Author: Bob Page
Yahoo! News Tag Soup
Remix. Remix. Remix. Web APIs are cool.
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.
The Future of Web APIs?
How soon until we see lots of Javascript wrappers that make AJAX calls to web APIs via xlmhttprequest? Check out the very cool FlickrJS: A wrapper for Flickr API. Include the .js and you have complete access to the Flickr API.
Getting Over It
Last week I got a letter from a health clinic that I used maybe five years ago. The letter said some of their PCs were stolen out of their office, and on those PCs were the electronic records of their patients, including mine. They also sent a photocopy of the police report, for reasons I don’t understand.
On Monday, DSW (the discount shoe store) said that transaction information on about 1.4 million credit cards was stolen. Because the transaction logs just had name, credit card number, and amount, they didn’t have any easy way to contact the people whose credit card numbers were obtained (although they did contact the credit card vendors). But given the list of stores and the dates of the logs, I know my credit card number was among the ones obtained.
How long must we be diligent, checking our credit cards for fraud, checking our credit history? Years.
Just this past week, I discovered ZabaSearch, a free site for looking up information about people. Where they used to live, when they were born, their phone numbers — all right there. And background checks for $5. How convenient.
I wonder where this will end. Will there be a backlash against acquiring information, new regulations on handling it, more use of one-time identifiers (like virtual credit cards), more use of things like P.O. boxes, etc? Or will people just warm to the idea that we no longer have any privacy? Or, in the words of Sun CEO Scott McNealy, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it”?