular and less expensive sites? Should I advertise on new sites? I’ll explore different strategies.
The problem with all of these ways of visiting other sites is that it takes time. Do I take time away from Second Life? Do I spend more time in Blogexplosion or EntreCard? How do I balance the time visiting other blogs with writing for my own blog? I try to get at least one post up every day.
Even the blog posts that I write follow the wandering approach. The serious niche bloggers tell me that I have to pick a niche and write just about that niche. Yet being the wanderer that I am, one day I’ll write about politics, another day about Second Life, and then group psychology, technology, marketing, law, family stuff, or anything else that strikes my fancy. It’s not great for building community, but hopefully some of the posts build can build bridges. Perhaps it is part of my own hobo code or other marks to point fellow wanderers in helpful directions.
Well, I guess that’s my comments for this morning. Now, it is time to set off and wander a little bit more.
