Technology
Entries related to technology.
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?
Grumpy Tuesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/17/2008 - 09:51I continue to fight a cold and have not been able to get enough sleep recently, so I’m pretty grumpy. On top of this, there is a long list of tasks that keep getting put off, causing the list to get longer, including several blog posts I need to write. So, I will combine a few of them into this post, and then, when and if time permits, expand upon them.
Firefox 3
Today is Firefox 3 day. Starting at 1 PM EDT, people will be able to download the official version of Firefox 3. I downloaded the final release candidate and have run it a little bit. So far, there isn’t much that I’ve seen as improvements. The one feature that I like best is a ‘most viewed’ tab. Things I don’t like: You need to be running at least Windows 2000. It won’t run on my main machine which is still Windows NT. Yeah, I know, I should upgrade, but Windows NT has been good enough for me for years.
Things I’m trying to get used to: With Firefox 2, you have these little arrows next to your back and forward buttons so you can skip back, or forward, several pages. In Firefox 3, they’ve combined this into one button. There is a little circle next to the page showing where you are. A little more compressed; mixed feelings about it. Likewise, the dropdown list of recently visited sites is now split onto two lines; the title on the top and the link below it. I’m still used to the old way of displaying the list with the URL on the left and the title on the right. I prefer the older format. Perhaps there is a way of tweaking Firefox 3 to look more like Firefox 2.
Associated Press
Recently, the Associated Press sent takedown orders to a blog for quoting brief passages of AP articles. They requested the removal of six blog posts and one comment for quoting passages from AP stories ranging from 33 to 79 words. At the core of this is a battle over what constitutes Fair Use. The AP positions borders on asserting that no use of AP content is fair. First off, this is really stupid on the APs part. They should be encouraging people to link to their content. Instead, they have discouraged people from linking to their content. The UnAssociated Press is calling for a boycott of all AP stories. People are urging others to stop Digging article from the Associated Press and any other activities that might drive traffic to AP stories. Major hat tip to Liza Sabater for her coverage of this at Culture Kitchen. For more information on this, start off with Netroots' bloggers boycott of Associated Press is working.
EntreCard
In a similarly stupid move, EntreCard is asking bloggers to write for them, offering between 700 and 2000 EntreCard credits for reviews of other blogs. Depending on how much they actually pay, and the exchange rate of EntreCard credits, that works out to be between around $2.50 to $15 per blog post. For bloggers that do most of their writing for free, that is a major improvement, and is near the low end of the range that people get paid for writing articles about Second Life. Yet EntreCard, unlike other sites, will not permit republishing of the article on the writers own blog. They express concern about Google not liking duplicate content.
My understanding is that Google doesn’t like the same content with hundreds of links repeated over hundreds of websites in an effort to boost page rank, and that an article reposted on another site or two isn’t what Google is penalizing. If people can come up with details about Google penalizing a site for regular cross posting, please let me know.
Second Life
As a segue from grumpy to hopeful, let me comment on the Second Life birthday celebration. It starts June 23rd. There was a lot of stuff floating around about how the birthday celebration would not allow adults whose avatars are in the shape of children from participating. Linden Lab changed its position and Dusan Writer wrote a post entitled Linden Regroups and the Kids Are In. I had really wanted to write a detailed post about this, but time has slipped away. Perhaps I can write a post about the celebration.
More Second Life
The Network Culture Project at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications has a different approach to promoting community involvement in Second Life. They are having a Community Challenge contest. They have announced five finalists, with voting through the 30th. My first choice is clearly The Ability Commons. I am good friends with the folks behind The Ability Commons and hold their work in the highest regard. I haven’t voted yet, because I need to look more closely at the other finalists to determine my second and third choices. If you are in Second Life, please check out this project and the five finalists and then enter your vote.
Serena
As a final more hopeful post, I want to highligh Help Save Serena. I mentioned the effort in passing in my wandering around EntreCard sites on Bloomsday, but I didn’t have the link to the Help Save Serena blog.
There are plenty of other things that I need to write about, but I have too many other non-writing tasks to accomplish, so this will have to suffice for right now.
Poetic Justice
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/13/2008 - 21:04During my time covering the Avery Doninger case, I’ve often pondered better ways of this being handled. Avery Doninger is the high school student who was barred from running for class office after she wrote a blog post at home critical of the school administration, using the word Douchebag and encouraging parents to call the school, when the school administration cancelled, or if you want to parse words the administration’s way, postponed yet again, a battle of the bands known as JamFest.
I don’t know the details of why Jamfest was repeatedly cancelled and rescheduled, but it seems that there should have been a better process. I do know that Avery could have used better language when she encouraged the citizens of the town to get engaged in the issue, and I believe that Avery has learned that herself. I believe that the school administration could have made much better choices in how to take the incident and turn it into a teachable moment instead of a Federal lawsuit.
Now, Principal Karissa Niehoff is being punished for errors that she has made. On May 31st, Principal Niehoff sent an email to Mike Morris concerning details of the case. The email appears to have violated policies of the Board of Education and the Professional Code of Conduct of the State of Connecticut.for School Administrators. As a result, Ms. Niehoff has been asked to write a formal letter of apology to the Avery and her family, has been placed on administrative leave without pay for two days, and has been asked to attend a workshop on the Family Educational Right and Privacy Act. In addition, Ms. Niehoff will be asked to develop at least one goal for the 2008-2009 school year that will show her understanding of the seriousness of this. Perhaps she should start a blog about this and post ideas on how school administrators can better address these issues in a digital age online. Others have suggested that poetic justice would call for her not being allowed to speak at this year’s graduation ceremony.
I applaud the new Superintendent, Alan Beitman, in his efforts to take the situation and make it an educational experience for all involved. I also appreciate the difficulties that a case like this presents. It is difficult to be constrained by advice from lawyers as well as professional responsibility from speaking out when you feel that only the other side is being heard. Yet my interest in the Doninger case has brought me in touch with representatives of other school districts. I have been impressed with the professionalism with which other school administrators address complicated situations, situations much more complicated than the Doninger case.
The age of instant, persistent searchable communications places many new challenges that Ms. Doninger, Ms Niehoff and all of us need to think long and hard about. My interactions with Ms. Doninger leads me to believe that she has learned much about our rights and responsibilities in a digital age. Let us hope that Ms. Niehoff will have similar learning opportunities and will be able to make good use of them.
High points and Low points of the Technology Management Conference, Day 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:38One of the bigger disappointments of the Technology Management Conference was Don Tapscott’s keynote speech Wednesday morning. Tapscott is co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I really looked forward to hearing some profound reflections on how Wikinomics relates to the financial services industry. Unfortunately, the session was scheduled to start at 8 AM, and because of a collection of transportation issues, I just could not make it into New York from New Haven in time to hear what Mr. Tapscott had to say. I hope he did say something profound and enlightening and that others will write about it.
The most exciting high point of the show was talking with Michael Warner, CEO and Founder of Quantum 4D. Quantum 4D provides a data visualization tool using 3D models, that shift as a time series is played through it, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. It is still in an early stage and there were lots of things that I wish it had. For example, you load data into Quantum 4D in batches, instead of Quantum 4D connecting up to real time data feeds. Their presentation layer looks good, and they talk about the ability of users to collaborate in the three dimensional space that the data creates. We talked about taking the presentation object and incorporating it into other systems. Being the Second Life fan that I am, I suggested finding ways of presenting their model in Second Life so people could collaborate in a virtual world to work with the data. There was some resistance to this idea due to some of the bad press that Second Life has received.
We talked about using QWAQ as a collaboration tools and about looking at integration with other collaboration tools. We talked about pricing models and about different companies creating their own data spaces that they could share on a free or subscription basis. This was definitely the hottest software I saw there. My sense is that it is something that only innovators and visionaries are likely to get right now, and the challenge will be to see how it develops, scales, gets documented, builds its community, and on and on, before it becomes the tool of choice by early adopters and the early majority.
After seeing such an interesting and compelling presentation, I was wondering what the Open Source Update panel had to say. The panel was made up of luminaries, Roger Burkhardt, CEO and President of Ingres, Randy Hergett, director of engineering for Open Source at Hewlett-Packard, Roger Levy, SVP and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell, Marcus Rex, CTO of The Linux Foundation, and Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. Unfortunately, it was too much like so many other panels, where the moderator asked lots of questions and didn’t really provide an opportunity to let these people shine. I left the panel without having heard anything new or interesting.
The final highpoint was the marketing effort of FTEN. They describe themselves as “an independent non-broker dealer application service provider (ASP) that offers these sophisticated solutions to Clearing Firms, Broker Dealers, Prime Brokers, Hedge Funds and Proprietary Traders.” They boast about their access, speed and control. Their swag was little stuffed pig toys with wings. They had women dressed as pigs with wings at their booth and they even gave away helium balloons to members of the press to try and get reporters to their booth. I didn’t find anything particularly exciting or innovative about their platform, but I do have to compliment them as having what seemed to be the most sought after and talked about swag.
Today is the final day of the Technology Management Conference. I’m working up in Connecticut today and won’t make it in. However, I was glad about what I did get to see, as well as the chance to connect with many old friends at the show and look forward to next year’s SIFMA Technology and Management Conference and Exhibition.
