Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
EntreCard Dropper Analytics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 09:17Yesterday, I completed the first version of my EntreCard analytics program. Over the past several days, there has been a discussion about ‘ghost droppers’ or ‘cheaters’ on EntreCard that use some sort of script to give an appearance of having visited your site when they really haven’t.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at data from Google Analytics and compare it to EntreCard data. While many people are concerned that EntreCard drop data may over represent the number of visits, Google Analytics data may under represent it. First, it only shows people who have stayed around long enough for the whole page to load. People who visit, see that the most recent article hasn’t changed and move on before the rest of the page is loaded are not counted.
Likewise, this is based on data of people who have visited from the EntreCard drop inbox. In my case a little over half of the traffic coming from the EntreCard website comes from people’s drop inbox. Another third comes from Advertisements and the rest from other parts of EntreCard. Unfortunately, it is only easy to tell where a person is coming from if the incoming link is from their drop inbox. It should also note that EntreCard traffic makes up only a very small amount of my total traffic.
This tool only shows visits from people that you have dropped your card on. If you haven’t dropped your card on someone, your card won’t be in their inbox, and they cannot return the visit this way.
Related to this, it does not provide information about people who have visited your site because they came to it from EntreCard at some point in the past and have bookmarked the site, or who click on your ad on a different network, like Adgitize or CMF ads, again, because they’ve seen your ad or visited your site from EntreCard in the past. Martin considers this a ‘flaw’ because it is likely to under represent people who might have come to your site via EntreCard, but ended up coming via a different network. I think Martin is overstating his case. This tool does what it does, it reports the number of page views generated by having a card in someone’s drop box.
With that, I have now made this tool available to anyone who uses EntreCard and Google Analytics. If you go to EC Analytics you will be asked to give permission to my program to access your Google Analytics data. The program will then list the various websites that you have data on. When you click on the website, it will provide a list of EntreCard userid numbers and the number of pages they have viewed on your site over the past thirty days when clicking on your card in their drop inbox.
By visiting the people that are most likely to return the visit, you are increasing the chances of people becoming repeat visitors. By skipping the people that are already visiting you because of other sites, like Adgitize, CMF ads, or from their own bookmarks, you are focusing on the people that are less likely to come through other methods anyway.
This is still a first version of the program, so improvement suggestions are welcome. To the extent that this becomes a helpful tool, I may gather data from this page to provide aggregate information about which people seem to visit the most pages from cards dropped on them.
Using Google Analytics API and PHP to Ghostbust EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/13/2010 - 13:36The EntreCard community has been all abuzz about ‘cheaters’ or ‘ghost droppers’ on EntreCard. These are people who somehow record with EntreCard that they’ve visited your site when they actually haven’t. I wrote a little bit about this in my entry Cheating at EntreCard and Finding Real Top Droppers. In that blog post, I suggested using Google Analytics to see who Google recognizes as visiting your site from your EntreCard drop box.
Since then, I’ve been using these analytics to visit those people that come to my website via the EntreCard Dropbox and visit the most pages. With that, I’ve seen more EntreCard based traffic over the past couple days than I have in nearly a year. Some of that may be simply because of the buzz about EntreCard ghosts and my current rise in popularity on EntreCard. However, it does seem like a useful strategy.
People have asked if my process could be automated, and I’m starting to work on automating it. Details are provided below. In addition, people have suggested it might be good to come up with a Quality Dropper list. Using what I’ve written so far, I can come up with the quality droppers, in terms of the number of page views, that I see. However, I could make this more useful if I had similar data from other sites. If you’re interested in submitting your own data, there are a couple different approaches.
One method, for a simple one time analysis, you could go to the Google Analytics page for your site. Click on Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and EntreCard in the list. Set Show Rows to 500 to get the most data, and then click on Export TSV. Send the Tab Separated Values file to me and I’ll add it to my analysis. For ongoing analysis, if you give me read access to the Google Analytics for your page I can include your site in the automated analytics I’m building.
Send your TSV file to aldon.hynes at orient-lodge.com, or give the same address read access to your Google Analytics User Manager and drop me a note about it.
For those who want to build their own automated analytics, here is how I’ve been approaching it:
#cttu – Aldon Hynes, Internet Novelist
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 09:46It’s five o’clock on a Thursday and the usual crowd is driving to the CT Tweet Crawl. It is a diverse group of people that gather every so often who are united by little more than their common use of Twitter. I’ve been going to Tweet Crawls, Tweetups, and other social media gatherings for years. It used to be much more geeks talking about some wild idea for a new website. The content producers started showing up, the bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers. Finally, the marketing people caught on with their nice suits and a chance to exchange business cards.
I’m listening to All Things Considered on the radio as I drive up. They are talking about William Faulkner and I think about novel writing. Every year I give National Novel Writing Month a try, and one year I completed the novel, but never got around to editing it.
I’m thinking to myself, “What do I have to say to this upcoming gathering? What do they have to say to me?” I anticipate the first question I will hear from many people, “So, what do you do?” I eat, I drink, I sleep, sometimes I write or manage to find interesting technology projects that pay the bills, but that isn’t concise enough for this crowd and people won’t want to swap cards with me. I could say that I’m quick with a joke, or to light up a smoke but people would then assume that there’s some place that I’d rather be.
Years ago, I spoke with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. It occurred to me that the best way to describe what I do is to say that I “help people tell their stories online.” With this in mind, the words of William Faulkner rattling around in my head and a little Billy Joel somehow slipping in, I decided on my new job description. “I’m an Internet Novelist”.
Yeah, it’s a little different from Bill’s friend the Real Estate Novelist. I’ve had time for a wife, although she may sometimes get frustrated at the amount of time that I am online. So, at the TweetCrawl, I use the phrase. I get polite nods as people seem to get it, exchange business cards and move on. Only one person seems to object. He points out that novels are supposed to be long form fiction. A lot of social media is very short form, and by novel standards, even a long blog post is short form. In addition, social media people are supposed to be writing about what is really going on, not some fiction.
While I’m a big advocate of truth and authenticity online, it seems as if a good social media presence is concerned with the narrative, with taking all the bits and pieces of life and weaving it into an interesting story. Hopefully, the story isn’t fiction, but becomes true in the telling of the story.
So, there you have it. I’ve told my story of being an Internet Novelist, and hopefully telling this story makes it a little bit true. It certainly made the discussions at the CT Tweetup more interesting. On the way home, I listened to Fresh Air as Terry Gross interviewed Loudon Wainwright. He talked some about his father being a journalist for Life magazine and how he had bought into the notion that you need to write a book to be a serious writer. Maybe I’ll end up buying into the same notion, but until then I’ll keep up my various forms of internet writing and hope to weave them into interesting stories.
Holden Caulfield and the Phonies of #PCWM
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/07/2010 - 09:53Yesterday, I drove up to Westfield State College for PodCampWesternMass2. Podcamps are open space unconferences where people interested in podcasting and often related topics like other social media, gather to talk about their interests. At PCWM, there was not an awful lot of talk about actual podcasting, and the sessions tended to be much closer to traditional speakers or panels than true open space unconference meetings, but it was a good group of people.
I’ve been doing so much with so many forms of social media for so long, that I typically don’t expect to learn a lot at these conferences, but I always hope for some good pointers here and there. More importantly, I like to share some of my own experiences and meet interesting people.
As I drove up from Connecticut, I listened to Studio 360 on public radio. For those interested, you can listen to Studio 360 as a podcast. One of the articles this week as about Joanna Smith Rakoff’s interactions with JD Salinger when she worked for the literary agency that represented him.
It seems like everyone has been talking about how JD Salinger has affected their lives. One of the best articles I found was Reflections on J.D. Salinger...Goddard College, Franny and Zoey and what an artist really is…. Nettie Hartsock wrote about how Franny and Zoey changed her life when she was starting at Goddard College.
I’ll commit heresy and admit that while I enjoyed reading Catcher In The Rye, and I’m sure I got something valuable out of it, it really didn’t have any great affect on my life, and I haven’t read any of his other books, at least as far as I can remember, although I have vague recollections of starting to read one or two of them and never finishing them.
The one word that I hear more often than any other in reflections about JD Salinger is Holden Caulfield frequent use of the word “Phony”. Greg Palast has a great essay, Kvetcher in the Rye which explores this in the political context. Ms. Rakoff talked about phonies in her show, and there was a lot of talk about Salinger’s reclusiveness.
Podcamps and social media are the other end of the spectrum from Salinger’s reclusiveness and concern about phonies. I don’t think I’ve ever met Mr. Salinger at a Podcamp or social media gathering nor have I met people channeling Mr. Caulfield. Too often, it seems, such gatherings, besides being the polar opposite of reclusive, tend to attract social media experts and other snake oil salesmen like those who talk about search engine optimization.
As I drove up, the words of Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog rang in my ears, “Everyone’s a hero in their own way…” Perhaps Holden Caulfield is right, we are all phonies in our own way. Yet we are also all catchers in the rye in our own ways as well.
We can look at the phony social media experts and search engine optimization snake oil salesmen as phonies living their lives of quiet desperation. Or, we can recognize that it is precisely this quiet desperation that can make even the most fake phonies fascinating catchers in the rye, and that is where some of the real power of social media and podcasting can come in.
When people bring a little bit of their authentic lives into their social media, they become a little less phony and a lot more interesting. Many of the people at PCWM understand that, and tried to communicate it to people learning their way around social media. It is, perhaps, the most important message that anyone can come away with from a podcamp.
With this as my framework, I was fortunate not to meet any phonies at PCWM. Instead, I reconnected with some fascinating old friends from previous podcamps and met some fascinating new friends as well. I hope others had similar experiences at PCWM.
The Crowd Sourcing Winter Vacation Contest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/04/2010 - 09:43Fiona’s week long school vacation starts a week from tomorrow. It will include Valentine’s day, President’s day, Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday, and probably some other important days I am not aware of. In other years, we haven’t really done anything special during winter vacation. It has conflicted with my work or my wife’s work. However, this year, we really need a few days away.
We’ve talked about various things to do. We could go into New York City, or maybe up to Boston for a day of exploring museums. We could go Cape Cod for a few days and walk on quiet beaches. I started looking for ideas online.
One site I checked was Festivals.com. They listed Dance Flurry, the great folk dancing festival up in Saratoga Springs, NY. Last summer at Falcon Ridge, we spent a bit of time with folks from Bungieville, a group of dancers from Long Island that always camp together at Falcon Ridge, and dance together at Saratoga Springs. Unfortunately, it conflicts with a few things, so we won’t be at Dance Flurry.
Festivals.com also listed the Chainsaw Rendezvoux. This is a weeklong gathering of chainsaw artists in western Pennsylvania. It seems like a fairly long trip to see some chainsaw artists in action, but it does sound very interesting.
The State of Maine’s Festival Page for February listed a nice collection of winter festivals, and we might head up there. However, many of them are focused on snowmobile races or ice car races. Races don’t rank high on our list of interesting things, but there is also going to be ice sculptures and fireworks.
I’ve wondered if sites like Dopplr, Where Are You Now?, CouchSurfing, Yelp, 43 Places, Upcoming, Foursquare, BrightKite, or some other set of sites might be helpful in finding a special vacation.
Then, it occurred to me, why don’t I put this request out on my blog, and spread it to various social media sites? So, I open it up to friends, followers, readers, and anyone else that stumbles across this website. Share your best idea for inexpensive, interesting things to do in the North Eastern United States for a husband, wife, and eight year old girl. If I get some good ideas, I’ll recap them in a later blog post, and perhaps do some blogging and other social media activities from the event. If it comes from a blog in one of my blog networks, I’ll through a little link love in there too.
So, what do you say? What fun events are happening in mid February?
