Remix. Remix. Remix. Web APIs are cool.
Month: May 2005
Recipe for Web Site Governance
Great advice from David Schatsky on governing your web site . This passage struck me:
Some guidelines are about navigation, some are about product information, some are about promotions. Each of those are different competencies. Delegate responsibility for each of those areas to different folks.
Why not also look at specific metrics for each? Designers think in these terms, web developers think in these terms .. shouldn’t our web analytics think in these terms too?
Feedburner’s Total Stats Pro
If you have a blog, you may already know about FeedBurner, a “feed enhancement service.” I don’t serve my feeds from FeedBurner, but lots of people do.
They’ve always provided some free statistics, and recently enhanced the free stats with ad summary performance and circulation trend charting. But they now have a premium service called Total Stats Pro that adds referrer reporting, detailed item and ad stats, including who’s syndicating your feed. Pricing is pretty cheap.
Subscribe or Purchase? Why Decide?
This could be the thing that gets people over the hump of subscribing to music.
For a long time I thought it was silly to be “renting” music — if you like a song and want to hear it for years, it would be cheaper to buy it, rather than renting it every month. Kinda like how phones used to be before you could legally own a phone . (OK I’m dating myself.)
But this new service could change that. First, for just listening to stuff, why not subscribe? At $5/mo (for a year) it’s cheaper than XM or Sirius, and you can take it with you. If you really like a song, you can buy it for $0.79.
All in all it looks like a killer offering. Except I won’t be using it, even though Y! employees get a break on the price. You see, it doesn’t work with my Mac or iPod.
A Lot About Log Parser
If you’re a Windows user and don’t mind getting raw web log juice under your fingernails, check out Gary Cooper’s Log Parser Basics, which has a good introduction to the free SQL-like Microsoft command-line utility for unearthing gems from your log files.
Click Me
Jeremy wonders how much anchor text matters, and opines that a company named “Click Here” would never make it to the first page of the search results.
So true. Or is it? Another common word used as anchor text is “download”:
While download.com appears at the top (which I suppose you’d want), this query may also be an indicator for the most popular downloads on the net.
Perhaps contextual or clustered search would help with these kinds of “signal vs. noise” problems.
Speaking of noise, I’ve often said that if I wanted to disappear from search results, all I’d have to do is change my first name to “Web” …
(yes, it’s Friday!)
Consistency
OK, nothing to do with analytics or Yahoo. I was reading news feeds today and came across a press release where a PR person announced he has started a blog, “to Share Insight and Observations on Society, Politics and Business” (his caps).
I dunno, maybe it’s the coffee, but I think this is funny. Who else would issue a press release when they start a blog? I guess when you’re a promoter, that’s what you do. I hope he doesn’t issue a press release every time he posts a new blog entry, or gets a Flickr account.