Finally, Twitter has become usable online via your mobile. Visiting http://m.twitter.com lets you see the latest rants by your Twitter friends. I’m surprised this wasn’t available from the start, but better late that never.
I think it’d be even better if the non-mobile-specific Twitter website used your browser agent to gauge which version to present you with. Wouldn’t that make more sense?
[Via Crunchgear]
There are tons of stats packages out there, but if all you’re looking for is a quick peek at your most popular blog posts, referrers, outbound clicks or search engine terms, they’re sometimes a bit heavy.
WordPress.com has some great basic snapshot stats, which were missing from the self-hosted WordPress.org install. Finally , Automattic has made them available for WordPress.org users as well.
I’ve used Google Analytics, AWStats, CrazyEgg and Webalizer, each for a different blog-related purpose, but this integrated Dashboard stats package is bound to very quickly become the one I rely on most for quick stats.
I’m considering using Mint in the near future for another project, but if anyone has suggestions, recommendations or warnings against any stats package, do let me know!
Which type of stats do you find most accurate: log analysis tools like AWStats or Javascript-based scripts like Google Analytics? Or both to complement/complete each other??
Looking at my RSS feeds last night, I had a count of how many of my “Marketing Favourites” folder were full feeds and how many were just excerpts. As it turns out, only two of my top 15 feeds are using excerpts in their feeds, one of which “doesn’t really count” because it’s really only linking to the post accompanying a podcast.
I came across Feedburner’s Rick Klau’s comment about partial feeds. He says:
First of all, I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds – that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher’s site – is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.
So in summary, partial feed = greedy site owner and no real benefits to the readers.
RSS feeds have been created to make it easier to plow through the mountains of information we want to assimilate every day, and partial feeds are a significant hurdle to that. If 13 of my 15 favourite feeds are full feeds and only two use excerpts, is it possible that, unconsciously, that factor played a role in my decision to “upgrade” these feeds from the enormous Marketing folder to the Marketing Favourites one?
By knowing I wouldn’t have to waste time clicking through to their site and would be able to read the posts while away from an Internet connection or during the routinely web downtime we’re getting in the office these days, these full feeds have made themselves more valuable.
David Churbuck points out that full feeds are also beneficial to Chinese readers, who may be able to read the RSS excerpt but not read the full entry on wordpress.com, for example.
What gets me even more than people posting excerpts only, forcing you to get out of your RSS reader (or at least in the case of NNW, open a new tab), is those who stick advertising at the bottom of their excerpt. Advertising in my feeds feels dirty.
But then, this happens in feeds that belong to companies unscrupulous enough to put so many animated ads within their actual website that it makes my brand new Intel Mac’s fans rev up (and my 16 months old Powerbook hit 100%), and makes me go cross-eyed while trying to read the site’s actual content. But hrmm… that’s one for another post though.
Am I missing any perfectly justifiable reasons to use excerpts?
[Via The Wrong Advices]
You know how they always say “Watch what you blog about, you might get dooced?” I was never one to really listen to that nonsense, and felt blogging was a great outlet for personal woes and tales, as well as professional or work-related riffs.
No, don’t worry, I’m not about to tell you I got fired over something I said on my blog. (Though it’d be a shot at 15 minutes of online fame!) Quite the opposite in fact.
Five years of standing on my soapbox babbling on about everything and nothing has served an unexpected purpose, as I’ve just been offered a job as blogger for a new and exciting mobile product launching soon. Whodathunk, unh?
I’ll have more to say about the company itself over the next few weeks and months, but first, I must wrap up work and pack up from Active Hotels, where I spent the past two years doing business development, on-site and email marketing, for better or for worse. I’m leaving behind a great bunch of people, but I’ve learned a whole lot in those two years.
It’s been a week since I’ve announced it in the office, yet the upcoming change is starting to really hit me now that I’m telling the outside world.
I have my fingers crossed that this change on the horizon will be a great one. It feels like the right time to be cracking into some new projects, and to be able to scratch two things from my living to-do list in one shot isn’t a bad job!
A few last thoughts via hugh’s cartoons:
Since Ask.com’s good old Jeeves was fired a few months ago, it’s been clear that something was brewing behind closed doors and that a great relaunch was bound to happen soon.
It’s now happened. A viral, out-of-the-box, really groundbreaking campaign about an information revolution. At least, that’s how it sounded back in the boardroom where the ideas took shape.
In reality, it’s one of the most blatant cases of astroturfing I’ve seen in the past few years. It presents itself as some sort of underground social movement, shrouded in mystery. [Disclaimer: Keeping in mind that I don’t live in London and my exposure to the campaign is limited to the banners on blogs I read, and these pictures snapped on the street and on the tube by some Londoners.]
The Wall Street Journal weighs in:
The online discussion has been dominated by people complaining they’ve been misled. “I thought this may be an informative Web site about how information is used on the Internet,” said one posting last week. “Instead I discover it’s just a cheap ploy for an inferior search engine.” The six-week campaign is designed to lift Ask.com’s profile in the U.K., where it trails Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. The Ask.com network, a unit of New York’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, was used for 4.3% of all Internet searches in the U.K. in January, according to comScore Networks Inc.
Fallon says it expected some criticism but felt there was little to lose, because Google is so much bigger. [via Search Engine Land]
Support for the campaign has been scarce so far. The campaign has been called a “load of drivel” and the agency producing it “cynical, manipulative hacks”. Some go as far as saying that Ask.com expected things to turn sour, figuring that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.
Not so sure about that. If all it leads to is a couple of attempts at using Ask.com, when the user is already in a mindframe where they feel betrayed and bullsh***ed by the company in question, the likelihood of this user leaving with a positive, “yes, I think I’ll use them again” attitude is somewhere between unlikely and simply laughable.
Time will tell whether this campaign yields any positive visibility for Ask.com, but at the moment, it’s a bit on the ugly side… A bit of a shame, but really, if Ask.com felt that the right way to spark new interest in its search engine was to be deceitful and lie to its users, then it’s getting what it deserves!
[Cross posted from Focus on Them]
A few worthy business-oriented reads for today:
Have a good Easter weekend!
Just a quickie to highlight the second April Fool’s joke, Google TiSP, its new FREE in-home wireless broadband service. Easy, user-friendly system! 😉
Lately, I’ve been getting a bit sick of staring at a screen all day. Email in, email out, do this, do that. Blergh!
But looks like Google has solved my problem, again! Gmail Paper is a new service, just arrived to the UK after some US trials, which allows you to request paper copies of your emails. These are delivered in 2-4 business days, leaving you the alternative of reading all your mail on paper.
And for those who are concerned about the environment, you needn’t worry, they thought of everything. “Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.”
When I was a kid, I used to get this feeling all the time. This floating feeling that life’s great, like you could explode if it gets any better. As grownups, we’re busy, stressed, worried over all sorts of trivial and not-so-trivial stuff, and we rarely, if ever, get that floaty feeling anymore.
However, in the past week or two, a number of positive things have happened, big and small, which have just kept me in that great mood. Some are as simple as losing a couple of pounds after feeling really bloated for ages, having something surprisingly tasty for lunch and the weather being as lovely as it was on Monday and Tuesday (even though it’s now rubbish).
On Tuesday, an article I wrote on the Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing Management was published on Digital Web. Then yesterday, like the cherry on the sundae, it featured on the Campaign Monitor blog. (Cheers for the mention, Dave!)
There have been a few other fortuitous events, which I’m sure I’ll be able to get into at a later date, but generally, it’s the small things that are keeping me in such a fab mood.
While we’re on the topic of travel blogging, I couldn’t help but introduce the Active Hotels blog, which we launched in February.
As you may or may not know, I send the Active Hotels weekly newsletter, in which I try to cram as many good travel deals as I can find.
But recently, I’ve been coming across tons of last second wicked deals which would have quickly evaporated before the next newsletter went out. And by wicked deals, I mean, even I was baffled by the rates and would eye my calendar for a free weekend to go laze around in some of the posh spa hotels I found.
After scratching our heads about the best way to tell people about these deals without filling their inboxes with daily emails, we thought a blog would be a great place to start. Between the blog and RSS feed, hopefully we’d manage to use it as a good way to converse with our past and future guests.
It’s only a humble little WordPress blog and there’s still a whiff of fresh paint in the air, but I hope we can make it a good spot to find deals and some rants and reviews on all things travel-related, so feel free to stop by and say hi!
that canadian girl 