Technology
Entries related to technology.
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:
Understanding Developmental Stages of Online Communication
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/06/2010 - 16:19Since my blog yesterday about what I’ve been reading, I’ve had a lot of interesting discussions about Joel Foner’s blog post How Tweeting About “My Stupid Breakfast” Creates A Lifestyle Of Continuous Learning.
People have talked about the importance of face to face communications, especially when providing therapy, and have spoken about examples of people being too closely wed to their cellphones, with and example of a New Year’s Eve party “where almost everyone was on the phone at midnight rather than holding hands and singing with each other”.
What I’ve Been Reading
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 10:56Every day, I get hundreds of emails on a wide array of topics. Many get deleted. Others I stored, and some I flag with the intention of coming back to them and writing about them. Yet too often, I never get back to writing about them. Now, as we start a new year, I’m going to try to do a little better at highlighting some of the emails and websites I see and commenting on them.
Netflix Origami. Cute little site on ways that you can fold up those old Netflix envelopes.
Wireless Sensors For A Better Life. A couple friends of mine are doing various bits of work with wireless sensors, so I thought this might be an interesting article. Unfortunately, it is a little short on content, mostly just talking about three different things you can purchase. Not as interesting as I thought it might be. However, I did wonder if I could program any of this for my N900.
The Obama Disconnect: What Happens When Myth Meets Reality. This is a long article by Micah Sifry that I’ve only scanned. He ends off saying:
I'm sorry, but when two million people are in motion in favor of something, because they put themselves in motion, we know what that feels like. It's called a movement. It started to happen in 2007-08, and it hasn't happened since.
Based on what friends who have been closer to OFA have been telling me, this sounds pretty much on the mark.
How Tweeting About “My Stupid Breakfast” Creates A Lifestyle Of Continuous Learning. I thought this was a great blog post and forwarded it to a mailing list, hoping to get some sort of discussion of the relationship between the lifestyle of continuous learning through online communications and other forms of continuous learning through face to face encounters. Unfortunately, the first response I received seemed to miss the whole point and resort to a knee-jerk response against online communications.
I think, time could be much better spent in real relationships and that all this is a only a sophisticated evolvement and substitute for extended families as well as a waste of time for those spending hundreds of hours updating their blogs & twitter accounts, instead of goiing out and meeting real people?
I responded in part,
it that makes a relationship real? Must a person actually see another person for the relationship to be real? Must a person actually hear another person's voice for the relationship to be real? What does this say about relationships of deaf or blind people? Perhaps we have to physically touch someone for the relationship to be real? Personally, as much as I've enjoyed meeting various people on this list face to face, I feel that there is a certain realness to the relationship with people that I have not had the opportunity to meet face to face.
Then, there is the 'substitute for extended families'. Yes, I think there is something important to that. I'd extend the concept not only to extended families, but also to the concept of tribes. Some of you may have been blessed with growing up with extended families, and still having functional extended families. Unfortunately, for many of us, particularly in the United States, the extended family structure, as well as local community involvement have all declined significantly during the twentieth century. Many attribute this to the change from an agrarian to an industrial society. The move from an industrial to an information society might be 'only a sophisticated evolvement and substitute' for the relationships that we once had in more agrarian societies, yet it seems to me that a sophisticated evolvement is better than further withering of personal contact that we saw during industrialization.
As to the dichotomy of either wasting time spending hundreds of hours updating blogs and twitter instead of going out and meeting real people, this seems to me to be a false dichotomy. In fact, much online communication often leads to the desire to meet real people. The efforts on this list to organize a face to face dinner at an upcoming conference and the expressions of eager anticipation of meeting people face to face, I believe illustrate some of the falseness of the dichotomy. Instead of seeing it as a dichotomy, I tend to see online communications as complimentary to face to face communications. Online communications can be used to establish desire to meet face to face, to organize such a meeting, even in an ad hoc manner, such as when a member of the list posted about being in New York City and I used it as an opportunity to meet him face to face. It also provides a framework of information, of knowledge about each person, so that face to face meetings can be deeper and more meaningful.
There is also the component about time and travel. I can communicate with four hundred people soon after crawling out of my bed, while others thousands of miles away are still in their beds, and then still get on with my day, meeting plenty of people face to face.
Yet all of this, I believe, misses the point of Joel's blog post. His post focuses on the developmental aspect of online communications, whether or not it might be inferior to face to face communications. It seems like too often people look at the initial form of online communications and dismiss it without thinking about the developmental aspects of online communications. It would seem as if people on this list might also have thoughts on how the developmental aspects of online communications relates to the developmental aspects of oral communications, or perhaps even the stages of engagement that people go through as they participate in face to face groups.
One final link for right now:
Life (and education) Changing Experience is a wonderful, though also long, and I’ve only skimmed it, post about using technology to builder closer relationships between students geographically and culturally far apart.
So, here are a few of the things I’ve been reading. Thoughts? Comments? Reactions? Also, what have you found of interest online recently?
To Make the Imagined Real
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/19/2009 - 18:14It is a desire as old as human kind, to make the imagined real. Pygmalion imagined a woman that he then sculpted, fell in love with, and in the end, the gods granted his sculpture life. Perhaps it is some of this drive to make the imagined real that is responsible for the success of great artists making that which they imagine real in the form of their artwork, and the success of great politicians making that which they imagine real in terms of reforms to make the world a better place.
To me, the ability to take ones imagination into a piece of technology and make something real is an important part of what makes good technology interesting. It is part of the requirement I placed on my older daughters. They could play any computer game they could create. It is part of why I’m so interested in the N900 as a phone where I can easily create new applications.
Yet perhaps the place where this is most important to me is in computer games. Years ago, the text based virtual worlds that I found most interesting where those that gave the most opportunity to create. LambdaMOO was a great example followed by Second Life as we moved to three dimensional games. These were virtual worlds where adults could create things that they imagined. OpenSim became even more interesting as a virtual world where there was even more opportunity to create.
So, I started my kids programming in Logo. I introduced them to SmallTalk and its variants, with Squeak EToys being my current interest.
As a general rule, I’ve disliked many of the commercially produced games, especially those that target kids. They are too mind numbing and there aren’t enough opportunities for creativity.
Yet the other day, I read a press release for Shidonni. “Shidonni, winner of the 2009 Parents' Choice Website Gold Award, is an online community designed for children ages 6-12 that focuses on nurturing children's creativity and imagination.”
The website had a video introducing Shidonni:
The idea of a virtual world where kids can draw their own pets, worlds, as well as food and clothing for the pets is very appealing. A downside is that it uses Microsoft’s Silverlight, which limits the machines it can run on. I did manage to get it loaded onto an old Linux Laptop that I have, but it ran incredibly slowly.
Yet the idea of kids being able to draw their own pets and worlds is a great starting point. What if you could take a drawing of a pet and have a stuffed animal created from the drawing?
Pretty Cool. However, at $79.99, it is pretty expensive. That’s over twice as expensive as many of the high end webkins, and ten times as expensive as some of the lower priced webkins.
However, when Fiona saw the one-of-a-kind Shidonni animals, she of course wanted one right away. She offered to chip in some of her savings. I told her that she should save up for it.
So, besides learning about the joy of creativity, she may also learn the value of waiting and the value of a buck. All of them are great lesson. So, I’ll be keeping a close eye on Shidonni and encourage any of my readers with kids in the six to twelve year old range to consider doing the same thing.
What do you have found for cool online tools to encourage creativity?
